Granta • 2012

There are plenty of reasons why Joseph Roth might have made a fitful letter-writer. When he wasn’t being whipped on by penury to compose feuilletons — those considered responses to people and places, things and happenings that remind us just how high journalism can soar — he was trying to sneak time to write his novels, managing sixteen in as many years, all interesting and several truly great. Then there was the fact that he lived his life in hotels and out of suitcases, shuttling back and forth between Germany and France, reporting also from Poland, Russia, Italy and Albania. All his writing was done at café tables or — increasingly as the years went on — bars. Somehow, his daunting prolificacy never did much to remedy his precarious finances, and funds would still become so scarce that even a stamp seemed a significant expense.

Roth could have used any one of these excuses. In fact, he used them all and more besides, fretting continually about his ailing health, his tattered concentration, the unreliability of the postal service. Yet in spite of these very real impediments, he left behind a sizeable cache of correspondence, a generous selection of which has now been translated into English for the first time by Michael Hofmann, the poet-translator whose clear-eyed, sharp- tongued devotion has been the making of Roth’s posthumous English-language reputation.

Four hundred and fifty-seven letters in total, they range from warm jottings to family and friends (“Liver flushed with calvados. Otherwise OK”) to beguiling reflections on the writer’s craft (“I dread misprints, two jumped up at me now like fleas from the type”). There is kindness to be found (as in a letter written on the passing of a friend’s father), but an abundance of bile and misery, too. Roth tested his friendships to their limits and his letters will test his fans equally. As early as 1930, he confesses “I find the politics quite paralyzing. It’s so hard to write. I have no money, I mean really NO MONEY, I get by on 5 marks a day. And I’m drinking. And my strength is fading.” Later, nearing the end of his wretchedly abbreviated life with the world erupting around him, he can come across as a terrible caricature of the male writer — dyspeptic, drunken, insecure to the point of neediness. And so, while Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters shores up his literary celebrity, it raises questions, too — questions about our enduring infatuation with that cosmopolitan, doomed Central-European Jewish culture whose golden age coincided with the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; questions about the role of the translator as self-appointed custodian; questions about our appetite for the details of authors’ off-the-page lives.

Moses Joseph Roth was born in 1894 in Brody, Galicia. When he headed West to the University of Vienna, he shrugged off his accent and first name in favour of his second and a more worldly mien. His identity remains mutable — he is ‘Red Roth’ briefly, Muh to his wife, even pledging a return to Moses. Politically, he is a man of contradictions and about-turns, a socialist and a monarchist both, a pacifist who enlists in the army. He plays fast and loose with fact, too, decorating his wartime service as a pen-pushing private with claims that he was a lieutenant and a prisoner of war in Russia. “For the past 25 years I’ve been living as a sort of fantastic figment,” he writes to his newspaper colleague, Benno Reifenberg from Vienna’s Hotel Imperial in the summer of 1928. (By the letter’s close he has already been forced to find new lodgings — the hotel was too expensive.)

In an age such as our own, when privacy’s perimeters are so hotly contested and technology adds an impersonal note to even the most secretive correspondences, there’s a temptation to fetishise inky epistolary exchanges from the past. We look to letters to reveal their writer’s inner self. The logic of this yearning is flawed where authors are concerned — when they write to their friends and family, they may be off duty but they are still using words in the best way they know how — to manipulate their reader’s emotions, to fabulate. Not that this posturing isn’t revealing in its own way. In the earliest of Roth’s letters, written to younger cousins, his big-brotherly bravado is touching. Of missives written when he was just 25, Hofmann notes: “These are the only letters in which Roth sounds young, in fact like a young shuttlecock: frisky and agile, youthfully pompous or light-heartedly pugnacious. You won’t hear it again.” And nor do you. Even at 30, Roth is to be found signing himself “Your old Joseph Roth.”

In 1922, he married Friederike Reichler, a beautiful girl from Vienna who was stylish but shy and far too fragile to keep pace with Roth’s restless itinerancy. As she soon learnt, to be with Roth was to be without him. Early on in their marriage, she wrote a late-night letter to Roth’s cousin, Paula Grubel, ending with a postscript: “12 o’clock already, and Muh’s still not back, what do you say to that?! Shocking!!!!”

This is one of the few letters neither by nor to Roth but about him, and it’s telling that Hofmann has found it necessary to include it here, to illustrate what should have been one of the most intimate relationships in Roth’s life. Moreover, the excitability of its postscript strikes him as an ominous sign of the troubles that lay ahead. By 1928, Friedl, was showing signs of mental imbalance, and Roth had embarked upon the process of searching for a diagnosis and cure for her. It was enormously costly — emotionally as well as materially. In the spring of 1929, he confessed to a Germanist friend, Pierre Bertaux, “her present illness is only an acuter version of her chronic weakness, a complete lack of resistance, in which I am not without blame. There are various causes. These things, of which I have been unable to speak for months, if not for years, oppress me more than the form of the illness itself.”

But even as Roth’s letters waltz around his guilt, they are invariably composed someplace far from Vienna (he was writing to Bertaux from Paris), where he leaves Friedl with her family. Eventually, other women fill her place, beginning with a virgin in the South of France (“three Catholic hymens before the real one” he joshes boastfully). Only on the rare occasions when Friedl shows improvement does he really consider the state of their union. What would her recovery mean — must he then return to her? It was never to be. In 1933, she was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia and placed in a sanatorium in Vienna, where the Third Reich’s eugenics programme saw to it that she was murdered in 1940, a year after Roth drank himself to death in Paris at the age of 44.

The bulk of these letters have a professional aspect. His correspondence is dominated in the early part of his career by his relationship with colleagues at The Frankfurter Zeitung, and latterly by his friendship with his patron, the bestselling novelist and memoirist Stefan Zweig. When writers talk shop, they do not delineate narrative arcs or debate the importance of place, they talk about advances and sales figures. Roth and co are no different. In between the numbers, he solicits other publishers behind his editor’s back, dashes his own novels and critiques others. Journalists, needless to say, are infinitely worse, and Roth’s fractious relationship with The Frankfurter Zeitung is, Hofmann concedes, one of “the burdens of this correspondence,” a burden that is conveyed here with tedious faithfulness, showcasing Roth at his most antagonistic and intransigent.

But journalism also occasioned one of his happiest periods. In 1925 his newspaper sent him to France, where he found a happiness he had never before known. It irradiates his letters, going quite to his head in a way that nothing else does. As he insists to Reifenberg that May, “I am writing to you in full possession of my skeptical faculties, with all my wits about me, and running the risk of making a fool of myself, which is just about the worst thing that could happen to me. I feel driven to inform you personally that Paris is the capital of the world, and you must come here. Whoever has not been here is only half human.”

It would end badly when the paper replaced him as their Paris correspondent, but France gave him something that could not be taken away: an unclouded view of post-WWI Germany as a country to fear and to hate. We may turn to letters in search of private revelations, but it is the public sphere that Roth’s from this era illuminate. It’s one of the qualities that makes his fiction and reportage so compelling, of course — that acute political foresight. In 1923, he became the first writer to use Hitler’s name in fiction. Later, he was in Berlin when Hitler was elected Chancellor. He packed his suitcases and boarded a train for Paris that same day, never to return. “It will have become clear to you now that we are heading for a great catastrophe,” he writes to Zweig a fortnight later.

Though his books were banned and burned in Germany, leaving him a writer without a readership, Roth was dead before the grotesque horror of that great catastrophe was fully known. Joan Acocella made the point in a New Yorker essay some years ago that “His portraits of Jews therefore lack the pious edgelessness of most post-Holocaust writing.” It’s what makes Roth’s portraits of Nazi anti-Semitism so arresting, she notes. Here in the letters, he plays fast and loose with anti-Semitic tropes. “In matters of health and money, prominent Jews are always a good idea. Jewish doctors are a kind of atonement for the crucifixion,” he tells one gentile friend. In other instances, though the irony is missing — it smacks merely of self- hatred.

Our fascination with Roth gestures to something larger, though. It’s part of our fixation with the artistic flowering embodied by Austria- Hungary’s Jewish authors, with an inherited nostalgia for the Empire that produced them and that fleeting historical moment when justly feared nationalism was eclipsed by something approaching unity. The appeal of this era also has to do with the densely layered identities enfolded into the fictions it produced, and with its melting-pot cultural and linguistic vitality. It seems cosmopolitan and edgy in a way that at once resonates with our globalised world and makes it feel a flatter, greyer place. Hofmann is hyper-sensitive to the way the publishing industry capitalises on our visceral urge to reconnect with this. Roth, he insists, is a talent robust enough to stand on his own — unlike Zweig, his patron, whose resurgent popularity he attributes to Pushkin Press’s “nice paper and pretty formats”. In recent years, Hofmann has mounted vicious and virtuoso attacks on Zweig, most memorably in the London Review of Books where he referred to the author as “the uniquely dreary and clothy sprog of the electric 1880s.” He’s only warming to his theme. “Stefan Zweig just tastes fake. He’s the Pepsi of Austrian writing. He is the one whose books made films,” Hofmann goes on — and on.

Even here, as an editor-translator, he lets his disparagement creep into footnotes, inserting himself throughout Roth’s correspondence with Zweig like a jealous spouse. “I never think of money matters when I think of you — that’s a complex of yours that you must shrug off,” Zweig tells Roth in 1934. Hofmann immediately qualifies “never”, adding: “when the writer Joseph Breitbach told SZ in 1935 that he was lending money to JR, Zweig warned him that it would cost him his friendship with Roth.” It’s faintly unseemly — you feel you should look away and yet can’t.

In the absence of a serious biography of Roth in English, Hofmann’s distilled introductions — both here and to novels and volumes of reportage — remain the most cogent appraisal we have of Roth’s talent. Rewarding though these letters collectively are, it’s hard not to wish that Hofmann had cast aside his translator’s reserve and devoted his energies to a longer study instead. Then again, perhaps the letters tell us as much as we need to know: they remind us that Roth’s true living was done on the pages of his novels and newspapers columns. We flock to see authors in the flesh at literary festivals and seize upon literary biographies, but their finest – and, unwittingly, their truest, most private – selves are invariably to be found in what they publish.

Judaism: A Way of Being

by David Gelernter

Yale University Press • 2009

Open Minded Torah: Of Irony, Fundamentalism and Love

by William Kolbrener

Continuum • 2011

I blame Jonathan Sacks. Across his oeuvre he has pioneered a style of writing about Judaism designed to put even the most refined gentile Englishman at ease. Beautifully written, his work weaves in philosophy, literature and history, giving the impression of a writer who draws upon all the wisdom of the world, seeking truth wherever it may be found. Naturally the Judaism portrayed is of a relatively orthodox variety; but this style and breadth of reference gives the reader the sense that Judaism is not dogmatic or parochial; rather it is tune with the best of humanistic and rational thought; [authentic] Judaism is both timeless and utterly relevant to the modern condition. Sometimes the philosophy is a little woolly, the logic slightly questionable, but we are swept along by the quality of the prose and the frequent anecdotes, designed to dig the Chief Rabbi out of whatever intellectual hole he may have dug himself into.

As a result of his undisputed success, Sacks has spawned a line of imitators, each displaying prose of impeccable quality, littered with philosophical and literary references. William Kolberener is the latest in this dynasty, and is rewarded for his efforts by a fulsome endorsement from the master on the back cover. Kolbrener, according to Sacks “engages in conversation with the timeless texts of the Torah [and] the result is both enlightening and enthralling.” While Kolbrener indeed sets out to engage in a conversation between classical Jewish texts and wider intellectual currents, the dialogue is frequently a one-sided one. Demonstrating his breadth of knowledge, Kolbrener references a diverse array of writers and thinkers: Wittgenstein, Hobbes, Descartes, Freud, Niels Bohr and Sophocles among others. These voices however, are rarely used to demonstrate an insight from which the tradition can learn. They either reinforce Jewish tradition or present an opposing view, which is then shown to be wrong. Either way, Judaism, or at least Kolbrener’s version of it, always wins. In Isaac’s Bad Rap T.S. Eliot is depicted as believing that “a classic is not the work that begins a literary tradition, but the one that allows for the tradition’s continuity”. So Eliot is supportive of Jewish textuality; this would have been a surprise to the notoriously antisemitic poet. In Modernity and Hell, Korah and Hobbes, the eponymous philosopher, who believed that “brute power provides the only barrier to endless war” fails to understand the possibility of Judaic conflict management in which “disputes for the sake of heaven” can be resolved because “these and these are the words of the living God.” Jewish reformists do little better: Prayer and the People sees Kolbrener baffled by the Reform movement’s attempt to create a contemporary liturgy that “reflects our values and ideals” — far better to stick with the (apparently heaven-sent) traditional siddur, ideally in the version edited and introduced by Jonathan Sacks.

There are, of course, several iterations of the classic Sacksian trope: clever Israel and the stupid Greeks. ‘Lighting Up; The Beauty of Hanukah’ sees the “Greek scoffers reducing everything to the laws of nature” as opposed to the Hanukah lamp that leads to “continuous recognition of the miraculous character of the every day”. Torah and the Pleasure Principle contrasts Greek thinkers who ‘stand outside’, relying on ‘rational principles’ and the sages of the Talmud who ‘think with their hearts.’ This is feel-good knockabout masquerading as philosophical reflection; whatever the rhetoric of Hanukah, the long history of Greek speaking Jewish communities, centred in Alexandria demonstrate centuries of Greek-Jewish synthesis; Judaism as we experience it today has been inescapably shaped by Hellenism. Open Minded Torah creates a superficial feeling of intellectual cosmopolitanism in which Judaism is in dialogue with the great ideas of modernity and western civilisation, but the wider sources function as a series of straw men whose all too easy rebuttal is designed to assure the reader of Judaism’s intellectual sophistication and superiority.

The idea of a work that weaves high- level Jewish scholarship around everyday life events is a powerful one. Unfortunately though, Kolbrener misses the opportunity to say something profound about Judaism and modernity. Modern Jews are in genuine need of unflinching analyses of the possible ways a rethought and renewed Judaism might offer an intellectually credible path in contemporary society. The requirement however, is not for writings that blithely assert the superiority of the Hebraic over the Hellenistic but instead, as Levinas suggested, bring Athens and Jerusalem into a genuine dialogue of equals.

If Kolbrener is Sacks’ direct descendant, David Gelernter is his wayward bastard child. The elegant prose is present, the literary and philosophical references (Kant, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Newton, Chesterton et al) utilised, the attempt to answer head on the great questions of life in a language accessible to the secular reader. But while Kolbrener’s view of Judaism represents a fairly mainstream Modern Orthodox position, Gelernter portrays a Jewish orthodoxy that he seems to have dreamed up himself. Gelernter writes extensively of the ‘Torat Halev’ (Torah of the heart); the term is used so frequently and with such assumed authority that the reader might imagine it to be rabbinic in origin; it is in fact a moniker of Gelernter’s invention. The hubristically titled Judaism presents itself as nothing short of a contemporary Mishneh Torah, with its author a latter day Maimonides. Gelernter declares his hand in the Preface: he is writing about a “common”,“normative”, “full strength, straight up; no water, no soda aged in oak for three thousand years” Judaism, which he identifies as “Orthodox”. This is a discomfiting start to all who view the Judaic tradition as diverse, plural and having been radically changed throughout its history; we, presumably, are practicing a Judaism more akin to cheap white wine. Gelernter sees as inadequate approaches to Judaism that focus on the particular; he wishes to move beyond specific aspects of Judaism in order to reinstate “the grand scheme itself: the picture that encompasses all these elements; the underlying idea.” While Gelernter doesn’t quite say that only he can access this God’s- eye perspective he comes pretty close. Not for Gelernter the approach of summarising “current thinking among theologians and philosophers of Judaism”, instead: “I attempt to summarise Judaism itself ”.

The main body of the book is split into four extended meditations: Separation; on halacha, Veil; on an ineffable transcendent deity, Perfect Asymmetry; on women and marriage, and Inward Pilgrimage; on the problem of evil. Perfect Asymmetry is by far the weakest: in attempting to justify a conservative position on gender roles and relations Gelernter sounds like a tea-party moralist and an apologist for some of Judaism’s most offensively patriarchal texts. Despite this, the other chapters work fairly successfully as free flowing, romantic ruminations on Jewish practice and texts, inventing new metaphorical and mythical frameworks to understand and promote Judaism. There is nothing wrong with this romanticism; the beauty of the prose and the novelty of some of the ideas make for engaging reading. What is problematic is the insistence that Judaism is homogenous, coherent and unchanging along with an accompanying insistence that said Judaism is defined, not by its classical texts, but by David Gelernter’s idiosyncratic understanding. Where there is a minor text that fits his viewpoint it is elevated to the status of ‘authentic Judaism’; where there is a major one that gets in the way it is treated as an aberration or an accident of history.

There are moments, however, where Gelernter goes further and presents ‘normative’ Judaism in ways that simply beggar belief. An especially unhinged appendix on Jewish and Christian ethics contains a series of remarkable claims on Judaism’s approach to violence: ‘In Judaism pacifism is immoral;…’Jewish morality is warrior morality. It is no accident that Abraham, Moses, and David, the Bible greatest heroes should all have been described as warriors… Judah Maccabee…frequently cited in Medieval Europe as the model of a Godly and chivalrous knight.’ Any familiarity with pre-modern Judaism would reveal this to be nonsense — most rabbinic and medieval texts display strong hostility to violence, an attitude which seeped through society and led Jewish communities to be famously passive and non- violent. Gelernter’s normative Judaism then is not ‘orthodoxy’ nor is it historically grounded: it is the ideal Judaism of Commentary magazine, where Zionism is central, social morality conservative, and God’s role is ultimately to let you ‘preserve the morality you already accept’.

Jonathan Sacks’ ultimate tragedy is the wasting of his gifts. An impressive knowledge of philosophy and a talent for elegant prose are squandered because of a need to tow the party line and defend a Modern Orthodox status quo. These two books are no less missed opportunities; while Kolbrener fails to take on board any lessons from non-Jewish sources, Gelernter’s obsession with depicting an essential and authentic Judaism leads him to downplay his own innovation and distort evidence to fit his goals. With such exquisite writing, knowledge of classic Jewish texts and broad frame of literary reference both writers could have produced works of transformative scope that point towards future Judaisms. As it stands, both, despite their tremendous sophistication, are works of apologetics.

By Gilad Atzmon

Zero Books 2011

Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights

By David Landy

Zed Books 2011

So contested has the issue of antisemitism become and so promiscuously is the term used that it is increasingly difficult tofind clarity amid the fog of frenzied debate. The publication of these two recent books provides a much needed opportunity to map out exactly where the borderline between disillusionment with Israel, anti-Zionism and antisemitism actually lies.

David Landy, an Irish-Jewish academic and Palestinian solidarity activist offers a sympathetic but not uncritical analysis of Jewish pro-Palestinian activism, based on extensive interviews. Through these he demonstrates that ‘Israel critical Jews’, as he calls them, are often motivated by a desire to reclaim their Jewish identity from Zionism, and it is through pro-Palestinian activism that many have actually come closer to their Jewishness. Further, some see themselves as providing a kind of guard against anti-Semitism within the wider pro-Palestinian movement. In these respects, most of Landy’s interviewees refute the criticism often made that Israel critical Jews are cynically ‘using’ their Jewishness.

The book raises complex questions about Jewish activists: Should they concentrate on convincing other Jews and transforming the Jewish community? Should they support groups within Israel itself? Should Jews support the Palestinians as Jews at all? Should Palestinians be the ones to set the agenda for activism? These are difficult questions, and the seriousness and sensitivity with which Landy and his interviewees address them does them credit, even if one disagrees (as I do) with some of the positions they take.

Israel critical Jews are subject to vituperative criticism from other Jews. They are accused of treachery, of being superficial ‘AsAJews’ and — most seriously — of being apologists for antisemitic anti-Zionism. Sometimes these accusations have merit and sometimes they are simply part of a self-perpetuating circle of intra-Jewish conflict. Amid these inflamed passions, the recent controversy over Gilad Atzmon’s now notorious book The Wandering Who?  superficially looks like another example of an Israel critical Jew being hung out to dry. In fact, Atzmon is a very different character and much more than a Jewish anti-Zionist.

The Wandering Who? is full of bluster, pompous verbiage and heroic posturing as Atzmon, an acclaimed jazz saxophonist and one of the disillusioned, self-exiled Israelis whose creative cynicism enriches the British cultural scene, seeks to explain his total rejection of Jewish identity. His argument is based upon the premise that Jews fall into three types: ‘those who follow Judaism’, ‘those who regard themselves as human beings who happen to be of Jewish origin’ and ‘those who put their Jewish-ness over and above all of their other traits’. The first two types are ‘harmless and innocent’ but ‘third category’ Jews are the real ‘problem’.

For Atzmon, in the post-emancipation era it is positively archaic and poisonous for Jews to maintain their ‘tribal’, marginal identities. Atzmon claims to be against what he considers the ‘myth’ of identity, and any kind of minority identity politics. We are all nothing more than human beings. While such a monolithic universalism may be oppressive and in any case unachievable, it doesn’t have to be anti-Semitic as any group identity would be invalid. But Atzmon only singles out one other group for his opprobrium — separatist lesbian feminists — and refrains from mentioning any other ethnic, religious or national minority identity as problematic. It seems that it is only Jews that destructively cling on to their identities.  By clinging onto Jewish identity, ‘third category’ Jews become part of a global network that ‘is all about commitment, one that pulls more and more Jews into an obscure, dangerous and unethical fellowship’. Zionism is just one part of a ‘unique political identity’ that is responsible for Western expansionism, and even the credit crunch (which Atzmon calls the ‘Ziopunch’).  Ultimately, Jews care only for achieving power and dominance, through Zionism and other means.

Atzmon reserves his greatest contempt for secular, left-wing, anti-Zionist Jews.  To campaign for universal values while identifying as a Jew is contradictory at best and mendacious at worst. To campaign as a Jew for the Palestinians and against Zionism is to automatically invalidate one’s own argument.  Since Jewish identity is the cause of Palestinian oppression, it cannot contribute to Palestinian liberation. Only through the renunciation of Jewish identity can those who are born Jewish bring peace and justice to the world.

Atzmon argues that the politics of anti-Zionist Jews, neo-cons and every other kind of Jew are simply part of one interdependent Jewish political identity, engendered by what Atzmon calls the ‘holocaust religion’. This predates the actual holocaust (which in any case Atzmon appears to be skeptical about, while not actually denying) assuming the latter actually took place and is a religion based upon an imagined fear of gentile hostility designed to perpetuate separation of the Jews from the rest of humanity. The holocaust religion, according to Atzmon, requires Jews to infiltrate all of society and politics. Jewish anti-Zionists and neo-cons alike are simply ensuring that Jews cover all the bases in their quest for political ubiquity.

The book is a peculiar mix of polemic, philosophising and personal narrative which creates a veneer of radicalism and up to date thinking. But, beneath it all, Atzmon is more conventional that he thinks he is. Ultimately, The Wandering Who? boils down to a number of hoary old anti-semitic tropes:

When Jews appear to be assimilating, they are really infiltrating and subverting.

When Jews identify themselves as Jews, they are primitive separatists.

Jews are obsessively concerned with attaining power and influence.

Jews are responsible for the hatred they attract.

The holocaust myth is simply a Jewish strategy to gain power through the world’s guilt.  The Wandering Who? is an anti-Semitic book certainly, but is it a dangerous book? So ludicrous are his arguments and so pompous is his tone that it is tempting to dismiss Atzmon as a crank. More genuinely disturbing is the fact that this book was published at all. Zero Books is a small company that has published some excellent quirky philosophy and intellectually rigorous criticism; they should have seen the book for what it was. (The book is endorsed by figures like Richard Falk, John Mearsheimer and Karl Sabbagh who, while strong critics of Israel and Zionism, should have heard alarm bells ringing when they saw the chapter entitled ‘Swindler’s List’). Ironically, it is precisely Atzmon’s Jewish background that gains him this platform, providing an alibi for his antisemitism.

Perhaps Atzmon has done us a service by illustrating exactly where anti-Zionism becomes antisemitism. In fact, anti-Zionist Jews, like Tony Greenstein, are among Atzmon’s most severe critics. Perhaps agreement over Atzmon might even provide the basis for a productive dialogue on antisemitism between Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews.

To the extent that Landy’s book is mostly carefully argued and certainly not antisemitic, it is perhaps unfair to compare it to Atzmon’s.  But both of them demonstrate the weakness of a certain kind of contemporary Jewish critique of Jewishness: it develops in ignorance of Judaism and the contemporary Jewish world.  To give one example of both authors’ ignorance, Landy says that Reform Judaism ‘may be developing into a syncretic Judeo-Christian religion’ and Atzmon doesn’t acknowledge that it even exists in his blanket statement that ‘Judaism is a non-reformable religion’.  Atzmon sees the apparent divisions between Jews as irrelevant, and Landy lumps all Zionist Jews into one monolithic bloc. Landy’s caricature of the Jewish community as filled with fervent Zionists who live in denial of the Palestinian plight may not be as antisemitic as Atzmon’s caricature of Jews as a clan of power-crazed paranoids is, but they are both caricatures nonetheless.

It is vital that Jews, Judaism and Jewishness be subjected to critique in order to stay alive and dynamic. There is a long and distinguished history of Jewish heretics and mavericks, from Elisha Ben Abuya, through Spinoza to Walter Benjamin. But the ones who really made a mark were those who were steeped in the traditions they rebelled against. Critiques founded on ignorance and fantasies will always fail.

Headline Review 2011

The List by Martin Fletcher

Thomas Dunne Books 2011

In one way it’s curious that Anne Frank’s diary has become by far the most pre- eminent Holocaust text, because it is also the most oblique. Its power emanates from something never seen directly by its writer. Since the focus is primarily on the claustrophobic world of the secret annexe where the Dutch Frank family and their friends hid from the Nazis, there is a constant tension with what we as readers know about events taking place in the world outside, and what will happen in the future. We understand that all the daily indignities, deprivations and fear Anne describes were in vain — the Franks would be discovered and deported to Bergen-Belsen.

The massive literature which has blossomed since the diary’s first publication in 1947 has told us what Anne could only speculate about — laying bare the monstrosities of the Holocaust in chilling detail. The shootings, starvings, gassings, burnings, beatings and torture, the unbearable suffering and unimaginable cruelty. But where do we go once horror and pity have been utterly exhausted? The next chapter, at least for some writers, is a move back to the kind of obliqueness achieved by Anne Frank. To the before and the afterwards, to the scars of the survivors, to the ripples cast outward and onward. Two recent novels tackle the events from opposite chronological directions — one starting with the prelude to the war, and the other the fall-out from it. It’s an oblique approach which, in the right hands, has the quiet power to disturb.

The Booker long-listed Far to Go begins in the tense months before the war, when time is running out for the Bauer family. They are prosperous, secular Jews living in an unnamed Sudetenland town in 1938. In the growing turmoil, they will put their only son on the Kindertransport before ending up on transits to Birkenau. That alone would be a familiar story, but Pick tells her story simultaneously from different points in time, spinning a spider’s web of complexity and nuance.

Both in time and place we are at one remove from the events at the black heart of the novel. Everything is anchored within the Bauer household, with the bigger political developments mediated through a prism – the gaze of the Bauer’s faithful nanny Marta. It is she who learns about what’s happening in the world outside by listening to her employer discussing politics and who feels the consequences when her beloved charge, Pepik, is made to sit at the back of the class, or when he wets his bed. On Kristallnacht, she watches aghast from behind the curtains as Nazi thugs smash up and torch a Jewish shop, and beat the owner to death on the pavement outside.

But there’s more to this than Marta’s naïve perspective on ominous events in the world outside. For this becomes very much a book very much preoccupied with the emotional wasteland beyond the war. Inserted between the chapters of narrative are letters, only some of which are written by familiar characters. The only thing we know for certain about each is their death, as each ends in a similar way, ‘(FILE UNDER: Bauer, Rosa. Died Birkenau, 1943)’

Following each letter is a confessional passage from a contemporary speaker, whose identity we can only guess at, speaking directly to someone else. A survivor, but which survivor? And how does this mysterious historian fit into the story of the Bauers? Slowly the evidence mounts to a further twist in the plot, but we must unravel the layers and straighten out the ambiguities to find out what it is. This becomes a story of multiple betrayals and devastating guilt, a future overshadowed by the past, and lives consumed by gaping absences.

The story of the Bauer family alone would be just another, sadly familiar Holocaust tale. But Pick is less interested in the details of the Final Solution than in the psychological consequences for the survivors. Thrust onto a train, arriving in a strange country among unfamiliar people, cut off from all that was known and familiar. What were the consequences of such an experience? Guilt, of course, but she suggests something far worse than that. A life determined by absence, ‘The gnawing longing, the desire to keep searching even when your rational mind knows everyone involved is gone.’

It’s that very longing which is explored further in Martin Fletcher’s The List. The year is 1945 and Edith and Georg are a young married couple trying to rebuild their shattered lives in a boarding house in Swiss Cottage. Both have made narrow escapes from Vienna alone, leaving family and home behind as the Nazis tightened their stranglehold on Europe. Like Alison Pick’s Pepik, Edith has been pushed onto a train by loving parents.

Here again the action is anchored within a domestic setting, at a distance from the portentous events that are central to the plot. The lounge of the Goldhurst Terrace lodgings is a place where a group of young refugees living with the consequences of the Holocaust commiserate over a cup of rationed tea.

The murder of millions of Jews haunts the text, although the reader only catches an occasional glimpse of its reality in characters like Edith’s cousin Anna, a lost soul ‘strange and distant, blank’ who arrives unexpectedly in their world with her flashbacks and nightmares, her hair still close cropped and a livid tattoo on her arm. Instead, we are led to discover, through Georg and Edith, the coping mechanisms, the black humour and the investment in domestic life which makes the knowledge of the past bearable. Edith is pregnant, but her excitement about the new life within her acts a constant reminder of the family that she has lost.

The hinterland of Edith and Georg’s story is the catastrophe that has engulfed their country and annihilated their community, friends and family. The list of the title is kept by Georg, which contains the names of relatives he and Edith are hoping to find. Scouring the offices of the refugee charities and Jewish organisations for news of survivors from camps and ghettos, he gradually crosses off one name after another. Finally there are only two names left — Edith’s father and his sister. But nobody, in the chaos of post-war Europe, seems to know whether they are alive or not. In both books, the survivors are left clinging to paper relics of the past —Georg’s list, the letters of Far To Go, a single photograph kept by Pepik.

Martin Fletcher depicts a post-war Hampstead heaving with Jewish refugees who frequent the Finchleystrasse, eating at the Cosmo and Dorice restaurants, their nostalgia for home refracted through black humour while they grapple with the idiosyncrasies of their adopted country and wait for news. The waiting defines them, as Fletcher describes: ‘They were all living the same blocked life. They couldn’t go anywhere until they knew.’

The Swiss Cottage that Fletcher describes is familiar to many second generation refugee children, including me, but here its cosiness is shot through with bleakness. While the cheerful couple who run the boarding house, Sally and Albert Barnes, are welcoming and tolerant up to a point, the mood elsewhere in Hampstead is turning sour. With fascist yobs patrolling the streets, a petition is raised to have refugees deported in order to free up accommodation for demobbed soldiers.

As the temperature rises, events in Palestine add to the ferment. Terrorist gangs have targeted the British troops enforcing the mandate, and they have Sergeant Eric Barnes, son of Sally and Albert, in their sights. A living link between London and Palestine, his fate threatens the precarious new lives of the émigré community. More explosive still, the terrorists have decided to take the fight with the British on their home turf with a bold plan to shoot Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin in Pall Mall. The political ramifications of a successful hit would be catastrophic for the Finchleystrasse circle.

With the pieces set in place, Fletcher brings it to a dramatic dénouement, plotting his double narrative with meticulous care against a grainy backdrop of post-war London. Martin Fletcher is a foreign correspondent with a distinguished track record in the Middle East, and he’s combined his expertise with his family background to write a page turning thriller, at the same time both wryly comic and memorable.

Fletcher knows his facts but, ever the journalist, sometimes loves them too much, overburdening us at times with unnecessary back-story. Pick writes with a greater delicacy of touch which means that the facts of Far to Go fall more gradually into place, keeping us guessing until the very last about the true identity of the different narrators and the path that has brought them to this place. The truth, when it comes, is shattering.

Fabrice Humbert

Serpent’s Tail 2011

The Origin of Violence (L’Origine de la Violence), the author’s third novel and the first to be translated into English, was swiftly extolled by the French press as a ‘great novel’ and a ‘revelation’. The novel won Le Prix Renaudot du Livre de Poche (the Prix Renaudot paperback award), a French literary award created in 1926 as a corollary of the Prix Goncourt. With the novel the author is also the first winner of the Prix Orange du Livre, the first literary award to involve web users throughout the award process. His latest novel, La Fortune de Sila (Sila’s Luck; Le Passage, 2010), has also been received with great acclaim, winning the Prix Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as Le Grand Prix RTL-Lire.

This compelling, if flawed, novel begins with a metaphysical reverie on the nature of evil, evoking the fall of Lucifer and images of Satan remembered from Dante. Evil as an abstracted personification takes on a real dimension when the narrator, a member of an old Norman family and teacher at the Parisian Franco-German lycée, takes his pupils on a trip to Buchenwald. The story begins here, when the narrator sees a photograph of the camp doctor with a prisoner —who is the living image of the narrator’s father. This haunting image propels the protagonist’s research into the identity of the prisoner, and through it the author inscribes him into the history of the Jews — since this anonymous prisoner takes flesh as his real grandfather, David Wagner.

The narrator’s problematic relationship with his father is played out in dialogue (as are all the relationships in the book) as flat and barren as his father’s life — the contours of whose circumscribed internal world are compared to his repetitive meanders of the streets of Paris. The narratives of David’s brother and a survivor of Buchenwald — David’s steadfast friend in the camp — lead the reader into the vividly evoked life of David Wagner. Through them, the resistant silence of that implacable fortress, which is the Fabre patriarchy is shattered, and the narrator becomes witness to the rise and fall of the morally flawed David; his amorous entanglements within the Fabre family — one driven by ambition, the other, passion; the consequent birth of a bastard, the narrator’s father; and the horrors of his imprisonment in Buchenwald. The narrator professes an obsession with violence — alluding to some nebulous, unexplained origin in childhood — an obsession which seems to find its fulfilment in the hell of Buchenwald, in the murder of his father’s father.

It is indeed in the account of the violence of Buchenwald that the author writes most powerfully and hauntingly. Throughout the work the narrator situates himself in relation to other authors, claiming that he can only respect accounts of lived experience in the camps, citing, for example, Primo Levi. The novel’s compelling account of the sheer madness of the camp, an arena in which the sadistic fantasies of the camp’s perpetrators (Martin Sommer, guard, Karl Otto Koch, Kommandant, and his wife Ilse) are brutally played out, and of the hierarchy of the prisoners, ranging from the Kapo to the living dead figure of the muselmann, is in every way worthy of Levi. Each perpetrator appears to embody a different facet of the face of violence; the sheer animal brutality of Stommer, who strangled, hung, poisoned hundreds of prisoners; the depravity and promiscuity of the flame-haired Ilse Koch, drunk with absolute power; most sinister of all, the insidious violence of the camp doctor (given a fictional role and name in the novel) who, in telling David the ‘Parable of the Jew’, implicitly assigns to him the role in the parable of the poisoned rat; a role which is fulfilled with David’s murder. Particularly graphic and disturbing is the account of David’s period as a Kalfacto in the Kochs’ house, where he exists as
a ghost, stripped of his identity and manhood, and ultimately, of hope.

Such convincing and poignant accounts as David’s are not — perhaps disappointingly — to be resumed in the novel. Following this profoundly felt excursion into the past, the story becomes somewhat bathetic, and the account of the narrator’s meeting and romance with a German teacher, the granddaughter of the morally tormented member of the Nazi party who was yet not a Nazi, lacks the resonance of the account of David’s affair. At this point the subject of the story becomes the narrator’s struggle to write his grandfather’s story itself; and the chapter about David’s experience in the camp appears to the reader to be a foretaste of this imagined story. The author fills the hiatus in the action of the novel with an intelligent and searching analysis of the social pre-conditions of Nazism, which is written more in the register of an historian rather than a novelist; consequently the reader experiences a jarring of styles, and feels almost as though the author is finding himself as a writer as much as the protagonist (both narrator and author are teachers turned writers).

The reader is drawn back into the overarching drama of the novel when the protagonist is called back to Paris to visit his dying ‘grandfather’ (husband to his father’s mother), heralding the dénouement of the novel. An element of doubt in the narrator’s relationship with both his father and grandfather lends a sinister edge, a sense of an unplumbed horror within the family…the horror, ultimately, of the Fabres’ betrayal of David. As both a Fabre and a Wagner, the protagonist carries both victim and perpetrator within him, and, in bringing the truth of David to light, enacts the wider authorial purpose of giving life to an anonymous face — and playing some part in expiating France’s heritage of guilt.

Fabrice Humbert is, like the narrator in The Origin of Violence, a young teacher at a Franco- German Lycée. He will, along with the novelist Agnès Desarthe (author of The Foundling), be talking to Michael Arditti during Jewish Book Week 2012 about his novel. Both authors have written novels about men who launch investigations into their own family histories, and through them find themselves confronted by the darkest atrocities of World War II. ( Sunday, 19 February 2012, 6.30 pm, King’s Place, St. Pancras Room)

Why does controversy seem to follow Philip Roth around? His first book, Goodbye, Columbus, touched off a riot of a reaction in the Jewish- American community when it was published in 1959. Roth, his detractors said, went out of his way to depict his fictional suburban Jews in an unpleasant light, a portrayal that would only give succour to antisemites. Ten years later, in 1969, Portnoy’s Complaint somehow scandalised an America that had witnessed a shocking number of political assassinations, watched nightly the televised carnage of Vietnam, and feared the revolutionaries that seemed to be taking over its cities. (To be fair, most Americans had never before read a depiction of an adolescent masturbating with a piece of liver.) None of the scandals that followed ever reached the heights of these first two, but Roth has, despite writing within a culture that seems to have less and less time for the printed word, shown a consistent talent for making headlines.

So it is not surprising that an apparently uncontroversial event — Roth, America’s grand old man of letters by now, receiving the Man Booker International Prize, a sort of lifetime achievement award for writers — was accompanied by yet more rancour and fuss. Carmen Callil, one of the prize’s three judges, supplemented the announcement of the award with her own announcement: she vehemently disagreed with the other judges’ choice of Roth, and was stepping down. Her stated reasons for contesting Roth’s win? “He goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book,” and, in a turn of phrase for which Roth scholars will be forever grateful, “It’s as though he’s sitting on your face and you can’t breathe.” She would later clarify her position by rather sensibly arguing that North American writers such as Roth receive more than their share of such awards, and that in giving the Booker to Roth the judges missed an opportunity to highlight some of the significant writers of other literary cultures. But it is her criticism of Roth as monotonous, always writing about the same thing, that was printed in bold type. The charge strikes me as both lazy and unsupported, and yet it is one Roth has heard from critics for decades.

In 1972, back when Roth was still living in Alexander Portnoy’s shadow, the distinguished cultural critic Irving Howe took it upon himself to take the author down a notch or two. In the pages of Commentary magazine (where Roth had made a splash in 1961 with his essay ‘Writing American Fiction’), Howe tore Roth’s books apart, asserting that they were held, “in the grip of an imperious will prepared to wrench, twist, and claw at its materials in order to leave upon them the scar of its presence.” The contention throughout the piece, anticipating Callil by nearly 40 years, is that Roth goes on and on about the same subject: himself. This criticism would haunt Roth, intensifying whenever he wrote a book featuring his Roth- like alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. Claiming that Roth wrote only about himself became an easy way to bash him, and to ignore the ways in which his books diverged from his biography. Carmen Callil, in dissenting from her fellow judges, has joined herself to this hallowed tradition.

What’s maddening about criticism such as Howe’s and Callil’s, to my mind at least, is that it lowers the discussion about literature to a nearly childish level. To respond to the charge that Roth, “goes on and on and on about the same subject in almost every single book” is to descend into absurdities: Look, I want to say, Roth writes about plenty of subjects — sixties radicalism! Jewish settlers on the West Bank! Baseball! Racial passing! But what kind of a perspective on literature is this? Do we read and re-read Lolita to find out more about paedophilia? Has The Great Gatsby endured merely because readers are fascinated by the roaring twenties? Surely readers find something more vital beyond a book’s subject matter — a pinhole that lets light into the dark tunnel of our own subjectivity, an urgent reminder of the variety and fullness of experience, the mysterious way a book — pages filled with typed words — comes alive in our hands. I am befuddled by those who see nothing but an author’s biography in a work of fiction, or who read a representation of subjectivity as self-obsession and solipsism. This seems to me a very simple-minded form of misreading. Isn’t this fundamental stuff — some of the very first lessons we learn when we begin reading fiction? What’s clear is that it is a criticism that has rankled Roth over the years, provoking him to respond vociferously in interview after interview, and respond, often provocatively, in his fiction.

In Roth’s 1981 novel The Anatomy Lesson, Nathan Zuckerman is beset by the twinned calamities of chronic pain and writer’s block. These afflictions are compounded by a vicious critical takedown in the pages of Inquiry magazine by critic Milton Appel, “an attack upon Zuckerman’s career that made Macduff’s assault upon Macbeth look almost lackadaisical.” Appel is modelled, of course, on Irving Howe and Roth has great fun with Zuckerman here, milking the righteous anger of a writer wronged for pages and pages of unhinged vitriol. Zuckerman, hopped up on painkillers, pot, and alcohol, calls Appel in a rage and semi-coherently gives the elder writer a piece of his mind. But more than that bit of inspiration, Howe’s piece plays a bigger role in The Anatomy Lesson, as the novel has Roth seemingly taking Howe’s central criticism seriously: what if it were true that Roth can only write about himself? What if Howe’s diagnosis is right, and Roth only has a talent for plastering himself all over his pages? He plays out these questions through Zuckerman, who has grown sick of mining his self for literature, and feels that he has exhausted that self. Zuckerman muses, “If you get out of yourself you can’t be a writer because the personal ingredient is what gets you going, and if you hang on to the personal ingredient any longer you’ll disappear right up your asshole.” The novel takes flight when Zuckerman decides to quit the writing life to go to medical school, all the while impersonating Milton Appel, and introducing himself as a pornographer, the publisher of a magazine called Lickety Split. More than just two fingers up to Irving Howe, the book seems to show how different Zuckerman is from his author: while Zuckerman attempts to escape the writing life because he has exhausted his self, Roth clearly has no such problem, steadily producing another installment in the Zuckerman saga, his third in four years, finding no shortage of material to keep him going.

A more adventurous critic than I could make the case that not just The Anatomy Lesson, but nearly all of Roth’s 1980s publications were in some way written in perverse response to the oft-repeated criticism that he only writes about himself, that he insufficiently fictionalises experience. There are the first five Zuckerman books, each taking noticeably from Roth’s biography to enact the comedy of late-twentieth century America. There is The Facts, a seemingly straightforward autobiography bookended by letters to and from Zuckerman, throwing a wrench into the non-fictional works (the latter is a passionate missive from Zuckerman to his creator, urging him not to publish the preceding memoir). There is Deception, a novel as transcription of conversations, featuring a writer named Philip who sounds for all the world like Philip Roth. The plot, such as it is, centres on whether or not Philip will publish his notebooks (which we have been reading) as is, or change all the names (including changing “Philip” to “Nathan”). At one point, Philip barks, “I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.” Roth’s first novel of the 1990s, Operation Shylock, took things a step further. Subtitled ‘A Confession’, the book is told in the first person by Philip Roth, who tells us the ostensibly true (though obviously false) story of how he went to Israel to put a stop to the hijinks of a man who calls himself Philip Roth, and is agitating for a meshugge cause called ‘Diasporism which advocates the wholesale migration of Israeli Jews back to Poland, Germany, and elsewhere in Europe. Each of these books seemed provoked in some way by a bee in Roth’s bonnet that looked and sounded an awful lot like Irving Howe. The books seem to dramatise the process of taking experience and converting it into writing, taking great pains (and many pages) to show just how grey the area between fact and fiction really is. I happen to think that there’s a lot more going on in these books than Roth making the same point over and over again, but if ever there was a time to criticise Roth for only writing about himself, it was in 1993, after Operation Shylock capped 14 years of books that each seemed to put Philip Roth front and centre.

But something drastic changed after Operation Shylock, something that makes Carmen Callil’s recent comments all the more mystifying: Roth forgot about Irving Howe and began a stretch of books that had, at least on the surface, little to do with his old oppositions of fact and fiction, life and writing, Philip and Nathan. In 1995, he published Sabbath’s Theater, a frankly stunning steamroller of a novel, centering on the despicable Mickey Sabbath, an obscene, arthritic, and now disgraced puppeteer who wants, more than anything, to die. It is hilarious and sad and provocative and, although it does feature a white male of Roth’s vintage and plenty of talk about sex (two Rothian hallmarks), the book pretty clearly sets its sights far beyond the writing life. This was followed by the already-canonised “American Trilogy”: American Pastoral (1997), I Married a Communist (1998), and The Human Stain (2000). Nathan Zuckerman returns for these novels, but it is a changed Zuckerman, one content to stay on the sidelines and narrate other lives, each tied to a different significant period in American history. It is these books that, for right or wrong, got many critics to sit up and take note of Roth’s greatness, often for the very reason that the books seemed to move past Roth’s old preoccupations. “What happened?” Ken Gordon asked in Slate, “The new books seem to recognize the existence of other people.” The books that have followed since the turn of the century have similarly branched outward from Roth’s comfort zone and, although their relative merits have been debated, seem to have tossed aside that old chestnut that Roth only writes about himself. To my mind, that criticism was never very convincing — doesn’t it misunderstand the very nature of literature? — but it’s all the more puzzling to hear in 2011, from a distinguished literary editor no less.

But enough already on the subject of Roth’s many subjects; I’d like to talk about a more subtle misreading that has crept into recent Roth criticism. Beginning with the publication of The Human Stain in 2000, the list of Roth’s prior publications in his books’ front matter, instead of being displayed in a single chronological block, now appears broken up, with the books divided into various categories: “Zuckerman Books”, “Kepesh Books”(the three books featuring David Kepesh as a narrator), “Roth Books” (including The Facts and Operation Shylock), even a grab-bag category called “Other Books”. One effect of this division is to highlight the diversity of Roth’s back catalogue: another shot across the bows to those critics who claim Roth has but one subject. But a more subtle effect can be seen in the way the categories seem to be telling us how to read Roth, how to conceive of his long and varied career. Just as we should be wary of readings that can’t see beyond the author’s biography, there are plenty of reasons to distrust reading Roth the way Roth tells us to. Roth long ago proved himself to be a most unreliable guide to his own work — in interviews he maintained for instance, that Operation Shylock was 100% true — and to take the author’s word for it when interpreting a book is merely the other side of the coin from assuming that he’s always writing about himself.

This phenomenon has particularly cropped up in the response to the publication of Roth’s most recent novel, last year’s Nemesis, which brought with it a new category in the book’s front matter. “Nemeses: Short Novels” includes four of the last five books Roth has published: Everyman (2006), Indignation (2008), The Humbling (2009), and, now, Nemesis. Each of these books, so the reviews have told us, is a short, spare meditation on fate and death. They are the products of an aging author who has seen many of his friends, and his only sibling, die within the last few years. They are the works of a man bravely staring down his own mortality, and responding with an appropriate “late style”. This is, of course, a valid reading. But why should it be the only one? Discussion of Roth’s fiction should not be left to the likes of Howe and Callil, who cannot see past their prejudices as to how much distance an author must keep between himself and his books. But the discussion should not be determined by Roth either. Roth may offer an interesting reading of his own work, and can certainly grant us insight into the creative process, but it must be up to us, the dwindling mass of serious readers, to deliberate over a work’s meanings.

Nemesis tells the story of Bucky Cantor, who, in 1944, is the 23 year old gym teacher and playground director who must preside over the children of Weequahic (Newark’s Jewish neighbourhood) during a terrifying polio outbreak. After afflicting most of the city, the disease reaches Weequahic, and two of Bucky’s eighth grade charges become infected and die. Bucky’s fiancée arranges for him to take a job as a counsellor at a children’s summer camp out in the country. He initially declines the invitation, insisting that he cannot abandon his post. But then, in a change of heart nearly inexplicable to himself, he accepts and flees “equatorial Newark” for the safety of rural Pennsylvania, where the camp is a world away from the overheated, overpopulated precincts of Newark. But within a week of Bucky’s arrival, one of his campers falls prey to polio and is sped off to the hospital. Bucky himself tests positive for the disease. It spreads quickly and the camp is shut within days. In a wickedly tragic irony, Bucky, who flees Newark to escape polio, ends up bringing it with him to the camp; not only is he powerless to protect the children of Newark, he helps the disease infect still more children. After a long and painful recovery that leaves him debilitated, Bucky becomes a recluse, rejecting his fiancée (he doesn’t want her to be tied down to “a cripple”), forever cursing God for creating polio. Although polio does not kill him, his once-promising life is essentially over. He never forgives himself for his role in spreading polio, or for his fateful abandonment of the kids of the Weequahic playground.

My brief summation does not begin to do the novel justice. But it’s enough to convey the fact that, yes, Nemesis shares certain features with Everyman, Indignation, and The Humbling. All four feature protagonists reckoning with the fateful circumstances that shape a life. All four are written in a spare, direct prose style with little of the humour that has characterised much of Roth’s previous work. And, if you see Bucky as having effectively died as soon as he discovers he is the polio carrier, all four protagonists end up dead. But when I first read Nemesis, I was surprised to find myself thinking of Roth’s earlier books — The Plot Against America and Goodbye, Columbus, in particular — and of an interview with Roth from 1984, in which he explained why he hadn’t dealt with the Holocaust directly in his fiction like, say, William Styron had:

“It works through Jewish lives less visibly and in less spectacular ways. And that’s the way I prefer to deal with it in fiction. For most reflective American Jews, I would think, it is simply there, hidden, submerged, emerging, disappearing, unforgotten. You don’t make use of it—it makes use of you.”

Although Nemesis is set among American Jews in 1944, the Holocaust is conspicuously absent. There is much talk of the war but no reference to the fate of European Jews. Might this be because, as in The Plot Against America, the book imagines an alternate history for American Jews, one in which they lose the security they were blessed with in reality?

“Our Jewish children are our riches,” a mother of one of Bucky’s students cries out. “Why is it attacking our beautiful Jewish children?” Although polio, of course, does not discriminate, throughout the book the danger is figured as specifically coming after the Jews of Weequahic. In a striking early scene, a group of hooligans from Newark’s Italian neighborhood drive up to Bucky’s playground and threaten to spread polio to “you people”. As the disease spreads, many parents decide to keep their children confined at home until the danger passes. And when the outbreak reaches epidemic proportions within Weequahic, there’s talk of barricading the neighbourhood, creating a ghetto to quarantine the Jews. For some in Newark this doesn’t go far enough: “Some of them sound as if they think the best way to get rid of the polio epidemic would be to burn down Weequahic with all the Jews in it.” I don’t want to push these parallels too far (or make too much of the fact that the false haven is presented here as a camp); it is certainly not necessary to read Nemesis as an allegory. I am merely suggesting that a fictional polio outbreak allows Roth to put his American Jews in the hands of the sort of historical threat they never had to face.

It is a testament to Roth’s success here that Nemesis is about much else as well. Bucky’s indecision over whether to stay in Newark, or flee to the safety of pastoral Pennsylvania recalls Neil Klugman’s dilemmas over assimilation in Goodbye, Columbus. The book’s depictions of 1940s Newark are as vivid as any in Roth’s canon, and it manages the difficult trick of presenting the past in a way that doesn’t read like costume drama. And I enjoyed the book’s knotty narrative structure, in which the narrator, Arnie Mesnikoff, one of Bucky’s playground boys, only reveals himself halfway through the novel. Before then, the events are narrated in the first-person plural, the ‘we’ an unusually effective way to convey the sense of camaraderie and affection the boys have for their hero, Bucky Cantor. What a book like this, so richly rendered, seems to me to produce is not a single, distilled meaning, like Carmen Callil might suggest (Roth once again resurrecting Jewish Newark), but rather a multiplicity of meanings, with a suggestive power that reaches out in many directions at once; it is, at once, ‘about’ polio, or the Holocaust, or assimilation, or the tragedy of having a body that ages, or the glories of growing up in Newark in the 1940s. You might say that its meanings go on and on and on, though I wouldn’t necessarily put it that way

Palgrave Macmillan. 2011

Jeremy Ben-Ami is a first rate political operator. In four short years he has made J Street a $5 million organisation and successfully built a Washington power base in opposition to the AIPAC juggernaut and the rest of the so called ‘pro-Israel’ lobby. With its mantra of ‘Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace’, J Street funds electoral battles, lobbies Congress and attempts to reframe the terms of debate. It has also spawned international imitators such as the predominantly French JCall and the recent UK start-up Yachad. Unfortunately Ben Ami’s skills as a theorist do not match his organisational success. A New Voice for Israel (subtitled ‘Fighting for the Survival of the Jewish Nation’) proves insufficient to jump-start a renewed peacemaking effort; his preference for platitudes over difficult questions leaves the book an exercise in nostalgia rather than an effective call to arms.

The book opens well, with Ben Ami using his family narrative to explain his position today, beginning with his grandparents’ status as founder residents of Tel Aviv. He goes on to focus on his father, Yitzhak Ben-Ami, a socialist idealist in the Ahad Ha’am mould who became a Jabotinskyite revisionist following the Arab riots of 1929. After rising up the ranks of the Irgun he devoted himself in the late 1930s to bringing in Jewish immigrants to Palestine, taking him first to Vienna and then to New York. In doing so he was opposed both by the British and the Zionist establishment. The latter wanted to prioritise the legal route, operating under the British quota, despite being set at disastrously low levels. In the USA, the American Jewish establishment, comprised of anti—Zionists and socialist Zionists, fiercely opposed the work of the revisionists through every available means, with the result that far less European Jews were saved than otherwise would have been possible. Ben Ami uses his father’s life story to powerful effect — just as the American Jewish leadership was wrong then, it is wrong now. Now, as then, the appropriate way to deal with critical voices is “not to reflexively shut them down but to engage them on the merits and see what value there may be in what they are trying to say.”

Ben Ami goes on to tell a story of generational change, of the differing views of Israel held by those, like his parents, who lived through the foundation of the state, and those like him who grew up after the 1967 war. His full awakening came during an extended stay in Israel in the 1990s, when he discovered that “yes, the Palestinians are a people, and yes they do believe that my people came and threw them out of the homes and took their country away from them”. From this vantage point he views witha mix of understanding and alarm the children of the 1980s for whom “the defining images of Israel are of intifada and occupation”, alongside many who see Israel as increasingly irrelevant to their Jewish identity. While Ben Ami is disappointed by those that would prefer not to think about Israel, he is more concerned by the other outgrowth of this constituency, the pro- Palestinian and BDS movements, dominated by young Jews. Ben Ami criticises attempts to silence these younger groups, and is keen to distinguish between those who he sees as beyond the pale and those that have a legitimate point of view. But frequently he comes across as trying to stem a tidal wave, advocating piecemeal remedies when radical surgery is required. He recognises the radical changes in Jewish life, with younger Jews seeking expressions of Jewishness outside the mainstream, but laments their lack of connection to the ‘vibrant network of young activists’ in Israel. This wish for a greater sense of Jewish ‘peoplehood’ is widespread amongst Jewish leaders, but it seems rather futile, given the anti-parochial universalist stance of many young diaspora Jews, who see Israel as one country among many that do not yet live up to their view of justice.

At the heart of Ben Ami’s case is a critique of contemporary American Jewish leadership (one that could easily be applied throughout the Diaspora), describing it as out of touch, unrepresentative and committed to stymieing debate around Israel and Jewish identity. This is justified, but entirely unoriginal. Such a critique might have had an impact 10 years ago, but in the wake of a decade of criticism, most notably from John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, it comes across as merely stating the obvious. The question of timing is pertinent — this is a book rooted in the early 1990s (the author was a Clinton aide) and Ben Ami is trapped in a Clintonian paradigm. Like many who came to prominence in that era, he focuses on the technocratic, believing that the ‘Clinton Parameters’ that were utilised at Camp David and Taba negotiations are sufficient to solve the conflict. In keeping with this he is resistant to making any deeper analysis; into nationalism, into inequalities of power or into the events of 1948, and he is at his least comfortable when dealing with the events of the last decade, be they the second intifada, the Wall, or the blockade of Gaza.

The book is at its weakest when it moves from diagnosis of the problem to potential solutions. Naturally, Ben Ami, like all centrist politicians, believes in the two state solution. So, however, does Benjamin Netanyahu (apparently), and he has managed to combine this professed belief with continuing settlement expansion and ongoing dispossession of Palestinians. Ben Ami has nothing to say about people (like the supposedly saintly Shimon Peres) who wax lyrical about the two state solution while making no criticism of checkpoints, house demolitions or collective punishment. Predictably, Ben Ami rules any kind of one state solution out of court without any discussion, and, more dangerously, declares any return of Palestinian refugees impossible, claiming that those who believe in it “oppose the state of Israel as the national home of the Jewish people”. An agreement with only limited numbers of Palestinian refugees returning to Israel might indeed be possible, but such a crucial issue cannot be ruled out of court at the outset, and the attempt to do so reveals a view of the conflict in which Israelis have red lines that must be respected while Palestinians hold extremist views that need to be watered down. Ben Ami’s most damning failure is his response to the planned Palestinian declaration of independence. Rather than welcoming a diplomatic move that is obviously a manifestation of the two state solution, Ben Ami calls for the US to “pre-empt this with an active and ambitious diplomatic initiative to achieve a two state solution”. Essentially then, the US should veto the creation of a Palestinian state, in order to make possible the creation of a Palestinian state. The subtext is clear — Israelis must be the ones to take the initiative, Palestinians the passive recipients of whatever largesse the international community decides to throw their way.

Street’s timidity was most apparent in the debacle of 2009-10, in which Obama publicly demanded that Israel freeze all settlement construction beyond the Green Line. The Israeli government, despite agreeing a limited ten-month freeze, refused to accede to the President’s demand, creating a long standoff at the end of which Netanyahu proved victorious and Obama was humiliated. At this juncture Obama needed to utilise the key sticks of US foreign policy, threatening America’s arm sales to Israel, her loan guarantees and her diplomatic support at the UN. This would surely have been the moment J Street was designed for; it needed to be there to support Obama against the furious Israel lobby and to show that such pressure was not anti-Israel, but in her best long term interests. None of this happened, because the mainstream lobby was too strong and J-Street too weak, making it politically impossible for Washington to dictate terms to its long-term ally. Reviewing this period, Ben Ami describes the call for a settlement freeze as a tactical error on Obama’s part. The president should, instead, have put his political capital into defining the borders of a Palestinian state, making it clear ‘who can build where’. It is unclear why Ben-Ami thinks this would have made any difference; the issue is that Israel’s government demonstrably no longer believes in a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, preferring a much reduced territory on the West Bank that lies somewhere between glorified local government and a Bantustan. It wasn’t Obama’s rhetoric that was the problem; it was his inability to put real pressure on the recalcitrant government of Netanyahu and Lieberman and J Street’s unwillingness to support such muscular action.

With this we come full circle. Jeremy Ben Ami’s theoretical weakness underpins a failure of realpolitik. His inability to think beyond Clinton era soundbites and his naiveté in the face of the Israeli right stands in the way of J-Street’s potential to change the terms of the political debate. This has wider implications, especially for those like Yachad, who operate in J Street’s image. The task is surely to create a diasporic movement that will put massive pressure on Israel to end the occupation, both directly and via national governments across the world. It needs to harness the energy of BDS and pro-Palestinian activists, away from purely negative condemnation of Israel towards a positive strategy of targeting the occupation with the aim of creating a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Organisations that devote all their energy to appearing moderate enough to appease the establishment are likely to fail in this task; without a genuine and unflinching analysis they deny themselves the resources they need to actually make a difference.

Yale University Press, 2010

If the suggestive title of Jeremy Dauber’s In the Demon’s Bedroom attracts the attention of the casual passerby, it will have done more than satisfy the book’s author. Rather, it will have proven one of the book’s primary claims:a writer knows how to pique his readers’ interest. Moreover, an author knows how to anticipate his readers’ initial interpretive leap and, subsequently, how to prevent grave misunderstandings. Lest the reader think Dauber is an author of supernatural pulp fiction, he appends the subtitle:Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern. As the subtitle clarifies, Dauber’s subjects are those Yiddish authors of Central and Eastern Europe whose published works appeared between 1500 and 1700. And, just like Dauber himself, these are authors who invite readers into their demonic textual lairs in order to teach specific lessons.

For Dauber’s readers, this is initially a lesson in the readability and relevance of the early modern Yiddish literary canon. Dauber repeatedly argues that Yiddish literature of the early modern period is both aesthetically rich and genuinely entertaining. Here, as he announces in his multiple close readings, is a selection of writing that demonstrates a literary dynamism. Playful rhymes, layered allegories and subtle allusions abound, and are ripe for the interpretive picking. As the title of his work suggests, Dauber also focuses his attention on those Yiddish narratives that participate in the supernatural mode. The texts under discussion cross genre boundaries but are unified in their deployment of the fantastic, the incredible or the demonic. Investigating fables, short stories and rhymed narratives, Dauber leads his readers into a highly-stylised literary world of supernatural adventure and romance. Readers and scholars who might have otherwise relegated early modern Yiddish literature to a cabinet of historical curiosities are persuaded that to do so would be to ignore the literary pulse of this fabulous corpus.

Yet Dauber’s meticulously- researched analysis does not aspire to be a glorified ghost story, nor should it. After all, the task of In the Demon’s Bedroom is not merely to entice contemporary readers and academics to appreciate early modern Yiddish literature, but to identify the sophisticated audience of these works at the time of their publication. Dauber rejects the assumption that Yiddish literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, by virtue of being written in a Jewish vernacular, was necessarily simplistic, or that it catered to a correspondingly simple-minded reading audience. Yiddish male and female readers, he contends, were not the watered-down counterparts of educated male readers perusing contemporaneous Hebrew writing. Rather, these Yiddish readers demonstrated mature reading sensibilities. Not only would they have understood various biblical, liturgical and Talmudic allusions but they would also have been able to negotiate the strong strain of Hebraic vocabulary in the Yiddish literary record. Moreover, Dauber argues, these readers were distinctly aware of genre conventions and would, therefore, interpret and assign meaning to deviations from genre norms. Similarly, if a narrative line stumbled, readers were quick to recognise the slip. For example, when the readers of a fable in R. Moses b. Eliezer Wallich’s 1697 Seyfer Mesholim (Book of Fables) are first told that a certain innkeeper is a paragon of cunning intelligence, only to see him engage in utter folly, it becomes necessary for the narrator’s voice to intrude. Accordingly,some two dozen lines justifying the discrepancy follow the incident and textually respond to the readers’ implied scepticism.

Most interestingly, Dauber recuperates the discerning profile of this Yiddish readership by turning to the supernatural mode announced in his work’s title. When these readers were confronted by images of the fantastic and demonic, he argues, they would have registered a range of responses on the spectrum of scepticism and belief. This is evidenced by various explanatory or scene- setting statements that the early modern Yiddish writers introduce at moments when supernatural narratives stretch the bounds of believability. As Dauber shows, these were techniques echoed throughout European literature of the period in works no less refined or supernaturally-inclined than Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus or Shakespeare’s Macbeth. As he did in his first book: Antonio’s Devils (2004), Dauber bolsters his argument concerning early modern Jewish literature with a discursive foray into early modern English drama. It would seem that both Marlowe and Shakespeare’s work demonstrates the same awareness of an increasingly sceptical and epistemically sophisticated audience as that identified by Dauber in a Jewish context. More than a comparative digression, the analysis of the text and performance history of Marlowe and Shakespeare’s plays suggests the larger implications for Dauber’s historical reconstruction of the Yiddish audience. Although, as Dauber strongly asserts, these texts were written for Jews and by Jews at specific times and places, these are also texts in conversation with the broad concerns of early modern European literature and society. Dauber’s work further implies the potential of such a conversation by bringing together the works of leading Yiddish literary scholars, such as Jean Baumgarten, Jerold Frakes and Sara Zfatman, with
recent cultural histories of witchcraft and demonology in early modern Europe.

The texts cross boundaries but are unified in their deployment of the fantastic, the incredible or the demonic

Whereas Dauber must convince his readers of the literary sophisti- cation of the early modern Yiddish audience, he contends that theYiddish writers of the period did not need to be similarly persuaded. They were, as he demonstrates, already aware of their readers’ varying intellectual and analytical profiles. These Yiddish authors wrote for a readership that was attuned to subtle literary gestures and the manipulation of text and symbols towards political ends.This is most evident in Dauber’s reading of the she-demon tale, Mayse fun Vorms (c.1520s). In his analysis, Dauber attempts to recover the interpretive paradigm that may have guided the Yiddish reading public at the time of the text’s publication. Briefly put, the tale concerns the erroneous engagement of a wealthy Jewish son to a murderous she-demon. The she-demon subsequently kills off the son’s first two wives and is then, herself, destroyed by the third wife in a subterranean demonic bedroom (hence the title of Dauber’s work). At the end of the tale, the third wife is alive and wealthy. She is left in a position far from the impoverished state in which she had been betrothed to her husband—a position of poverty she had previously compared to death.

Contemporary interpreters have read the story as a polemic against intermarriage or a literary exploration of threatening female sexuality. Yet, as Dauber’s close reading demonstrates, what may appear today a moralising tale about sexual relations would have been read in its time as a warning against the exaltation of wealth and ownership as values unto themselves. Dauber carefully maps a network of biblical allusions and recurring wealth-related imagery in order to demonstrate how the text condemns the coercive power of money. However, as he carefully notes, the text does not act with the goal of disturbing a social hierarchy that privileges the wealthy over the poor; the hierarchy should persist while the values of wealthy Jews are reformed. Most interestingly, Dauber shows that Mayse fun Vorms does allow social mobility in certain cases; for example, if one follows the model of piety, obedience and normative gender roles exemplified by the third wife. The discerning Yiddish reader would decipher this social message by carefully attending to the system of allusions and symbols underpinning the narrative. Dauber demonstrates that paying similar attention to the literary techniques of such works as The Tale of the Spirit of Koretz (c.1660) and the Tale of Briyo and Zimro (c.1580s) allows contemporary literary historians to identify the former, a dybbuk tale, as a valorisation of communal action and the latter, a Judaised romance, as instructions for negotiating Jewish rights under a hostile Christian ruler. Dauber also posits the Tale of Briyo and Zimro as a test case for how the Yiddish author as cultural transmitter ‘perceived (and, perhaps more daringly, even constituted) the audience’s perspectives on cultural adaptation.’ After all, the tale directly draws on conventions of non-Jewish chivalric romances that were popular at the time. Yet Dauber shows that common tropes of the genre were adapted with various modifications and transvaluations.The text does not advocate for ideals of chivalric love. Rather, a close reading of the tale reveals the lesson that any ‘attempt to generate an authentic mixture of the external and internal, chivalric and Jewish worlds’ must be relegated to the world of fantasy. It is only in the world of the dead that the story’s Jewish heroes, Briyo and Zimro, can marry. What emerges from Dauber’s work is a sense not only of the Yiddish reader but also of the Yiddish writer as a cultural activist and moraliser who anticipated, responded to and shaped the future inclinations of his reading audience.

Accordingly, In the Demon’s Bedroom may rightly be labelled a work of recuperative scholarship. Dauber self-consciously reads each tale as an intricate artistic construct, and, in doing so, he mines the canon of early modern Yiddish literature to unearth the interpretive profiles of its readers and the moralising agendas of its authors. He demonstrates that to descend into the demonic Yiddish bedroom—into the world of early modern Yiddish readers and writers— is to discover a complex network of literary and semiotic exchange. Readers who were dismissed as merely functionally literate and authors who were labelled condescendingly as ‘popular’ appear as active, sophisticated players in a dynamic reading community. Dauber’s scholarship lays the groundwork for similar recuperative efforts and we may well wonder what other authorial and readerly spectres may be lurking in the Jewish literary archive.

‘I’m waiting for the scenery to look more like how I’d imagined Israel and less like rural Pennsylvania,’ thinks Sarah Glidden, as she stares from her bus window at the plain, flat landscape on her ride north from Ben Gurion airport. Combining light-hearted humour with both the harsh and mundane realities of Israel, this scene is representative of her graphic novel, How to Understand Israel in Sixty Days or Less, the award-winning comic artist’s first book.

The memoir takes place over several weeks on the author’s first trip to the country. Twenty-something Glidden, a self-declared liberal who is pro-Palestinian and critical of Israel, and who has a non-Jewish boyfriend and few Jewish friends, decides to get to the bottom of the Arab/Israeli conflict by going on the free Birthright trip offered to young Jews who have never before been to the country. She expects to be critical of the programme’s ‘propaganda’ and, once there, does not disappoint herself: she repeatedly questions whether Israel had the right to take land from the Palestinians and Bedouins, and probes the real meanings behind nationalist myths like Masada. But soon her strict liberal outlook starts to crumble. She finds herself falling for Israel, or elements of it: its own left-wingers, its compelling history , the feeling of belonging.

Her journey takes her through the contemporary political landscape she came to explore and into a more complex landscape of culture, history and powerful emotions. At every stage, her identity and her preconceptions are challenged by the confluence of these different forces and the book’s appeal lies in the honesty with which she confronts these.

Questions rather than answers are what she collects on her journey, from characters who not only represent different political viewpoints but are themselves multi-faceted, complex, defying stereotypes: her guide, who is pro-Wall for the safety it offers but empathetic to the pain it brings; her cousin, who moved to Israel to study medicine, but hates how Arabs are treated; an orthodox rabbi who values human respect above religious law; an American who thinks the Arab nations should help the Palestinians, but can’t stand Israelis and their rudeness; an unreliable peace activist; a left-wing youth leader who asks why progressives are anti-Israel – shouldn’t they be pro things? Glidden’s smart, passionate take on complicated people and positions results in an emotional journey, complete with insomnia and tears, calmed by the presence of her level-headed, soya-milk and yoga- obsessed friend Melissa, who isn’t afraid to tell her to take it down a notch.

The book is narrated not just verbally but by watercolour graphics. Glidden paints herself as a frumpy, arty type, and the characters she meets are portrayed astutely and comically, in simple cartoonish figures with dots for eyes, reminding this Canadian of Lynn Johnson’s early For Better or For Worse. Particularly memorably drawn are the girl from Orange County, who brazenly mistrusts Arabs, wears enormous sunglasses and a scarf and is seeking to ‘meet hot Israeli soldiers…what-ever’; the fashionable New Yorkers who wear fitted vintage coats; and the chubby trip organiser in wire-framed glasses. Glidden shows us the country, too: the view from Masada, green kibbutzes in the Golan, Jaffa. Her graphics are most exciting when they jump into the surreal, casting herself in historical scenes and conversing with fantasy figures. She debates with the pioneers who came to build up Palestine (‘Wait, but what about the people who live there already?’) and her nights are peopled by imagined characters—from prehistoric man and woman to Ottoman tax collectors—who had once slept in the same spot she now lies. A painting accuses her of insensitivity; a Bedouin speaker gives her the honest speech she longs for. She listens cautiously as Ben Gurion explains how he never wanted to infringe on Arab rights. Through courtroom scenes she dramatises her recurring question:‘Is Birthright trying to brainwash me or is it actually pretty reasonable?’, including herself in these frames in a direct personal link with the political and the historical.

The narrative is strongest when she is most open abouher fears and preconceptions: are the soldiers on their trip the ones that actually bulldoze houses? She is too uncomfortable to ask. Learning that her Republican travelling companion is not homophobic, as she has assumed, makes Sarah consider whether she has misjudged others as well.‘I’m ashamed to admit to myself that I like this feeling of being in this room [full of Jews],’ she confesses. ‘I’m even more ashamed at how much I didn’t like being outside of it.’These are moments of reflection on the path to maturity as Sarah learns to tolerate people whose opinions she does not share and she starts to ask if the Israeli/Arab conflict is no-one’s fault —if both sides did what they had to in order to survive.

Every memoir is a selective retelling, but some of Glidden’s omissions are distracting. It remains unclear why she chose to go on Birthright—a state-funded trip known for its agenda—when there are many ways for a first-timer to explore Israel (there’s no such thing as a free trip!). I was left wondering why she was looking for this fight, and wanted to know more about the background to her identity issues: Where did she get her liberal politics? Did she have any Jewish sympathies before? Glidden mentions that her non-Jewish boyfriend is concerned that she is being brainwashed by Zionists; I wondered how the trip made her feel about their relationship. She also briefly notes that her brother died in an accident. This harrowing insertion took me out of the story—I wondered if that was the same brother who had gone to Israel in the past, and how this tragedy may have played into her identity struggle? I would have preferred more of this backstory, in place of her longer researched segments about Israel’s history: though interesting, they sat awkwardly in the personal story, and her emotional demeanour detracted from their credibility. Ultimately, perhaps, this remindsus that most arguments about Israel are emotionally driven, and drives home her point that objectivity is difficult if not impossible to achieve.

Despite being 200 pages, Understanding Israel is a quick read and a compelling tale, presenting varying arguments and stories about Israel in an easy-to-understand way. Glidden should be commended for taking on this heated topic and treating it with honesty, self-reflection and humour (‘So it looks like Purim really does have a lot in common with Halloween in the states… it’s just an excuse for girls to dress like sluts.’) The book will appeal to those who have felt a conflict between their liberal views and their connection to Israel.The blend of simple prose with sparse drawing style gives the serious themes additional impact; and though the memoir poses rather than answers questions about how liberal Jews can feel sympathy for Israel, it also captures the tastes and smells of Israel with great accuracy. I could taste the borekas as I read.

William Heinemann, 2010

The death of the historian and essayist Tony Judt in August 2010 attracted a great deal of media attention. Much of it was dedicated to his journalistic writings on Israel, including the first three paragraphs of the obituary in The Daily Telegraph, five paragraphs in the obituary in the New York Times and three paragraphs in Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s piece on Judt in The Guardian. Most extraordinary of all, the BBC News website dedicated almost its entire news story about his death to his views on Israel.

This is simply bizarre and distorts Judt’s achievements as one of the outstanding historians of his generation. It is true that Judt wrote a series of polemical articles about Israel, mostly for The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Nation and The New York Times and that these did receive widespread media coverage, especially in the States. However, most of these articles were written over just four years, between 2002-06, with a couple more op-ed pieces for The New York Times in the last year of his life. These coincided with a series of polemical (and equally fashionable) articles attacking Bush’s foreign policy, especially the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq. But this was only a tiny period of Judt’s career. It was hardly the main focus of his work even at the time, when he was completing his most famous book, Postwar (2005) and writing several important essays on social democracy and modern European memory. And without being particularly disrespectful to Judt, his writings on Israel were hardly very original or interesting, and pale beside the importance of the rest of his writings in recent years.That they caused such a stir reflects more on the strange state of the Anglo-American Left than it does on Judt’s career.

Now that the dust is settling, a few months after his death, it is possible to see his legacy more clearly. Several interesting essays, especially in The New York Review of Books, including an outstanding tribute by Yale historian Timothy Snyder, author of the recent Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, have redirected our attention to Judt’s work as a historian. Now we have a new book of essays, The Memory Chalet, which remind us of his range, his central passions, and his outstanding qualities as an essayist and intellectual.

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Rethinking God & tradition

By Arthur Green

Yale University Press, 2010

Everything is God:

The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism

By Jay Michaelson

Shambhala Publications, 2009

What does it mean to be radical? In the context of religion, the term can conjure up images of extremism, violence and fundamentalism (as in ‘Radical Islam’), often through strict adherence to orthodox norms. But to be radical is paradoxically both to depart and return—to depart from conventional or accepted forms, and to return to something essential, the ‘root’ of an ideology or philosophy.

What then would ‘Radical Judaism’ be? Perhaps the gun-toting hilltop nationalism of the Settlement movement? Or the ultra-Orthodoxies of Stamford Hill or Mea Sharim? Or could it be something altogether non-Orthodox, a return to a perceived essence prior to or beyond those outer forms and beliefs?

Two recent books that emphasise their radical credentials are Radical Judaism: Rethinking God & Tradition, by Arthur Green, and Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism, by Jay Michaelson—and they have far more in common than merely their titles. Michaelson, a scholar and activist who writes on spirituality, Judaism, sexuality and law, and Green, rector of the Rabbinical School at Hebrew College Boston and a major scholar of kabbalistic and Chassidic thought, both eschew conventional conceptions of a personal God who is outside of creation and intervenes in the world, in favour of a more mystical—yet immanent and accessible—Oneness.

These works of theology are certainly very far from Richard Dawkins The God Delusion, and much of what dominates public discourse on God. Green states at the very start of his introduction that he is not a ‘believer’ in the conventional Jewish or Western sense. He simply does not encounter God ‘as ‘He’ is usually described in the Western religious context, a Supreme Being or Creator who exists outside or beyond the universe, who created this world as an act of personal will, and who guides and protects it.’ Instead, when Green refers to ‘God,’ he means ‘the inner force of existence itself, that of which one might say: ‘Being is.’ He also refers to it as the ‘One’ ‘because it is the single unifying substratum of all that is.’

Similarly Michaelson’s central concept of ‘nonduality’(‘not-two’) is based on the idea that ‘despite appearances, all things, and all of us, are like ripples on a single pond, motes of a single sunbeam, the letters of a single word.’ The ‘true reality of our existence’ is ‘Ein Sof, infinite,’ and it is this infinite which Michaelson refers to when he uses the word ‘God.’ Like Green, he has let go of the old (and popular) image of ‘the benevolent Parent who cares.’ He encourages his readers to doubt everything, all concepts they might attach to divinity, and see what is left, which Michaelson chooses to name ‘God.’ Nonduality is ‘where monism [belief in the ‘One’] and atheism shake hands. Nothing is added or taken away from the universe as it appears.’

Both writers differ slightly from classic pantheists like Spinoza, who said that God is entirely equal to nature. They refer explicitly to ‘panentheism’—the view that all is in God. But both go on to collapse or at least blur the differences between pantheism and panentheism. According to Michaelson, nothing is added by the word ‘in’. If we can meaningfully refer to anything outside of everything, it too is something.

Though Green describes himself as a ‘mystical panentheist,’ he too is something of a ‘radical immanentist.’ He believes that God is ‘present throughout all of existence’ and ‘underlies and unifies all that is,’ that ‘this whole […] is mysteriously and infinitely greater than the sum of its parts,’ and that it ‘cannot be fully known or reduced to its constituent beings.’ But ‘transcendence’ here ‘does not refer to a God ‘out there’ or ‘over there’ somewhere beyond the universe’ since Green (much like Michaelson) does ‘not know the existence of such a ‘there.’ Rather transcendence means ‘that God—or Being—is so fully present in the here and now of each moment that we could not possibly grasp the depth of that presence. Transcendence thus dwells within immanence.’

If, then, they are ‘adding nothing’ and ‘taking nothing away’ from the universe as is, why should the authors refer to God at all? And how is this radical or significant, except as a semantic exercise? Are Michaelson and Green simply atheists, dressing up their denial of God in the language of religion?

Michaelson recognises his philosophy’s similarity to atheism. In both he knows ‘there are no puppet-masters pulling the strings of our own reality.’ But internalising and living from the understanding that nothing separate exists—not even the self—has drastic effects, and ‘the stage [or our reality] is now a cathedral.’ Referring to Being as ‘God’ is, for both Green and Michaelson,‘an act of naming.’ It is to choose to address the universe as‘You,’‘proclaiming my love and devotion to Being’ (Green) or marking the moment ‘when knowledge becomes love’ (Michaelson). It is also a concession to the human heart, a bridge between an overwhelmingly abstract Unity and the human need for relationship and apprehension. Michaelson, more compre- hensive in his theology here than Green, argues for the relative ‘truth’ of such personification. Gesturing towards mystical traditions both Jewish and otherwise (from the wildly shifting imagery the Zohar uses to portray the divine, to nondual Hinduism’s understanding that all is Brahman but can be worshipped in different guises), he suggests that the individual who has accepted that everything is God can recognise all worldly manifestations as ‘masks’ or, to use a phrase taken from the Sufi poet Hafiz,‘God in drag.’

Vitally, neither author stops at the stage of recognising Oneness.They are concerned with how to live in a world of diversity and variation. For Michaelson, this is the culmination of the mystical journey.The true nondualist first moves from the apparent diversity of the world into unitive consciousness, but this is only an ‘interme- diate phase.’ If everything is really one, that also includes experience of two.The third and final stage is to return to the world, transcending and including both the dual and the nondual, experiencing duality while maintaining the consciousness of unity.This is a particularly Jewish monism, this-worldly rather than world-denying.A central question for Green is how the individual responds to the divine call. What does God require of me, so to speak? This is what the Biblical God asks of the first human:‘Ayekah?’—‘Where are you?’ Am I stretching my mind to the fullest to know the One, stretching my heart to become more aware, and working for the good of ‘every creature and every life form,’ which is ‘a garbing of the divine presence’?

But it is here, in Green’s application of theology to the world and religious, that he has come under fire, seemingly too radical—here meaning ‘extreme,’ beyond the pale of accepted norms—for some Jewish commentators and rabbis. Radical Judaism is the culminating instalment in a trilogy of theological works that Green started with Seek My Face, Speak My Name and continued with EHYEH: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow. It reads very much as an attempt, driven by an awareness that ‘the day is short,’ to articulate as fully and systematically as possible his theology and what Judaism might look like as a result.This means using the traditional structure of ‘God, Torah and Israel,’ upon which three things the Mishnah claims the world stands, and reinterpreting their meaning. So Torah, in the absence of a separate commander, is not the literal word of God but, to quote Daniel Landes in the Jewish Review of Books, ‘a purely human response to ‘the wordless divine call.’ Thus Green’s interpretation of the Ten Commandments, a re-rendering for the radical Jewish seeker and teacher, is too free for Landes, Director and Rosh HaYeshivah of the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies in Jerusalem. Landes focuses on Green’s new understanding of the prohibition on adultery, the ‘replacement of a firm prohibition of adultery with nothing more than self-selected boundaries (‘make sure that all your giving is for the sake of those who seek to receive it’)’. Landes and another rabbinic reviewer, David Wolpe,whose review ‘Rethinking Judaism’ appeared in The Jewish Journal in March 2010, take just as much issue with Green’s definition of ‘Israel.’ Putting aside Green’s relationship with the modern state of Israel (he describes himself as a ‘religious Jew’ and a ‘secular Zionist’), Israel is expanded as a concept, potentially to include other ‘God-wrestlers’ and seekers, from other traditions, whom Green hopes will be among his readership.Again, for some this is beyond the pale. Shaul Magid, writing in Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, points out that the title ofWolpe’s review subtly brings into question whether Green’s Judaism is Judaism at all.

To be fair to Green, he considers a number of interpretations of what ‘Israel’ might mean, both symbolic and historical, imagining different groups and peoples claiming the name in different ways. But I agree that his book is weakest in the latter stages, in its attempts to depict a coherent system of Judaism based on his altogether more convincing theological foundations. Michaelson succeeds in his book because he feels no need to create a complete system or impose what he describes on his readership.The first half of his book also makes use of the classic Jewish triad ‘God, Torah and Israel,’ reinterpreting the latter two as much if not more than Green. Torah, in Michaelson’s book, is simply ‘Judaism and a nondual devotional path,’ and Israel is ‘Community, history and nondual messianism.’ But that is the point. It is simply in Michaelson’s book; he makes no claim that this is what these terms actually mean or even should mean. They are ways of thinking about such categories, while the focus remains on the nondual theories and practices. His style is more discursive and comprehensive than Green’s. He summarises a huge range of practices, texts, philosophies and ideas that support a nondual approach to Judaism, but he leaves the exact angle of that approach up to the individual reader. Michaelson’s nondual Judaism has room for any and all denominations,‘from Hasidism to Reform, from cultural/ nationalistic to spiritual/universal.’ He takes ‘nothing for granted’ and questions everything. He invites his readers to access the nondual experientially, devoting the second half of his book to practice (a sort of ‘spiritual cookbook’) in imitation of the schema of Rabbi Aharon of Staroselye, the leading disciple of the founder of Chabad Hasidism and ‘perhaps the most systematic expositor of nondual Judaim.’ In R. Aharon’s words, ‘Without feeling, the thought of unity is just imagination.’

And this brings us onto one answer to the question, ‘Why now?’ Why have these books been published at this particular point in Jewish and wider cultural history? Michaelson told me there is, in his opinion, a movement towards what he calls ‘I-spirituality’ (or should that be ‘iSpirituality’?), whereby the individual chooses and experiences for him or herself the optimum blend of practices to find God (or Unity or enlightenment, if you prefer). So more people are actually participating in the practices that lead to these insights.Although Green’s book is more conventionally theoretical than Michaelson’s, he too emphasises the importance of experience in his intro- duction.The divine is everywhere, but we can perceive it most in moments of peak experience, when all else falls away or perhaps appears in heightened form.

In a number of ways, there is nothing new about these works.The authors’ projects incorporate the tracing of theological roots, to both Jewish and non-Jewish precedents. Green successfully places today’s conventional conception of God in the context of a much longer history, including periods when nondual theologies in Chassidut and Kabbalah held a more dominant position among mainstream Jews. Michaelson’s book, too, is littered with references and quotations from mystics and practitioners, from Isaac Luria to Ram Dass.

Green and Michaelson each mention the ‘New Atheists,’ those recent writers such as (in the UK) Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins, who have stated the case against the existence of God, and there is no doubt this is something of a cultural context.To Michaelson the New Atheists simply set up a ‘straw man,’ a version of God he too would deny.The ideas in Everything is God and Radical Judaism are not exactly direct responses to the recent trend—both authors were penning articles and books saying something similar before the New Atheism arrived on the scene. But both have attempted to write convincing works of theology that might appeal to rationalists. It could be said the cultural and philosophical currents that have made Dawkins and his fellow atheists popular have also enabled the publication of books like these. Renewal rabbis such as Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Arthur Waskow have publicly advocated and promoted similar nondual theologies since the 1960s, but have been easier to dismiss as‘fringe’ ,wrapped up in the hippy movement. It is not yet entirely clear just how popular or significant Green and Michaelson’s contributions are but Green is certainly a figure of sufficient academic, philosophical and religious stature to have, at least, attracted mainstream attention, even if mainly in the form of critique.

Might we, then, be witnessing an evolution of theology, leaving behind overly-simplistic ‘old man in the sky’ stuff for these more mature integral conceptions of the divine? From time to time, writers such as Waskow and Schachter-Shalomi have claimed God itself is evolving— that the processes of biological, psychological and societal development are ‘God becoming aware of Godself.’ Such claims, echoing Hegel, Aurobindo and Ramana Maharshi, are unverifiable, and neither Michaelson nor Green go so far in their assertions. Green does see evolution as the primary scene of God’s manifestation, and Michaelson devotes a small section to consideration of ‘nondual messianism’ culminating in a more integral, all-embracing, virtually transparent conception of God.

Unfortunately, there is little evidence that more mainstream, conventional ideas of God are about to give way. The ‘Supreme Being or Creator who exists outside or beyond the universe, who created this world as an act of personal will, and who guides and protects it’ still dominates popular theology. In a recent Jewish Quarterly conversation with Michaelson, Rebecca Goldstein, author of 36 Arguments for the Existence of God, argued she must engage with that ‘straw man’ of the New Atheists, because so many millions around the world place Him (and this God is surely a ‘Him’) at the centre of their lives. But it is a vicious circle. Our continued engagement with such ideas at the expense of more mature and sophisticated theologies, such as those of Green and Michaelson, perpetuate ignorance—or at least delay our development. It remains to be seen whether these two books constitute a significant step forwards, whether mainstream cultural discourse can more fully embrace the God they describe. Now that would be radical.

by Edward Skidelsky

Princeton University Press

Sitting on the judging panel for this year’s Wingate Literary prize, I noticed several patterns emerging. One was the length of most of the entries; it seems that following the model of the 37 volume Babylonian Talmud, many Jewish authors cannot seem to express themselves in less than 600 pages. Another is their secular bias: while there is a proliferation of American Jewish books on Judaism as religion, UK Jewish writers are more likely to steer clear, preferring the safety of Jewishness as culture, warm families, and an ever decreasing Yiddish vocabulary.

The overwhelming trend however, is of an abundance of books dealing either with Israel or the Holocaust/Second World War era. The focus on these two areas is hardly surprising; they continue to be the foci of Jewish identity for a large numberof Jews. It is, however, disappointing that there is not more focus on other aspects of Jewishness. A Judaism that is rooted in the memory of the Shoah and a connection with Israel holds little promise for survival and renewal, at least for those of us in the diaspora. Is there no space for Jewish philosophy, religion and culture, for a Judaism of ideas rather than a Judaism of survival?

I was therefore drawn towards submissions that had a wider take on Jewishness, even if that take was tangential or concealed. This is certainly the case with Edward Skidelsky’s Ernst Cassirer; The Last Philosopher of Culture. The book hardly views itself as a ‘Jewish book’, rather it is an intellectual biography of a neglected modern philosopher, which explains his work through the lens of the intellectual currents surrounding it. That the subject is Jewish is a minor point, indeed Cassirer himself, coming from the German Jewish liberal assimilationist tradition, would hardly have flagged up his Jewishness as being particularly central. Nevertheless, Cassirer’s work is arguably closely linked to the concerns of many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals; the promotion of political Liberalism, a utopian belief in the power of culture, in particular literature, and an attempt to defend rationalism against its ‘mythic and ‘spiritual critics’. The role of Jews in propagating liberal, secular, and internationalist outlooks in 19th century societies has been well documented. Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century documents the evidence, and comments on the Jewish ‘search for a neutral society where neutral actors could share a neutral secular culture.’ The role of the enlightened Jewish intelligentsia was to create societies in which they could be full members; that meant playing down bloodlines and Christianity and playing up national literary canons, liberal media and organisations and the idea of a state that, as much as possible, belonged equally to all its citizens.

Skidelsky takes as his starting point the event for which Cassirer is most famous: his public debate with Heidegger in Davos in 1929. This event has come to symbolise the changing of eras; Cassirer representing the Weimar period and the idealist tradition, Heidegger the representative of the new philosophical irrationalism and the harbinger of the new Germany which, if not yet fascist, was certainly illiberal. Cassirer, then, is on the wrong side of history. An heir to the neo-Kantian ‘Marburg School’ of Hermann Cohen, he represents a school of thought that comes to a standstill at the end of the 1920s. While Heidegger was a leading inspiration for the modern continental philosophy of Sartre, Levinas and Derrida, the rationalist tradition of which Cassirer was part, became ever narrower and more technocratic, leaving no room for his expansive worldview of culture intertwined with the ethical and political.

Skidelsky gives us a glance of what his book might have been; he confesses that he had originally planned to argue that Cassirer was the last thinker to bridge the ‘Two Cultures’ that have become analytic and continental philosophy. Cassirer attempted to reconcile the quasi scientific logic of Wittgenstein with the ‘irrationalism, literary modernism and political of extremism’ of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, seeing that both systems had their own truths and believing that synthesis was both possible and necessary. Boldly, Skidelsky turns away from this move, and offers a critique of his subject; Cassirer’s ideas, he believes, are so of their time, so rooted in 19th-century Germanculture as to be virtually useless to us today. He describes Cassirer’s writing as ultimately not really philosophy as we know it today, being ‘inductive, not deductive in its method’, being so tied to its era that it is ultimately untranslatable.

This view gains weight as Skidelsky explains Cassirer’s key work, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Cassirer views language, science, art and myth not as radically different ways of seeing the world, but as symbols through which reality is experienced. Symbols allow us to transcend distinct phenomena and construct a wider picture.‘If animals are captive to their environment, reacting to it in purely instinctual fashion, man the “symbolic animal”, is able to grasp it as a world, as the object of aspirations, projects and theories. Symbolism thus opens the way “from animal reactions to human responses”’. Cassirer views this process in Hegelian terms, as a series of stages. The first symbolic stage is that of myth: ‘expressing and organising man’s most deeply rooted instincts, his hopes, his fears’. The next stage is religion, ordering and refining these myths, and giving them an ethical character. Finally, the process reaches its zenith, via linguistic development, in natural science, the ultimate form of conceptual organisation. Cassirer’s process, however, is not entirely teleological. He believes that each symbolic stage continues to exist, each symbolic expression retaining its autonomy. This is demonstrated through the metaphor of a tree ‘each branch of which nourishes new branches while continuing to exist in its own right’.

Skidelsky makes two arguments for why this is untenable, one philosophical and one historical. On the philosophical side, Cassirer wants to say that the many branches of the tree, the diversity of symbols, can be resolved into an underlying functional unity, thus avoiding each going its own separate ways. Given however, Cassirer’s insistence on the independence of each symbolic form, how can they be brought into a totality? Historically, Skidelsky suggests that Cassirer’s work relies on a fundamentally optimistic belief in the progressive tendency of history. Given that this approach took a battering following the First World War, how much more so in the aftermath of the Second. On this view, Cassirer in simply a product of his time, despite trying to engage with the new ways of philosophy, he is condemned to be viewed as a representative of a more innocent age.

Even if we accept Skidelsky’s verdict, and write off Cassirer’s philosophy, there is much in this overall thought that seems immensely appealing. On religion, he treads a line that successfully navigates the poles of rising fundamentalism and the ‘new atheism’. Following Hermann Cohen, he sees religion as a transformation of myth into reason and ethics, but allows room for the ritualistic, viewing it as ‘the intermixture of the spiritual with the material’. On culture, Cassirer’s view of a society’s value system sustained by its cultural life may be old fashioned but it will continue to be attractive wherever materialist instrumentalism and the rule of the market are the only guiding values. In terms of politics, following the collapse of Marxism, and the rise of the far right in much of Europe, the liberalism and democratic socialism of Cassirer and Cohen seem utterly necessary. Finally, ‘the two cultures’, of analytic and continental philosophy, lie as firmly apart as ever. Cassirer’s attempt to synthesise them may have been ultimately unsuccessful, but the notion of a discourse that drawsboth on literature and logic, myth and science, is still one that demands to be pursued.

Sadly the book failed to make the Wingate shortlist. Despite Skidelsky’s elegant prose and clarity in explaining complex ideas, the other judges felt that it wouldn’t reach ‘the wider reading public’, one of the key criteria for the prize. The book sits between the two poles of academia and popular non-fiction, trying to have a foothold in both, and despite its brilliance, may be limited in its readership as a result. This is an elegant metaphor for Cassirer, reaching out both ways: to the linguistic formalism of Bertrand Russell and the Vienna School, and to the mythic existentialism of Kierkegaard and Heidegger, and being spurned by both camps. Sitting between two worlds, trying to hold them together is an often impossible, but necessary endeavour. Jews, caught between the sacred and the secular, the stranger and the citizen, understand this all too well. Ernst Cassirer may have failed to do so, but through his attempt he leaves a range of powerful tools with which we can continue the struggle.

William Heinemann, March 2009, £20.00

On the evening of 6 May 1947 Alexander Rubowitz left his parents’ home in Jerusalem and never returned. Rubowitz was 16 at the time, and a member of LEHI (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), the smallest and most ardent underground organisation fighting against the British Mandate in Palestine. Commonly referred to by the British as ‘The Stern Gang’, LEHI specialised in acts of terrorism, usually in defiance of the Jewish Agency, which led the Zionist struggle for independence. It later transpired that Rubowitz had been abducted by British  officers, serving in the Special Air Service (SAS), which led the counter-terrorist offensive. One of them, Major Roy Farran, admitted that he killed Rubowitz in the course of his interrogation, by smashing a rock against his head. The body was never found.
Those were violent days in Palestine. Arabs, Jews and the British attacked each other with varying degrees of maliciousness, always supposedly for patriotic purposes. Hence the abduction and killing of Rubowitz are hardly worth more than a footnote in the history of those dramatic times. But both the young Zionist militant and his British assassin became mythological heroes, which gives their story special significance and lifts it above the chronology of routine violence.
All nations require both heroes to admire and villains to abhor, but it is not always easy to determine why some names acquire glory or infamy while others simply sink into oblivion.  This much is clear, however: historic symbols require constant maintenance by eagerly supportive constituencies. Both Rubowitz and Farran had such constituencies.
The Rubowitz family sympathized with militant Zionist nationalism, although they may not have been aware of their son’s involvement with LEHI. But when he failed to return home that evening, they immediately acted on the assumption that he was arrested and alerted the Hebrew press. Thus from the very first moment the affair was handled as part of the national struggle for Zionist independence. The family was backed by LEHI and eventually by most of the Jewish community in Palestine. The mystery surrounding the whereabouts of the body left the disappearance of Rubowitz an open case; in fact efforts to find his remains continue officially to the present day.
Roy Farran had been recognized as a war hero even before he was stationed in Palestine. At the age of twenty-six he was one of the most highly decorated officers in the British Army. He had been injured in Crete, taken prisoner by the Germans, escaped and returned to active service. In 1947 he joined the SAS and came to Palestine, to combat terrorism. After Farran confessed what he had done, his superiors stood by him and tried to cover up the murder. He was court-martialed and acquitted on a legal technicality. LEHI, seeking revenge, sent a bomb to his home, which exploded and killed his brother Rex. Farran settled in Canada where he was elected to the Alberta Legislature and served as Solicitor General. He died in 2006.
Under British rule in Palestine, starting in 1917, the Zionist movement was allowed to bring into the country hundreds of thousands of Jews, build dozens of new settlements including several towns, and lay the social, political, economic, military and most importantly the cultural foundations of the future State of Israel. Limitations imposed by the British Government on Jewish immigration to Palestine during the Second World War led to tensions between the Zionists and the British, particularly after the Holocaust. In days to come Israel’s independence would be depicted in textbooks and in popular history as the outcome of a heroic struggle against an evil oppressor. This thesis has been reevaluated in recent years, but Israelis still frequently argue among themselves about who forced the British out: the PALMACH, which was affiliated with the Jewish Agency, the IZL, which was the larger of two right-wing, oppositional organisations, or LEHI. For years the question was relevant in Israeli politics: prime ministers Menachem Begin, Izhak Shamir and Izhak Rabin had been members of IZL, LEHI and PALMACH respectively.
In the mid-1930s the Arab national movement in Palestine rose against the pro-Zionist British. Their revolt nearly paralysed the country for several months and required considerable efforts on part of the authorities to suppress. By 1939, British policy makers realised that Palestine could no longer be governed. There is reason to assume that had the war in Europe not broken out, Britain may have decided to leave Palestine ten years earlier than it eventually did, and in that case there would be a simple answer to the question who forced them out: the Arabs.
After the war nobody made the British leave Palestine, the days of empire were over. Not even India seemed worth holding on to anymore. The struggle for Israeli independence has endowed the young nation with an invaluable heroic myth, but was hardly significant in London’s decision making. The British would have left Palestine regardless of the Rubowitz affair, which is built up as a historic turning point in Major Farran’s Hat.
David Cesarani, Research Professor in History at Royal Holloway, University of London, and the author of several previous books, writes well. Gifted with a sense for human and political drama, his vivid account of the Rubowitz affair is fascinating. Farran emerges as a typical ‘son of empire’ as Cesarani calls him — haughty, endlessly committed to the values of colonialism, and totally incapable of realising that these values belong in the past. Cesarani repeatedly refers to him by his first name only, which seems to reflect some undue affection for the officer, the gentleman and the assassin that Farran was. Cesarani fully understands Farran’s colonial sentiments.
Similar to several heads of the British Army, such as Field Marshal Montgomery, Cesarani also seems to accept the view that having to give up Palestine came as a set back to Britain’s national interests. The abduction and murder of Rubowitz, he writes, created a scandal that ‘ate away’ at British prestige and authority, contributing to the demise of British rule in Palestine. In fact the decision to leave Palestine had been made in London prior to the Rubowitz affair and by the time it started there was not much British prestige left. While Montgomery and some of his colleagues continued to think in imperialist terms, most people in Great Britain realised that their county’s interests would henceforth no longer require the domination of foreign lands and peoples. In Palestine also Colonialism was over not as a result of Zionist terrorism, but as part of the decolonisation of the world.
Cesarani is outraged by Farran’s ‘blatant disregard for the law’. In hindsight the distinction between legal and illegal colonial domination seems dubious enough, but Cesarani also writes: ‘At a time when counterinsurgency warfare is once again at the forefront of military operations by the British Army and NATO, it is perhaps an opportune moment to revisit the events that took place on that balmy evening in Jerusalem sixty years ago as warning of everything that can go wrong when young warriors directed by desperate and unscrupulous politicians wage war on terror.’
Obviously ‘young warriors’ commit war crimes not merely on behalf of ‘unscrupulous politicians’; nevertheless, reminding members of the armed forces that it is their duty to disobey manifestly illegal orders is worth repeating always and everywhere, including in Israel.

Telegram Books, March 2009, £12.99

In a lecture at Harvard in 1967, Jorge Luis Borges mourned the passing of the epic, a form he loved for its fusion of music and narration and its heroic breadth. In contrast to the myopic and introverted modern novel, it offered a ‘pattern for all men’ — something that we in the contemporary world hungered for just as much as the ancients.
In A Designated Man, set on the fictitious island of Skender, Moris Farhi gives us a darker, starker version of the same struggle we saw in his last novel, Young Turk; again, a multi-ethnic society is in distress. Though graced with fertile soil and a long, distinguished history, Skender is in the grip of what is known locally as the Law. First introduced several centuries earlier, and justified by a rigid concept of honour, it gives its men no choice but to surrender their lives to blood feuds.
The Law has been so successful that it now allows clans that have had all their male feudists wiped out to appoint women in their stead. Any woman who agrees must erase all trace of her femininity thereafter. Any one who resists the Law’s fundamentalist logic can expect a harsh response from Toma, the Law’s chief enforcer, who is responsible for the training and indoctrination of young feudists and also acts as agents for the faceless Gospodins, the mainland clan that has been slowly and quietly buying up the island, in the hope that Skender might one day become a Mediterranean equivalent of Diego Garcia, thereby making them a fortune.
It is a dystopia with many resonances for anyone familiar with the history and politics of the post-Ottoman world. There are the little people, and there are the faceless others who play them like puppets, rob them of their histories and identities, and benefit from their pointless slaughter. But there are also the rebels, and this is their only legacy.
The story comes to us in a sequence of voices. With one exception (the loathsome Toma) they are immensely compelling, displaying an extraordinary emotional range, so much so that to read the book is to hear an epic sung. The first to speak is Kokona, the retired school teacher who has devoted her life to resisting the Law. We meet her returning by ferry from the mainland (itself in ruins following forty years of People’s Wars); with her is the dwarf whose colossal feats have protected her from the feudists, and whom she calls Dev (which is Turkish for ‘giant’). Having noticed that a battle-scarred stranger sitting close by has no food, he invites the man to share their meal. It soon emerges that the man they dub Xenos (Greek for stranger) was once Kokona’s pupil. After his father, a reluctant feudist, was gunned down by his foes, Kokona sent the boy to the mainland so that he could escape the same fate. Instead he was drawn into the People’s Wars. He has come home in search of peace.
He has not even reached the water mill that is his birthright when he has his first brush with death. All who hear of this encounter are mystified by it, for the feudist Bostan is known for his accuracy. Like his dog Castor, he trusts no one. But like Castor, he seems suddenly unable to go on the attack. The enchantment seems to be mutual, but for a time, neither man trusts it. Bostan remains a fervent feudist, while Xenos (or Osip Gora, as we come to know him) seizes every opportunity to challenge the Law. He does so most effectively when he uses its lesser known articles to argue for its abolition.
But swirling underneath his fine words are the suppressed longings that will determine his fate. The voices telling the story make no secret of them. There is no need: all but one are ghosts. They speak to warn us against the Tomas and Gospodins of this world. Like Mario Vargas Llosa in The Feast of the Goat, they see the greatest danger not in the leaders themselves but in those who have swallowed their ideology whole.
But despite all the penalties, most islanders are unable to live as purely as their masters command. This is evident in their ever changing responses to Skender’s mixed approach to gender. In allowing for women to become designated men, they detach the islanders, both male and female, from their assigned biological selves. As some women go in mad pursuit of honour and glory, some men find themselves questioning that code as they move, almost without design, into lives of nurturing. But it is not an easy passage. Their hearts are in conflict with the social code that still, to some degree, defines them.
The heroes and heroines in this tale do not always make the right choices, and neither do they live happily ever after. What matters is that they refuse to bend to the language of hatred. The same holds true for the tellers of the tale. They draw us in through the music of their voices. They take us to the heart of each character and each scene, so that we, too, feel the danger and the pull of illicit desires. When they fall in love, so do we. Though they portray the island’s self-made gods as almost invincible, and rebellion as an almost always doomed exercise, their song becomes all the more beautiful in the face of tragedy.
Moris Farhi is a sophisticated writer, in conversation not just with the modern novel but also the twists and turns of Borgesian postmodernism. Rather than deconstruct the epic, he has invested it with new ideas and brought it back to life. He should be congratulated for his daring and commended for his great and heroic heart.

Portobello Books, June 2009, £10.99

Anyone who expects a short story to be an impressionistic wash, a glimpsed moment that requires less than full concentration, should know that the eight stories in Sana Krasikov’s debut collection permit the reader no such idleness. On the contrary, One More Year demands commitment. Its narratives are intricately woven, populated by idiosyncratic characters, of whom many — the boyfriend’s mother, for instance, who lectures on the psychology of endurance after surviving a plane crash — are merely mentioned in passing. Each tale is alive with the minutiae of a fully-realised world and in each the author has amassed enough material to create at least one novel.
Like most of her characters, Krasikov is an émigré from Eastern Europe. Born in the Ukraine, she grew up in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and moved to the United States when she was eight years old. In this acclaimed collection, for which she was awarded the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, she describes the immigrant experience from eight different angles, in unsentimental prose laced with bruised compassion. Her characters, whether striving to assimilate in the States or reacclimatise themselves to Russia, are adrift in equally inhospitable lands: ‘an entire world transposed, like an ink blot on a folded map, from one continent to another.’
Many of Krasikov’s protaganists are lone women, forced to sacrifice the possibility of love for the pursuit of security. Ilona in ‘The Companion’ allows an elderly man to nurse fantasies about their relationship as long as he provides her with accommodation, while in ‘Better Half’, waitress Anya weds the laddish Ryan in the hope of acquiring a green card. When Ryan becomes violent she takes out a restraining order against him, but loneliness reunites them and they begin an affair which threatens her new visa application. Despite her pragmatism and his immaturity, Anya knows that if she is to leave him for good, ‘she’d have to overcome the urge to look for him…like some gaunt animal migrating uphill before a flash flood without quite knowing why’.
It is not only romantic love that requires sacrifice. In ‘Maia in Yonkers’, the story from which the book draws its title, Maia cares for an elderly lady in New York in order to support her teenage son back in Georgia. When he visits, her son is both consumed by greed and incensed by America’s conspicuous wealth. ‘Why are you showing me all of this? I can’t stay here anyway!’ Gogi protests, accusing her: ‘Every year you say its one more year….!’ Meanwhile Mrs Trapolli, the old lady for whom Maia works, over tips cabbies and waiters so that her aquisitive daughter has nothing to inherit. When Mrs Trapolli’s generosity collides with Gogi’s avarice, she only adds to the layers of resentment, gratitude and guilt between mother and son.
Although the stories share a pervasive bleakness, Krasikov’s understated humour runs throughout the book. In ‘The Alternate’, middle-aged Victor invites the daughter of his long-dead lover to dinner, hoping to seduce her but ultimately finding that ‘what he wanted now, most of all, was for her to like him’.When they speak on the phone he worries that his echoing of her Americanised ‘Terrific’ sounds like an over-eager ‘Chrifeeg!’ Over dinner, Alina confides that she argued with her boyfriend because he asked her to hide his laptop before leaving his flat unlocked. ‘So I put it in the oven,’ she explains, ‘And then I left. When he got home he set the oven on preheat because, who knows, he wanted to bake himself a potato.’ These stories might be short on hope but they are constantly uplifted by moments of wry humanity.
Only in Asal, the tale of Gulia, whose husband Rashid divides his time between her and his other, Islamic wife, does Krasikov’s writing seem overwrought. Here, the characters’ elaborate histories come at the expense of clarity. Gulia herself has been previously married and, in the course of the story, leaves Rashid, finds work as a childminder in New York, marries a third man in order to stay there and toys with a relationship with a fourth, still trying to quash her enduring love for her husband. Asal is unpredictable, intriuging and finally shockingly sad. But it took, for this reader certainly, more than one reading to untangle the plot.
That apart, One More Year is an accomplished collection from an original new voice; subtle, uncompromising and wise. Having enjoyed Krasikov’s densely packed stories, I look forward to her forthcoming first novel. Freed from the confines of the shortened form to develop the cast of fascinating characters at her disposal, I have no doubt that she will find a rich seam of inspiration and relish the extra pages in which to share it.

Auckland University Press, October 2009, £34.50

‘A very good portrait is a paradox,’ says Leonard Bell, professor of Art History at Auckland University. He considers how revelation and mystery co-exist in the work of Marti Friedlander, and her motivation for each of the 185 photographs included in this handsome book, many now being published for the first time.
The daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, Marti was born in 1928 in London’s East End. Aged three, Marti and her sister Anne were put into an orphanage in Bethnal Green run by the London County Council. In 1933 she moved to the Jewish Orphanage in Norwood. You need to know this about Marti’s early life because it informs so much of her photography. Deeply steeped in Jewish sensibilities, yet always an outsider.
Leonard Bell considers how Marti’s Jewishness accustomed her to be ‘at once in the thick of it and watching from the margins,’ and how her well-honed powers of observation, analysis and interpretation have equipped Marti to become one of New Zealand’s most celebrated photographers. But the acclaim and accolades don’t make her mainstream. She’s too original for that. Marti sees the world with an open heart. You see that in the images. Curious, empathetic, non-judgmental, a restless dynamo searching for what makes everyone special and unique.
Marti had been a friend of my parents since they were all teenagers. But I only got to know her properly on a visit to New Zealand in 2006, when she welcomed my boyfriend and me after our long flight and, with a light touch, remote-controlled our month-long trip around North and South Islands. The photographs she took of us when we returned to Auckland on New Year’s Eve have become cherished mementos. I’m wearing a big, bold necklace that Marti had given me because it was my birthday, and a tee shirt on which is printed a cartoon couple and the caption ‘Real Love’. As Bell explains, couples are of particular intrigue to Marti, what draws them together and sustains their bonds.
In 1957, having studied photography and worked as an assistant for two leading London photographers, Marti married Gerrard Friedlander, a dentist from New Zealand. For their honeymoon, they travelled through Europe on a Lambretta and spent a couple of months in Israel before making their home in Henderson, a suburb of Auckland.
‘I fell off the edge of the world when I came to New Zealand,’ says Marti. ‘Being in a society that was so authoritarian was like going back to an institution…This outpost of England was thoroughly unfamiliar to me. I never attempted to make pavlova, but I did preserve fruits and veges, bake bread, climb mountains, wade through rivers, get lost in the bush, and generally embrace a pioneering spirit of sorts.’ She worked at first as a nurse for Gerrard, but once she returned to photography, Marti started to make a name for herself.
Bell charts Marti’s gradual but never total immersion into New Zealand society through her portraits of artists and writers, miners and farmers, politicians and street protesters, children and wine makers, documenting urban, suburban and country life. Behind it all, the fabulous backdrop of New Zealand’s mystic land and untamed beaches. And photographs from her periodic escapes to Europe, Israel, Asia, South America and the South Pacific.
For a while Marti and Gerrard considered making Israel their home. Bell writes: ‘The Israel in which the Friedlanders almost settled in 1963 was still in the process of becoming a nation… The chaotic variety of the country emerges from her photographs.’ In Marti’s photographs from Israel, occident and orient collide. Two hassids choose palm leaves for a lulav, squinting in concentration as they examine the tips, while a non-religious man in the bottom of the frame looks away, uninterested. In another, a fashionable woman in dark glasses and bouffant hair sits outside a Dizengoff café and turns to stare at the camera, unaware perhaps that she has caught the eye of one of the men behind her.
In 1968 Marti visited Parihaka, a Maori community that, without violence, had resisted confiscation of its land and which, in 1881, the Government had viciously suppressed. There, Marti met Rauwha Tamaiparea. ‘I was so touched by this woman…she reminded me in a way of the Jewish matriarchs of my youth, people who were in their eighties and nineties, knew who they were, and had no difficulty with their identity.’ This encounter triggered Marti ‘s interest in moko – Maori facial tattoos – and two years later she travelled around isolated parts of New Zealand’s North Island with writer and historian, Michael King, taking hundreds of photographs of kuia, or female elders.
Bell has selected a number of portraits from the book that resulted, Moko: Maori Tattooing the 20th Century (Wellington: Alister Taylor, 1972; Auckland: David Bateman, 1992, 1999 & 2008). Marti’s images of the kuia are, to my mind, her most radical. They convey an understanding between women that bridges differences in background and experience, while moko, for the Maori, represents a cultural indomitability, a silent protest against the political and economic supremacy of the Pakeha, or Europeans.
Kirikino Kohitu sits on a bed clasping her knees and smokes a pipe. Her face is worn and fingers gnarled, a moko etched on her chin. The weave of the rug clashes with the print on her skirt, and the floral bedclothes seem incongruous next to walls plastered with the pages of a magazine. Though dignified and resilient, the portrait speaks of social marginalization. Leonard Bell sees in these portraits a commonality between Jews and Maori, a ‘centrality of historical memory and lineage, and the crucial importance of community and traditional ritual in maintaining ethnic and individual distinctiveness in societies hostile or indifferent to them.’
Marti’s next book, Larks in a Paradise: New Zealand Portraits (Auckland & London: Collins, 1974) with text by James McNeish, stems from her travels around New Zealand. They lay bare the wrinkles of a country in transformation: a caravan site in Arrowtown with the mighty mountains of South Island rising behind, suburban developments under construction, bare-foot artists and gents in bowler hats, elderly couples in front of clapboard houses and demonstrations against New Zealand’s involvement in the Vietnam War.
Marti’s spiritedness reaches its peak in her photographs of political activists. ‘Put an end to backstreet abortion’ shouts the placard in one image. There are anti-nuclear demonstrations, marches against the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union’s persecution of Jewish refuseniks, and protests against the Springbok rugby tour of New Zealand in 1981.
For the final chapter Bell has chosen some of Marti’s self-portraits. These, he writes, ‘may conceal rather than reveal and when made for publication or exhibition effectively manufacture a persona for public consumption.’ Marti admits: ‘I’m afraid of many things, revealing the sadness that exists in me, the loneliness, preferring to present to the world a competent mistress of life.’
Chosen for the cover is a self-portrait taken in 1964. Marti sits in front of two of her child portraits. One is of her niece Nina, cautious and unsmiling, watching us watching her. The other is of an Israeli girl, Michal, grinning as irrepressibly as the unruly curl of hair that springs from her head. Marti wears a turtleneck. She too has a renegade curl that stands up like a comma between the two portraits. Marti tilts her head and raises an eyebrow.  She seems to embody the mood of both girls, and then you realize how strongly Marti’s presence resonates in all her photographs, even when she isn’t there.
‘I took photographs out of a sense of wonder,’ says Marti. ‘Like a child seeing something for the first time.’

Naomi Gryn is a writer and documentary filmmaker. Further details are at www.naomigryn.com. Her radio documentary, The Jews of India, will be broadcast on BBC World Service on 16 January 2010.

Often, I am swamped by incredible pleasure
by the wild connection a thing makes between
my thumb and finger, as though desperately alive
in some galvanic dance.
(A Dialogue of Some Importance)

The image has the function of ‘primitive’ importance, of man grasping at the very marrow of life in the wild leap that the creation of tools or craft specialisation meant in the history of humankind. It is this kind of hope and faith in a better future in life or in death that Heller leaves us with. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, human progress is still alive.

Hovering at Low Altitude, a translation of the collected poetry of Dahlia Ravikovitch brings us a full account of one of the most truly inspired Israeli poets of the last century. Poems like Clockwork Doll should be read akin to the poetry of the confessional poets, such as Sylvia Plath:

I was a clockwork doll, but then
That night I turned round and round
And fell on my face, cracked on the ground
And they tried to piece me together again.

Like Plath, Ravikovitch started her career precociously young writing in form and gradually moving into free verse and anything heretical, similar to Plath’s ouija boards. But Ravikovitch’s ‘gods’ are those of Biblical Hebrew legend. When she is at her best she is not using Hebrew legend but working from it. The seduction for us as readers is complete in the magical wisdom she affords:

Magic Spells

Today I’m a hill.
Tomorrow a sea.
Wandering all day
Like Miriam’s well,
A bubble astray
In a crannied wall

At night in my bed
I dreamt horses red,
Purple and green,

In the morning I heard
A babble of water,
The parrots’ yatter.

Today I’m a snail,
Tomorrow a tree
Tall as a palm.

A nook yesterday,
A seashell today.
Tomorrow I’m tomorrow.

Ravikovitch is perhaps best known and loved in her own country as a political advocate. She has said that rather than fuel the Messianic agency of military campaigns, her poetry has forced a leading Israeli general —Yehoshafat Harkabi — to learn from Lear that to conquer another people could prove suicidal for the conqueror. For me, her most moving statement on political conflict is The End of the War:

He came at midnight, both legs lopped off,
Though his old wounds had long since healed.
He came through the third-story window—
I was struck with wonder at how he got in.
We’d lived through an age of calamity;
Many had lost their closest kin.
In streets sown with shredded papers
The orphan survivors were skipping about.

I was frozen as crystal when he came.
He thawed me like pliant wax,
Altered me even as the pall of night
Turns into the feather of dawn.
His bold spirit translucent as mist
That streams from the morning clouds.

The jewel of this compendium of translation of Ravikovitch’s poems is the malleability of utterance Bloch and Kronfeld command, together with their fidelity to certain Biblical effects, notably the device leitmotiv. Bloch and Kronfeld manage to handle the conjunction and vicissitude of emotion that is the staple of spoken Hebrew — where it resides most readily,  always functioning at extremes.
The Messianic mission is one that Ravikovitch interprets uniquely, as one best considered as it relates to the real individuals involved, to be registered through metaphor by reference to the body, as in The Hurling:

Jerusalem the City of David was hurled away
Like a finger lopped from the body.

Ravikovitch lends herself to readers, much like Plath did, the vision of a martyred creator a deeply personal narrator, uniquely invested in each conflict.

The first thought crossing one’s mind after putting down The Novel of Nonel and Vovel (following an exhilarated sigh of disappointment that the roller coaster ride is over) is indeed a morosely existential one: who is going to read this book? Who is going to be inspired by it for action that makes a difference in solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
The above quote appears in the ‘art & politics’ chapter of this inter-disciplinary multi-tasking, workaholic, split-personality-disorder-diagnosed Middle-East-conflict-in-space graphic novel in which every chapter is illustrated by a different artist, bracketed by questionnaires, essays, photographs, games and even a crossword puzzle. The climactic chapter is the only one written by someone other than the two artists behind this project, Oreet Ashery and Larissa Sansour. But when their superhero alter-egos Nonel and Vovel are getting ready to save the day and solve the conflict that transcends our planet’s borders (no spoilers!) the storyline is interrupted by a conversation between Ashery and Sansour in cameo appearance, illustrated into the sci-fi sequence sitting on a bench in London’s South Bank, discussing the problem of handing over the most dramatic chapter to a guest writer (Soren Lind).  
Ashery and Sansour felt that the ‘notion of a fictional graphic novel alone’ is not enough, and wanted the ‘process behind the book to be transparent and grounded in our daily reality’. Therefore, the graphic chapters unfolding the storyline are interspersed with photographs of the two in relevant locations in Israel/Palestine and London — from the separation wall to a Sunday roast meal and Doris Salcedo’s Shibboleth piece in Tate Modern, better known as ‘the crack’ — probably the most engaging and communicative piece of contemporary art in recent memory. Posing as two rather experimental performance artists (Ashery last seen dressed up as controversial 17th century  messianic figure Shabbtai Zevi; Sansour notorious for her Sombrero-donning, gun-slinging character Bethlehem Bandolero) next to a piece of art popular enough to become a tourist attraction speaks volumes of the main question posed herein: can art change the world? Old question – fortunately, this book articulates it in novel (or should it say Nonel? Or Vovel?) ways.
There is a reason why it will only be revealed at this point that Ashery is Jewish Israeli and Sansour Palestinian. There is a reason it will only now be mentioned that the central concrete nemesis (notwithstanding a handful of sci-fi ones) they confront as superheroes is the separation wall in Israel, which they intend to break down. There is a reason why this review will refrain from making an analogy between Ashery and Sansour asking themselves whether their artistic practice places them in a ghetto separating them from the ability to influence reality, and indeed the wall, stranding the Palestinians in a tragically non-metaphorical ghetto. And the reason for that is that the emotions, prejudices, fears, mistrust and pre-conceptions we have in regards to the conflict on either side of the wall and of the left/right political fence constitute the more elusive and therefore more difficult wall to demolish.
Simply by revealing that this book is made by a couple of lefty arty-farty bleeding hearts, one risks erecting a wall between the crucial insights offered in their book and considerable potential readership. How sad it is that being divided to camps doesn’t mean dialogue, even polemic – but a secret, crawling civil war. How sad it is that global political discourse is light years away from the level offered by this book. How tragically deep the chasm between what politicians and artists see, how uncompromising the latter’s honesty, self-doubt, investigative drive and clarity.  How seemingly easy it is for an Israeli and a Palestinian to find common ground anywhere besides their shared homeland.
Ashery and Sansour are lefty arty-farty types perhaps, but they are certainly not naïve and wide-eyed about it. On the contrary, they are only too aware of the traps and pitfalls they face, and go through acrobatic twists, leaving no stone unturned in their determination to understand their position as politically-engaged artists, and the relevance of said position for the rest of us unsuspecting fundamentalists. The quoted bitter assertion opening this review reveals their familiarity with the ways the world always finds ways to erect a dialogue-blocking wall around them: in 2000 their agenda is too ahead of its time to be noticed, and in 2009 they’re allegedly jumping some ridiculed bandwagon. To paraphrase Reem Fadda’s (rather opaque) text in the essay section closing the book, Ashery and Sansour seek a present where their voice is heard.
Therefore, the main conflict tackled by the book is not the Israeli-Palestinian one, but that besieging the artist torn between self-fulfilment and political commitment. The novel begins as our two artists are infected by a mysterious virus that is revealed to imbue them with ‘context-responsive’ superpowers, alas it comes on account of losing their creativity. Ashery and Sansour look political art in the eye as a praxis that often betrays selfish privilege camouflaged in good intentions. Ashery and Sansour ask one another the cruellest question: are we forced to choose between a life in pursuit of artistic goals and a life of committed activism? Are the two mutually exclusive? And, facing the severity of a century-long conflict, is the solution in the hands of heroes, freedom-fighters and messiahs? Are artists — and ordinary people for that matter — out of their depth in this equation? Is the position of the artist as a passive anarcho-pacifist — always averse to violence and to the notion of wielding any level of power — the privilege of those who are living a safe, sheltered life where strife and oppression are confined to the TV screen?
Ashery and Sansour’s quest for an answer constantly breaks the book’s ‘fourth wall’: their aversion to political power is exchanged with treating their practice as control freaks; they express reluctance to go with the flow of the genre and become ‘real’ heroes who at least make a difference in this imaginary realm. This compulsion to disturb narrative as such, shatter illusion whatever form it takes, refuse to serve as propagandists to their own agenda — as if illusion, myths, and propaganda are by definition enemies one must slay to unravel a precious, forgotten, common sense clarity — condemn them, and to a considerable extent every political activist, to remain perpetual underdogs — noble losers. Ashery and Sansour confess to being trapped; yet sharing this existential cul-de-sac with us stems out of a sense of responsibility and the urgency of a desire to break free.
The biggest underlying fear keeping every concerned citizen awake at night is, to quote John Lydon, that ‘better days will never be’: the impossibility to even imagine a world based on justice and peace. This fear underpins the superior text in the book’s essay section, curator Nat Muller’s allegorical sci-fi ‘Proposal for the Venice Biennnale Intergalactic Pavilion’. Muller is masterful — and hilarious — in imagining futuristic conflicts and trends leading up to ‘galactic liberation’, a utopian ground zero after which it becomes much harder to visualise the ways of the world and the role of its artists.  Muller suddenly needs strife to trigger interest and tension. Under the ‘foreseeable obstacles’ section of her surreal proposal she details ‘unstable meteorological conditions across the Mediterranean’ threatening the realisation of Nonel and Vovel’s project. The next section ushers back what we’d think we managed to get rid of by the year 2212 — security, needed as precaution against a cult of revisionist settlers who falsely maintain that Palestine was never liberated.
If the only function we can imagine for future peacetime art is a bizarre repetitive re-enactment of a by-then unneeded heroism; If the only possible excitement, the only projected life-force is nostalgia for the extinct need to resist, aren’t we admitting our secret collaboration with the present’s state of strife to which we seem to be addicted? Nonel and Vovel make the bold step of asking this question. Possible answers contradict the aforementioned essayist Fadda’s ‘liberation through entering history’ position — three hints will be provided. First is Lydon’s above quote. Second is Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence (resonating with pre-historical ‘dreamtime’ and negating monotheism’s linear history). Final is something the recently departed thinker, essayist, columnist and artist Amos Kenan said in relation to Zionism, quoted in the biography written by his partner Nurith Gertz, ‘Unrepentant’. I paraphrase: ‘if the dream comes true and it’s not what we thought we wanted, it means there must have been something inherently faulty with the dream to begin with. We must therefore examine what is wrong with our dream’.

Heinemann, 2008, £20

In the early 1990s Tony Judt was in his mid-40s, a fairly obscure British historian, specialising in modern French history. Three things happened to make him one of the best-known historians of his generation. First, in 1995, he became Director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, just at the time when historians in New York were redefining  the way we think about modern Europe. Then, in 2005 he published Postwar, the masterpiece of the new European history, a monumental 900-page, acclaimed account of Europe since 1945. Finally, at around the same time as Postwar, he wrote a number of controversial articles attacking Israel and Bush’s war on terror. He had become one of the best-known public intellectuals in America.

Reappraisals is his first book since Postwar. It is a collection of essays published between 1994 and 2006. These two dozen essays mostly appeared in the New York Review of Books and the New Republic. This is Judt as essayist and public intellectual, writing about writers, thinkers and politics from the Cold War to the Bush Years. He is opinionated and fluent, a sort of east coast David Starkey, with more than a touch of nastiness. He rages against Israel, dismisses French Marxists like Louis Althusser, and eviscerates a recent biography of Arthur Koestler. But he has his heroes, too. Koestler and Primo Levi, Edward Said and Albert Camus, ‘the best man in France’. His heroes are Jews and exiles, mostly men (and the occasional woman) in the dark times between the Russian Revolution and the height of the Cold War.

There are interesting continuities between these essays, mostly written while he was working on Postwar, and his acclaimed history of post-1945 Europe itself. In both there is a dark vision. He has no illusions about Europe (or America). There is no happy story of progress and he reserves some of his sharpest polemics for the post-1989 optimism and faith in free-market democracy that followed the fall of the Wall. Much of the history in these essays is brutal. He writes of the violence of Prussian troops in 1815 and what Romanian soldiers did to Jews in World War Two. He admires Hannah Arendt for the way she grasped the central importance of terror in totalitarian regimes and approvingly quotes the Polish thinker, Leszek Kolakowski: ‘The Devil is part of our experience… Evil, I contend, is not contingent … but a stubborn and unredeemable fact.’

The rise and fall of Communism was, according to Judt, one of the defining features of the twentieth century, especially the mid-twentiethth century. He keeps coming back to the great anti-Communist tradition, both critics of Communism and ex-Communists like Koestler and Camus. ‘They are,’ he writes, ‘the twentieth century’s Republic of Letters.’ Some of his fiercest scorn is for Marxists who never saw the light — the French Communist, Louis Althusser, and the historian, EJ Hobsbawm. His review of Hobsbawm’s memoirs is one of the best essays in the book. How could Hobsbawm stay loyal to Communism, after all that had happened? ‘Seventy years of “real existing Socialism” contributed nothing to the sum of human welfare. Nothing.’ And yet Hobsbawm remained a Communist. He was undoubtedly one of the great historians of his time, and yet, ‘he has somehow slept through the terror and shame of the age.’

A third theme in these essays, also familiar to readers of Postwar, is memory or rather, mis-memory.  Perhaps the most impressive essay in the book is a magnificent review-essay on the colossal seven-volume Les lieux de memoire, about French memory and history. Judt has a keen sense of the feeling of loss at the heart of this project. Despite its apparent solidity — 5,600 pages — Les lieux de memoire is an attempt to preserve a living sense of peasant and rural France at the very moment it was disappearing. At that time the French Left and the Catholic Church, indeed France itself, as a great power, were all in decline. ‘France,’ writes Judt, ‘was thus modernizing, downsizing, and splitting apart all at once.’ France in 1960 would have been recognizable to Flaubert or Hugo. ‘The France of 1980 did not even much resemble the country just ten years earlier.’ This Herculean attempt to capture the essence of France and its past was problematic from the start, writes Judt. The problem was that the French had lost a sense of a shared past: ‘there no longer is a received version.’ Since 1918, the story becomes more confused, less glorious, more troubling. The Third Republic was easy to commemorate — all those streets named after Victor Hugo and Louis Pasteur. But the shame of Vichy? The dirty wars of Algeria and Indo-China? The decline of rural France? This is not unique to France. In the essays on Blair and ‘Heritage’ Britain and ‘The World We Have Lost’ we see that our relationship to the past is becoming more, not less, complicated. Even the recent past seems already remote. ‘The twentieth-century is hardly behind us, but already its quarrels and its dogmas, its ideals and its fears are slipping into the obscurity of mis-memory.’ ‘We wear,’ he writes, ‘the last century rather lightly.’

What can this mean? Surely the twentieth-century is still close to us? But Judt digs down to larger social changes which are cutting us off from the central experiences of the twentieth -century. As he writes about Koestler and Camus, he realises how remote these debates about Communism are to a generation born after 1989. War, or civil war, touched every European life in the first half of the twentieth- century. Now it is something which happens somewhere else.

Reappraisals is shot through with an overwhelming sense of loss: from the speed of social change that has eroded our sense of a shared world to the decline of the two great intellectual faiths of modern Europe, Catholicism and Communism On the disappearance of central and east European Jewry he quotes Manès Sperber, born in Galicia: “I am one of the last, one of the walking coffins of an exterminated world.”’

The nearer Judt comes to the present, the emptier and more desolate the scene. All the ideals are in the past. Communism; the belief in a free world, shared by Camus and Kolakowski; the idealism of the first generations of Zionists. All gone. . America has become shallow, unequal and strident. The hopes of post-1989 free market capitalism have become empty illusions. Blair’s Britain is ‘often squalid,’ the railways and hospitals don’t work, poverty is rampant.

And then there is Israel. There are only three essays on Israel, but they loom large. The first is a handsome tribute to his late friend, Edward Said, the second, a reassessment of the Six-Day War (his last piece for The New Republic) and the third, an all-out attack on Israel today, ‘The Country That Wouldn’t Grow Up.’

Taken together, these essays are the most provocative and controversial part of the book. A number of key points run through them. First, ‘Israel’s international standing has precipitately collapsed’, and, conversely, the Palestinians have replaced Israel as the object of international sympathy. Israel, writes Judt, is internationally isolated, a pariah, dependent only on American support. Secondly, the ideals of the European founding fathers have given way to a new militarism, nationalism and religious irrationalism. Finally, Israel needs a dramatic change of strategy, ‘a truly statesmanlike shift in its policies…’ These would include; dismantling the major settlements, ‘opening unconditional negotiations with Palestinians, calling Hamas’s bluff by offering its leaders something serious [sic] in return for the recognition of Israel and a cease-fire…’

At this point, Judt’s prose loses its analytic rigour and precision, becoming vague. Negotiations with ‘Palestinians’. Who exactly? Edward Said or Hamas (mentioned just once in the whole book)? Offering ‘its leaders’ (who?) ‘something serious’ (what?). Judt is quick to condemn, but he has nothing constructive to offer. His lack of empathy — Israel today is only the aggressor — leads to a jarring  one-sidedness quite distinct from his masterful, nuanced balancing of complexity in other chapters of history.When he writes about Israel Judt the historian and intellectual essayist descends into polemic and brawl. His tone becomes angry, hectoring and imprecise, as it does in his later attack on intellectuals — Bush’s ‘useful idiots’ — who supported the invasion of Iraq.

Raised in the East End, all his grandparents were Yiddish-speaking Jews from eastern Europe. His parents, he told The Guardian, ‘were leftwing, even Marxist, but strongly against Communism.’ As a teenager he was passionately pro-Israel — ‘I was a gung-ho, utterly committed, leftwing Zionist.’ Now, sixty, he has two modes for dealing with the loss of the two faiths that once drove him. One is a kind of mourning for a lost world, the other is a form of contemptuous rage Neither have much to do with the great historian who wrote Postwar and has helped us, through a lifetime’s work, with great sublety and care, understand the complexities, silences and darkness of our recent history.

Penguin, 2009, £16.99

Talmud is essentially an activity, not a book; you engage in it, rather than read it as you would a piece of literature.

Thus Normon Solomon introduces the challenge of how to reduce this epic work, how to capture the intricacies and richness of the Babylonian Talmud that shaped rabbinic Judaism and remains today a core element into a one-volume anthology. The Talmud consists of law and lore, literature and theology, humour and intellectual debate. It contains discussions of historical figures, commerce, Temple offerings, torts, holiday observances, family relationships, agriculture and capital punishments, to name but a fraction of the subjects covered within its 63 volumes. The task of selecting representative sections which reflect the diversity of the entire work is mammoth.

Some have attempted this feat before using different presentation methodologies. They have chosen their favourite sugyot (sections), their personal ‘top ten’ list of passages they think capture the essence of the Talmud. Others have shared passages outlining the various styles of writing or methods of reasoning that the Talmud utilises. Normon Solomon, however, has chosen to follow the classic outline of the Babylonian Talmud, maintaining the identity and integrity of the original volumes by selecting a passage from each to present in this anthology. In this sense, the anthology follows a very traditional pathway — parallelling the daf yomi model where Jews study a page a day of Talmud from the beginning to the end — so too does this anthology lead its readers through an abbreviated version of the Talmud, briefly touching on each masechet before moving to the next.

In other ways this anthology diverges significantly from tradition. The introduction expresses an appreciation of scholarly methodologies for studying Talmud, providing historical context, social and cultural history, literary analysis and even some references to textual criticism. In addition, the appendices contain numerous reference tools for those beginning their exploration of  Talmud, including maps, illustrations, timelines and an extensive bibliography and index.

The selections themselves are uneven in terms of both length and accessibility to the novice. This is perhaps unavoidable within the framework that Solomon has chosen, as most modern readers will find that the selections from tractates about Shabbat or marriage will be more relevant and engaging than those chapters regarding purity of Temple objects or tithes to the priests. Solomon has seemingly tried to offset this ‘relevance imbalance’ by allowing for longer selections from tractates that might resonate more with the modern reader.

The use of different fonts, spacings, upper and lowercase letters, and bold typeface makes the intricacies of talmudic discourse more accessible to the beginner. In addition, Solomon provides a useful introduction to each tractate, summarising the contents and contextualising the particular passage. All of these elements — the introductions, the appendices, the typeface — make this edition eminently readable.

The question is, however, how best to use this resource. Ironically, it suffers from the same challenge as the Talmud itself; as talmudic material is organised according to a logic of its own, it is difficult to find a particular passage that speaks to the issue you want to explore. The stream-of-consciousness methodology of talmudic discourse defies modern taxonomic categories. Therefore, without an index and/or extensive knowledge of the entire Talmud, this remains a resource that requires a teacher or a guide. What Solomon does not provide is a commentary to walk one through the passages themselves. Though this is understandable as adding commentary would have expanded an already substantial tome into at least a second volume.

It is the perfect text for a university professor to assign varied sections of Talmud for study in a history of Judaism class. Alternatively, a rabbi might use it as the text for an English language ‘Introduction to Talmud’ adult education course. The casual reader picking it up off the shelf in a bookstore, however, will be at a loss to utilise this resource. Perhaps Solomon’s next project could be to write a mishneh torah to guide students through the intricacies of the passages he has chosen.

This weakness, however, is also the very strength of the Talmud. While it is not readily accessible to the casual reader, it remains one of the richest ever literary and legal creations. This new anthology is a welcome addition to the ever-growing bookshelf of Talmudic literature in English translation, which allows teachers to guide those without knowledge of Aramaic and Mishnaic Hebrew into the ‘Sea of Talmud’.

As it is written in Pirkei Avot ‘Turn it and turn it, for everything is in it.’ One could apply this same statement to Solomon’s anthology. It contains everything, which is exactly what makes it difficult to navigate. But if one invests the time to ‘turn it’, it has everything, or at least a little bit of everything, and more than one could rightfully expect from 822 pages.

Harvill Secker 2008, £16.99

Reading Eva Hoffman’s new novel is a mixed experience. At first, I found the rarefied and brittle consciousness of the protagonist, Isabel Merton, hard to engage with. Her life as an internationally famous concert pianist seems both admirable and enviable, yet she is dissatisfied. However, Isabel herself experiences unease at what she thinks of as her ‘hard’ but also ‘de luxe late capitalist life’ as a concert pianist. We read of a European tour she undertakes, travelling between Sofia and Prague, Vienna and London and the cities blur into an indistinguishable round of concert halls and hotels. What stands out for Isabel is a meeting with Anzor Islikhanov, an exiled representative of the Chechen government, and a man driven by energies at odds with her distanced and orderly life. Each recognizes in the other a capacity for passion and commitment: in Anzor’s case, to vengeful patriotism, in Isabel’s, to the power of music. They embark on an affair that seems unlikely; like her namesake Isabel Archer, in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, Isabel Merton is a young American confronted by European wiles — but this time of a profoundly historical nature.

Berg Publishers, 2008, £17.99

The startling image on the cover of this book is a work by the Israeli artist Nechama Golan. It is a high-heeled sandal made of paper, ink and glue. The shoe is printed with a rabbinic text which explains how a woman is acquired, bringing together a number of ideas discussed in this book. In her introduction Nahshon alludes to the ‘special niche in the Jewish closet of memories’ occupied by shoes and their makers. Her book includes research ranging from commentary on shoes in the Bible, to Jewish art, drama and films featuring shoes, via the cobblers of the shtetl and the figure of the Wandering Jew.

The collection is divided into themed sections. The first of these, entitled ‘Religion and the Bible’, begins with a psychoanalytically inflected discussion of the meanings of shoes and shoelessness in the context of God’s desire for an intimate relationship with human beings. This is followed by a study of Halitzah (the ceremony of removing the shoe from her brother-in-law by the childless widow of his dead brother, releasing him from the obligation of marrying her). In this chapter the shoe aspect, though explored in the context of which kinds of shoes were permitted for the performance of Halitzah, is secondary to a feminist enquiry into the history and meaning of Halitzah and Levirate marriage. The next chapter considers late nineteenth and early twentieth-century shoe-shaped tombstones found in cemeteries in eastern Europe. Even though the primary data (the tombstones) is damaged by acid rain and human forces, and there is no scholarship on them, Rivka Parciack offers two fascinating suggestions to account for these unusually shaped tombstones. The final chapter in this section deals with the wearing of sandals as an expression of ideology in the modern Israeli state, and traces back the forging of the new Jewish identity through the wearing of what became known as Biblical sandals from the 1920s onwards.

The first two chapters of the next section, ‘Memories and Commemoration’, are rooted in early twentieth-century Europe. Nahshon reprints an extract from a memoir describing the different shoe-making professions (making the soles, making the uppers, mending shoes) in the Polish village where the author, born in 1916 and briefly apprenticed to a shoemaker, grew up. This is followed by a collection of Yiddish expressions and proverbs about shoemakers. Accompanying these, and offering its own commentary on this period, is Jeffrey Feldman’s essay which draws on his first encounter with the piles of shoes in the Holocaust Museum in Washington and accounts of the Eichmann trial where shoes were first held up as evidence of the mass murder of children. Feldman questions the meanings of these exhibitions and compares them with the exhibit about the Iraq war made of boots arranged in fields in the formation of tombstones. He is interested in the decay and conservation undergone by the hair and shoes remaining in the death camps and, above all, in visitors’ confrontations with the smell of the decaying leather.

The third section, ‘Ideology and Economics’, contains two chapters. The first traces the history of the Wandering Jew in drama and art, setting out a range of arguments about the place of the Wandering Jew in anti-Semitic discourse in Europe and the adoption of this figure by early Zionist thinkers who rejected the idea that Judaism is built on exile. Zionists are said to have ‘converted’ to the Christian theology of nineteenth-century nationalism, seeking to reinscribe the Jewish people in the pages of history and reconnect them to their land. The chapter is extremely well researched but only tangentially related to the idea of shoes. It is followed by a history of dress, including shoes, in the early history of Jewish settlement in Palestine and later in the new state of Israel.  A different context for some of the material discussed in the ‘Biblical Shoe’ chapter is offered here, suggesting that, despite its title, the earlier chapter might have been better placed in this section.

The final section of the collection, ‘Theatre, Art and Film’, begins with a discussion of sexuality centering on shoes and religion in the work of Bruno Schulz, whose drawings feature androgynous yeshiva boys and high-heeled dominatrixes with their abject admirers. The essay balances description and the contextualisation of Shulz’s work in theories of art history and psychoanalysis. Sonya Rapoport’s chapter describes how her 1970s work Shoe-Field was put together, but the discussion does not place the piece within any theoretical context, and her reason for choosing shoes is never explained. ‘The Theatrical Shoe’ is a textual, theatrical and cultural history of Gronemann’s comedy King Solomon and Shalmai the Cobbler, later translated into a Hebrew musical and first staged in Tel Aviv in 1943. It is a well-researched cultural history of theatre in Palestine and then Israel, but the topic seems to have been slightly wrenched to fit the shoe theme. Finally, in ‘The Cinematic Shoe’ Jeanette Malkin discusses an early film by Ernst Lubitsch. She interrogates the ‘Jewish’ portrayal of the petit bourgeois milieu, concluding that Lubitsch drew on the East European Jews often portrayed in the Jewish theatre. Lubitsch’s portrayal aroused controversy because he was working in a mass medium: he produced a too-public depiction of a reviled section of the Jewish population of Berlin at a time of rising anti-Semitism. The piece includes some discussion of the role of objects in Lubitsch’s films and notes the early product placement evident in the fashion show featuring shoes lent by Berlin emporia.

The book is generously illustrated with photographs and reproductions of paintings and drawings. Each essay is accompanied by footnotes and bibliography, and the index is meticulous. The question I was left with, however, was whether scholars and general readers interested in the many fascinating topics discussed in this book would think of looking here for them.

Little, Brown, 2009, £ 16.99

‘Light and space…that is everything you need’. So declares a visitor to the spectacular Landauer House, the architectural apotheosis of modernity erected in the days before the black nightmare of World War II. There would be something almost too neat about this perfect construction, this paean to rationality and progress, emerging just at the point the forces of barbarism are about to descend on Europe, were it not of course essentially true. (The story of the Landauer House, the Glass Room, is based in large part upon the modernist Villa Tugendhat in Brno.) The bright dawn of innovation, of creativity and expectation, slips into twilight even as the Glass Room’s final fittings are being made, without ever seeing the expected day of its promise fulfilled. It is an anachronism almost from the moment of its completion.

Insatiable as our appetite seems to be for the full bloody history of the collapse of ‘rational’, ‘progressive’ Europe into insanity and savagery, we are fascinated also by those moments just preceding it, as if, were we to look in the right place, we would somehow discover the point of return, the stone that, placed just right, might alter the flow of history. Mawer himself seems similarly fascinated by the years and months leading up to the invasion of Czechoslovakia, with the first half of the novel reconstructing the early days of the spectacular Landauer House, of its creation by the brilliant architect Rainer von Abt and inhabitation by the Jewish automobile tycoon Viktor Landauer and his non-Jewish wife Liesel.

Yet it remains nigh on impossible to read a novel such as this without an overwhelming sense of fatalism, of all roads leading only to one place — and for the most part Mawer does not attempt to force us to abandon this oppressive sense of inevitability. (Viktor Landauer feels ‘the tremors of uncertainty’ in Czechoslovakia, while his wife Liesel is struck by the image of herself and her husband as ‘evanescent creatures within the transparent walls of glass, like summer mayflies with their gossamer wings and delicate tails and ephemeral lives’). He is interested in all the contradictions — personal and political — inherent in the erection of this impressive, rational building just at the moment it becomes clear that it cannot be built to last, that if it survives at all it will be through sheer luck. What, and where, are the shadows cast by this palace of light?

Beyond the Glass House, the shadow of Nazism and genocide naturally looms large. Within it is drawn Viktor’s working class lover, Kata, a Hungarian-Slovak Jew he meets in Vienna, whose figure casts a shadow of its own over the Landauers’ marriage. Viktor’s discovery ‘that love, the focused, thermic lance of passion and hunger should be centred not on the figure of his wife, but on the body and soul of a half-educated, part-time tart’ is a shock to him, and to his wife when she discovers that, for all his championing of transparency, he is drawn to the ‘shabby opaque world’ he shares with Kata. And Liesel herself has her own shadowy secrets — the love Hana, her closest friend, has confessed she has for her, and her conflicted, uncertain response to this revelation. The Room ‘is only as rational as the people who inhabit it’, Hana claims: it cannot bestow rationality, only reveal the complex patterns of desire and deceit formed by those beneath its roof.

The subsequent history of the house suffers by contrast, as if, once the original inhabitants have been forced to flee for their own safety, Mawer knows it is necessary to bring us up to speed in time for the eventual reunion (the novel opens with Liesel’s return years later), but is nowhere near as careful about getting there as he was in building up to the moment of the Landauers’ exile. Though the later characters are linked to the Landauers both by theme — of art, of music, of questions of faith and faithlessness in love — and through Hana, the links have a tenuousness about them. Hana’s declaration of love to Zdenka, who works in the house in its later years under Communist rule, is so similar to her prior declaration to Liesel years earlier that it’s hard to think of it as anything other than Hana’s pursuit of the shadow of her lost love, rather than a true expression of feeling.

Perhaps this is because, for all its promise of the future, the Glass Room has been unavoidably claimed by the past. That it was created to be the herald of a new dawn just at the moment darkness descended ties it irrevocably to the past it sought to be free of. Von Abt’s great project was ‘to take Man out of the cave and float him in the air’, away from the shadows and into the light. But to float forever is to exist beyond history, outside the unpredictabilities of human behaviour, an impossibility. Any space that Man inhabits can only bring the shadows rushing back.

Five Leaves, 2008, £12.99

In the mid-1990s I worked as a research assistant for Jewish Continuity, the short-lived organisation that sought to ensure the continuity of Judaism in this country. One of its major concerns was preventing intermarriage and, in order to do so, great pains were taken to research the lives of British Jewish single young adults. Notwithstanding the naivety and crudity of some aspects of Jewish Continuity’s ‘anti-intermarriage’ agenda, a detailed picture emerged that contributed to the understanding of British Jewry. But I couldn’t help feeling then, as now, that something was missing — we didn’t investigate what young Jews thought about the prospect and the reality of sex with other Jews. Was intermarriage partially a result of young Jews finding other Jews a sexual turn-off? Are non-Jews more sexually alluring to Jews (and visa versa)? What, in short, is the ‘sexual economy’ of British Jewish life?

It struck me then as now that the topic of Jews and sex is a crucial one if we are to understand Jewish behaviours and attitudes, particularly towards assimilation and intermarriage. So I was eager to read the unambiguously-titled collection Jews and Sex edited by British-Jewish scholar Nathan Abrams. The book has its roots in Abram’s essay on Jews in the porn industry, published in the Jewish Quarterly in the winter 2004/5 issue, and the nude cover photo of Jewish porn star/performance artist Annie Sprinkle suggests a welcome openness about sexual matters.

On reading the book though, it becomes clear that the title is too broad, for all its admirable straightforwardness.  This is, for the most part, a book about Jews and representations of sexuality. The 16 essays here are largely concerned with how Jewish artists and other cultural figures have represented sexuality in their work and, more generally, how Jews have been positioned and position themselves relative to discourses of sexuality.

The most successful essays here are those that open up the hidden worlds of Jews and sex: Hinde Burstin’s chapter on ‘twentieth century lesbo sensuous Yiddish poetry’ uncovers a barely known chapter of Yiddish literary history. Nathan Abrams’ own chapter on Jews in the porn industry does not just play ‘spot the Jew’, but interrogates why it might matter — or not — to look for the Jewish presence in porn.

Other contributors find interesting representations of Jews and sex in the work of various artists, filmmakers and novelists, throwing up some valuable lesser-known works worth tracing. This collection also contains much of a highly predictable nature: the usual suspects — Woody Allen, Phillip Roth and Howard Jacobson — all appear in chapters that are far from ground-breaking. Indeed, in its conceptual apparatus this collection will be familiar to anyone who has engaged in the study of contemporary Jewish cultural studies or gender and the Jewish body (Sander Gilman looms large as an influence). The two most conceptually adventurous and playful chapters in the book are Geoffrey Dennis’ ‘Jewish erotic theology’ and Jay Michaelson’s ‘Homosexuality and Liminality in Judaism’. Both are frustratingly short.

Jews and Sex leaves a lingering feeling of disappointment, heavy on representation but thin on sociology. Most problematically, a few contributors come close to using artistic representation of Jews and sex to draw conclusions about Jewish sexual practice — in particular, Jyoti Daniels’ chapter on Amos Gitai’s Kadosh argues that the film allows us ‘a glimpse into the lives of Hassidic women’. Perhaps a genuine investigation of sexuality in art and culture will encourage Jews to consider how their sexual practice and choice of partner might be intimately connected to Jewish life.

Schocken Books, 2009, $23.95

And Laish is a strange and wonderful book, a curious story of an extraordinary journey: a convoy of Jews travelling through Eastern Europe on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The travellers are all strangers to each other — old religious men, traders, thieves and murderers are crammed together in the wagons — and none stranger than the narrator, the orphan Laish, because nothing could ever be familiar to a boy with no family. Laish knows nothing about his parents and does not know much about himself either, not even the meaning of his name, only that ‘the name comes from Hungary’. (But Laish, your name comes from the Bible, from the story of Palti, son of Laish, who tearfully followed his wife Michal to the gates of Jerusalem. She was reunited with David and he was ordered to turn back. So he, like you, tried to reach Jerusalem.) Aharon Appelfeld the boy was orphaned at a young age. Eight years old when World War Two broke, young Aharon escaped from a labour camp and spent several years hiding in the forests of Ukraine, somehow surviving and waiting for his parents to come back to him. Appelfeld reached Palestine in 1946 and today lives in Jerusalem.

When Laish is ordered to record the names of those in the convoy who die along the way, he too, like Appelfeld, finds himself in the role of the storyteller. Speaking from the depths of loneliness, his voice, the voice of the uprooted, comes from nowhere, with no vantage point of space or time.

Telling stories does not come easily to the boy. He is a cautious narrator, not used to being listened to, or to making himself too visible. In the dangerous environment of the convoy, a child alone is wary of getting in people’s way. He tries to disappear in the story and carefully encodes his emotions. ‘In his last days,’ he says of the man for whom he used to run errands, ‘although he goaded me, he did not make me hate him, even though his wickedness overflowed from him’. Then, after the man dies, Laish remarks dryly, ‘I became someone else’s property’.

Laish is unlike other orphan storytellers. The orphan in Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s famous ‘The Voices’ cycle, for example, directly confronts the readers with the abysmal agony of his being. His tone is disturbing and accusatory. Pip, in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, is a self-helping Victorian. True to the ideology of his time, Pip leads himself from orphaned boyhood to independent manhood by the power of his storytelling. But Jewish Laish narrates as he lives, almost in hiding. He is reluctant to talk about himself too much. He opts for the ‘we’ instead of the ‘I’ and does his best to blend in with the rest of the human mass moving towards Jerusalem. It is easier to chronicle the journey, other people, other people’s heartaches. So he quietly observes the bizarre collection of human beings on the wagons: Mamshe, the girl who lives in a man-size birdcage; Ephraim, who has visions from other worlds; the dumb, the drunk, the demonic. Some live their nightmares in their sleep and some live them in waking. Some are haunted by their past, others by an unknown future.

The convoy is delayed again and again, by greed, violence and disease. But maybe it is not delayed at all. Laish’s ‘employer’ believes that the pilgrimage is nothing but a fraud. ‘I don’t believe that the convoy intends to reach Jerusalem,’ the boy admits. ‘Even though wherever we arrive, the dealers declare our destination at the top of their lungs.’ The dealers deal, the beggars beg and no one is nearer Jerusalem. Yet somewhere else Laish confesses he dreams of the city, ‘a broad, light-filled city — a city where there is no frost or dampness, where a man can lay his head on a stone and fall asleep.’ But then, quickly, apologetically, ‘I must surely be wrong.’

So the days are full of deception, and the nights are full of terror. Bundled in their corners, the weak suffer. The thieves, quick-fingered and ghost-like, rob them of the little they have and the thugs threaten to throw them off the wagons. And in the midst of this, the old men, desperate to reach Jerusalem, slowly die one by one, as the convoy continues to stall. The book’s chapters are short and disorienting, and reflect the movement of the convoy. This is no straightforward movement. It is slightly out-of-time, slightly otherworldly, slightly not what it appears to be.

In this time-out-of-time, there are moments when compassion comes stiffly, in small measures,‘Once he bought me a bar of halva’, Laish remembers of his ‘employer’. Sometimes, there are even shows of affection: ‘From time to time people will say, ‘Laish is a good lad, he helps the old men’, and I am moved’. At these moments, the convoy briefly becomes something like a community. And then there is finally a hint of redemption, and a glimpse of Jerusalem.

Houghton Mifflin, 2008, $24

I confess to having a thing for the fiction of four of my older Bronx contemporaries. For class acts, E. L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick are a match for any literary backfield Boston, San Francisco, or other cultural capitals might field. In individualised manners, the first three are all realists whose imaginative work is significantly coloured by social or political concerns. Ozick, on the other hand, a keen observer of wounded conscience and blindsided consciousness, is more cerebral than the others as well as less absorbed in the ebb and flow of history.

This is not to say Ozick stands aloof from the passing scene, but her concerns tend to be more instrumental than thematic. A chronicler of human fallibility, her characteristic tone is ironic or derisive. Of the four stories in Dictation, her current collection, two culminate in lacerating laughter and another with the revelation that lying or self-deception is the universal language of mankind. Consequently, although she never tires of acknowledging Henry James as her Master, her work is equally redolent of the mature visions of Twain and Melville.

Of my Bronx quartet, Ozick, craftiest at her craft, is by far the most difficult for many readers to grasp. To that end Heir to the Glimmering World (2004), her most recent novel, may be confidentally exploited as a kind of concordance to this new compilation of not-so-very short stories. In one of them, for example, the surviving Jewish sect of Karaites of Heir to the Glimmering World are reincarnated as sectarian exponents of a utopian, universal language aimed at ameliorating the global discord etiologically symbolised by Babel and its Tower.  Another Heir to the Glimmering World recurring, apposite motif in these new stories are mistreated babies who, symptomatic of an adult world that has lost its bearings, serve not as symbols of hope or redemption but as heirs to victimhood, mayhem, and murder.

‘Dictation’ and ‘Actors’, the first two stories, are both accomplished performances that cover perennial Jamesian themes. In ‘What Happened to the Baby?’ and ‘At Fumicaro’, the latter two tales, Ozick shifts her attention from her Master’s signature quarrel between art and life to one less hackneyed: good versus meretricious art, the real thing versus its simulacrum. They deal less with the authenticity of art than with characters, surrogate artists, who, inauthentic themselves, are pretenders.

The title story delightfully evokes literary England in 1901. Structurally complex, it appears to be about the fading rapport between Henry James and Joseph Conrad during the interlude when each was tantalised by the mystery of literary doubling. The story line shifts abruptly between their shadow selves: personal stenographers who operate as secret sharers. (The motif is borrowed from Heir to the Glimmering World where, as some may recall, the protagonist hired to perform ill-defined duties is surprised to hear herself introduced by her employer as his ‘amanuensis.’)

James’s Theodora, ardently lesbian, is calculating; Conrad’s Lilian is virginal, mousy, self-effacing.  Each is dehumanised by her celebrated employer into a ‘typewriter’,  while raging with covert emotion for her dictator. While Lilian is secretly in love with Conrad, Theodora’s resentment of James — the engine of the story within the story — is chilling. But then professional envy is a longstanding Ozick theme.

The ironic subtext of this Jamesian donné is that, insensible of their own insensitivity, these masters of oblique motivation are themselves oblivious to the psychological and emotional agency of their hirelings. Hence the women’s audacious design.  Theodora’s scheme aims not only at implementing a furtive reprisal for slights but of helping herself to a slice of the novelists’ ‘immortality’. In the midst of this, the young, already fearsome Virginia Stephen turns up in the James salon ‘to pay homage to the Master’. Predictably, she exploits the occasion to make an assignation with James’s similarly inclined typewriter. Since the appetite of vast numbers of readers for even a whiff of Woolf is insatiable, this otherwise distracting jeu d’esprit surely enhances the wider appeal of this literary romp.

Despite its sprightliness, on first reading Dictation has the static feel of a literary set piece, a clever, ‘well made’ story designed to flesh out the ironic nugget of an idea. But the sub-plot of Theodora’s literary immortality is decidedly more complex than it appears, writing itself out of all seriousness and into the absurd in sub-purple prose of the cheapest timbre:‘the hot fluids of The Jolly Corner run, uninhibited, into a sutured crevice in The Secret Sharer.’ The rub is that congratulating himself upon ‘solving’ this overcooked mystery only takes the reader so far. For all its buoyancy, Dictation nearly succumbs to its own ingenuity.

‘Actors’ returns us to more familiar Ozick terrain — Jews and Manhattan — but it is thematically akin to the first story. ‘Matt Sorley, born Mose Sadacca,’ we are informed, ‘was an actor … and (when they let him) a comedian. His stage name had a vaguely Irish sound, but his origins were Sephardic.’ Not alone Sorley’s identity but also his compromised private life is an act: mainly unsuccessful at his chosen profession, he acts the part of the dedicated husband and actor. On a typical day, we discover Matt unconvincingly lying to the shoe repairman, amateurishly lying to his wife, and uselessly lying to himself.

‘At Fumicaro’ that provided the most pleasure because, I believe, it is the most impenetrable. The time is the 1930s. Frank Castle, 35, an American journalist who writes about art, literature, politics, everything, arrives in Italy to attend ‘The Church and How It Is Known’, a four-day conference of Catholic intellectuals. The complacent Castle, a bachelor, is a man of little experience and one who displays a disquieting lack of reaction to the rising fascism around him (he sails from New York on the Benito Mussolini).The story climaxes atop Milan Cathedral in a frenzy of psycho-religious vertigo, as Castle and his pregnant child-bride swim amid a sea of statues and paintings of the Holy Family. The blurring between the Church and the Third Reich is particularly uncomfortable and the expected revelation is frustratingly mysterious.

The final story in this quartet — ‘What Happened to the Baby?’ — has an intricate plot peopled by enough characters to stock a full-length novel. Moreover, each of these (including Phyllis, the narrator who knows everything and nothing) is equipped by his or her double. Without exception, all are liars, con-artists, or adulterers.

Beginning with Phyllis’s childhood memories of Uncle Simon’s League for a Unified Humanity (not really her uncle, not really a league, but you get the slippery idea), the narrative skips through four distinct time frames. Defying Poe’s strictures for the short story (ratified in our day by the likes of Nadine Gordimer), and paying a heavy price for it, Ozick shifts the scene from the Lower East Side to the Catskills to Greenwich Village to the Bronx. She stocks her narrative with a cast of disagreeing, disagreeable Jews of her parents’ generation, for whom she generates little sympathy.

As in ‘At Fumicaro’, the point of view is restrictive and the reader held at a tantalising distance from the narrative centre. The breakdown of language in a world of no redemption provides the disheartening, unifying theme for this collection of stories by one of our most accomplished writers. Dictation richly deserves its inclusion in the New York Times list of outstanding books for 2008.

Isn’t the bagel to Jews what fish and chips is to the English? Maria Balinska’s research suggests that this assumption should not be taken as the hole truth.

The Bagel, The Surprising History of Modest Bread

Today we think of the bagel’s home as New York with roots in Poland, but Balinska finds forms of this iconic bread in Italy and the Far East. She catches the baby Jesus eating it in Fra Lippi’s painting Madonna del Pappa where the child’s halo is mirrored in the bagel he clutches in his left hand. Perhaps Jesus also ate one at the Last Supper, she muses, but, if this famous meal happened during Pesach, was Jesus enjoying a bagel made from matzo meal? In her free-associative style, Balinska doesn’t go into this conundrum but she does travel far in search of the bagel’s diverse origins. She finds a version in fourteenth-century Poland in the popular obwarzanek and she even discovers a form of a bagel among the present-day Muslim population of North-west China where it is known as the girde.

Balinska maintains the common-sense assumption that humans tend to have the same good ideas in different parts of the world which accounts for the wide appeal of the roll with the hole. What, she asks, is the philosophical (or nonsensical) resonance of this hole? Does it express death? Nothingness? Infinity? The charm of the book is not that it has answers but rather it is a teaser for those of us who have never really given the bagel more than the occasional thought. Indeed, like the glass we smash under our bridal foot, its possible interpretations are tantalising.

This biography of the bagel is a mixture of serious research, anecdote and folklore. Balinska reminds us of the story of the fools of Chelm who go and ask the neighbouring town’s baker for better holes to improve their bagels. Armed with their newly-purchased holes they run home fast across fields only to trip and drop their precious objects. Shamefacedly they return empty-handed to Chelm.

Balinksa, whose family is both Jewish and Catholic, seeks to establish the bagel as a way of uniting religious and political, culinary and social history. She implies that the bagel is not merely a staple food which needs serious chewing, but rather a reflection of Jewish philosophy; in other words it is not a meal which can be swallowed thoughtlessly.

She unearths some fascinating history. The word bagel comes from the Yiddish beigen, to bend. One story relates how the bagel came out of Prussia in the ninth century and that it was considered a bread that Jesus ate. Jews therefor were not allowed to bake it and local anti-Semites attacked any Jew who dared bake bread. The Jews decided, therefore not to bake but to boil their bagels, to escape this rule. So the birth of the boiled and, eventually baked,bagel became the norm.

Although medieval history provides essential background it is the more arresting twentieth-century memory of the bagel in the Warsaw Ghetto that is particularly haunting. Balinska’s descriptions of half-starved bagel-selling children in the Warsaw Ghetto with their sawdust mini versions still shocks. The majority of Poland’s bagel-sellers were to die in the Holocaust. But the bagel, and the Jewish life it represented, refused to be annihilated and the narrative drive which takes Balinska to the ghettoes and to European Jewry’s death throes revives when she evokes the bagel’s survival and rebirth in the USA.

The bagelisation of the Unitd States of America meant, that in order for it to flourish as a business option, it had to lose its Jewish association and become as American as McDonalds. In the l970s it was marketed, somewhat incongruously so as to appear American as ‘the Jewish English muffin’. The idea was to change the ethnicity by bleaching it into an Anglo-Saxon mould. It was promoted with ‘familiar American foods’ like jam, tuna and even bacon. Balinska shows how ‘bagel’ enters the American language by quoting a US Army officer before a Vietnam bombing raid. ‘You might call the whole thing a bagel strategy. We will bomb all around Haiphong and isolate it’

And where is the bagel today? We see it all over the UK where few gentiles would guess it has Jewish roots. Here, despite its humble street origins, it is marketed as a cool and rather sophisticated bread, Back in Poland, the bagel is enjoying a new popularity. In Warsaw the ‘New York bagel’ with smoked salmon and cream cheese is seen as an exotic import. Few Poles realise that the New York bagel, which is the sister of their native obwarzanek, has made its homecoming.

And if the English can have their cod and chips to make them feel ethnically proud why can’t the Jews of London, Manchester, Leeds and Edinburgh take a double pleasure in seeing their bagels in Sainsbury’s, Waitrose or Tesco? Who are we kidding about the identity of the bagel or even fish and chips? How many know that cod and chips arrived on this island with the entry of Spanish and Portuguese Jews and that it was so delicious that the English seized the recipe and made it their own? Similarly Muslims and Catholics may have invented the bread with the hole, but the Jews stuffed it with cream cheese and lox and made it Jewish. Balinska’s quirky book is full of intriguing insights. After reading it, I’ll never be able to look at a bagel’s empty eye without giving it a wink.

Jonathan Freedman, Klezmer America: Jewishness, Ethnicity, Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2008, £20.50)

Despite the title, this is not a book about klezmer, at least not in the conventional sense. That’s not to say that klezmer isn’t discussed in it, but it is part of a wider discussion of the problematics and potentials of Jewish culture in America.

The author, a professor of English and American studies at the University of Michigan, is interested in how ‘dealing with the collective fictions that accrete around the examples of Jews, Jewishness and Judaism can unsettle even the most seemingly secure of the seemingly calcified categories by which our culture parses otherness’. For those not used to the language of academic cultural studies, this sentence may seem a little intimidating, but there are riches in Klezmer America that await the patient reader. In this collection of linked essays Freedman looks at a host of case studies in his examination of how ‘Jews, Jewishness and Judaism’ subvert and throw light on the seemingly intractable structures of race and ethnicity in America.

Klezmer’s totemic significance lies in its ‘relentless and definitional hybridity’ and its ‘ceaseless and even foundational revisionism’, which challenge notions of fixed ethnic and racial boundaries. In the work of artists such as the Klezmatics and John Zorn, Freedman finds ‘a tradition of dynamic innovation wrought in the encounter between Jewish and gentile cultures that has the property of reanimating both, creating in this interplay new configurations of ethnic belonging’. This celebratory tone is striking. Indeed, Freedman concludes the book by arguing that we are witnessing ‘a kind of renaissance that ushers into being new forms of Jewish cultural production by a generation that’s free from much of the baggage weighing down their elders’. Klezmer is at the vanguard of contemporary Jewish culture’s reconfiguration of the stultifying structures of race and ethnicity in America. Freedman finds this reconfiguration at work within a host of Jewish cultural phenomena including the work of Sacha Baron-Cohen, Tony Kushner’s play Angels In America, the music of Uri Caine and the novels of Philip Roth.

At the same time, Freedman is not just interested in highlighting the radical possibilities of Jewish cultural production, he builds a version of cultural analysis that uses the prism of Jewishness to illuminate the wider dynamics of race and ethnicity in America. His dissection of topics as various as the marriage of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, Marrano and Converso literature and the relationship between Jews and Asian Americans, open up fascinating new perspectives on the complexities of American multiculturalism. For me the most scintillating chapter in the book is the one which analyses the immensely popular Left Behind series of Christian thrillers. The series, which which uses the Tom Clancy-style techno-thriller idiom to depict the apocalyptic sequence of Rapture, Tribulation and Second Coming, is noteworthy for eschewing the overt anti-Semitism common in previous Christian apocalyptic works. Yet at the same time, Freedman shows how anti-Semitic discourses persist, albeit weirdly denuded of their Jewish content.

Despite the bravura analyses on offer in this book, I couldn’t help but have some reservations. While Freedman demonstrates how a consideration of Jewish issues can open up seemingly intractable questions of race and ethnicity, I wondered whether Jews, Jewishness and Judaism were anything more than a heuristic device, a tool to think with. There is a disconnection in Klezmer America from everyday lived experiences of Jews in the United States that occur outside of the realm of cultural production. It is unclear what Jews, Jewishness and Judaism actually are for Freedman beyond a productive collection of cultural resources.

What is missing from this book is any kind of ‘thick’ description of Jewish lives as they are lived in all their diversity. In particular, the practices of the organised, mainstream Jewish community are either ignored, dismissed or treated as a starting point for more productive cultural explorations. Even if one feels that the mainstream Jewish community is too conservative to do anything but maintain old modes of thinking and practice, if the exciting new modes of Jewish cultural production and criticism that Freedman talks about are to be truly transformative they need to engage with that community.

It is in the interaction of mainstream and more critical modes of cultural production that the most urgent analytical questions are raised. For instance: What happens when klezmer circulates outside the realm of radical Jewish culture and into the world of synagogues, barmitzvahs, weddings and JCCs? What happens when the institutions of the mainstream Jewish community begin to discover, sponsor and incorporate critical forms of Jewish culture? Freedman’s book, while immensely thought-provoking, limits itself by its neglect of such questions.

I never met him. I know exactly where I was standing when I heard he was dead. It was in March 1986 and a friend came in to tell me that the Jewish American novelist I admired had died. ‘Saul Bellow,’ he said, then paused, ‘No, Bernard Malamud’, he corrected himself.

It was a Malamud moment — mainly serious, half comic, also awkward. I remember I thought to myself: I will never get to meet him now, though I had never before thought of doing so. Malamud, not Bellow, was my man. In July 2005 I was sitting in the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, reading my way through the Malamud archive there and read this in a notebook entry for 21 October 1976: ‘Bellow gets Nobel Prize. I win $24.25 in poker.’ This was the little man, the one who always felt he came second, who, while shaving, would mutter unconvincingly to himself in the mirror, ‘Someday I’m going to win.’ He had known no real success until he published his first novel at the age of 38. I can guess what he would have said the day I heard I was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize. But at least it wasn’t alongside a biography of Saul Bellow.

I have been reading the work of Bernard Malamud since I was a schoolboy in Nottingham. In 1969, my teacher, the novelist Stanley Middleton, recommended The Fixer, perhaps because he knew I was Jewish and, like Malamud, the son of a shopkeeper. Much later, I wrote about Malamud in a book called The Experience of Reading published in 1992. It was three years after that, sick of straight-and-narrow literary criticism, that I tried out an experimental book called Malamud’s People: it was a collection of short stories about a variety of people reading my man. I don’t know if it was any good; certainly it struggled to find its publisher and when published had no impact. But it gave feeling to my thoughts, embodied in those imagined human narratives, and some freedom too. I even sent a copy of it to Malamud’s London agent, Michael Sissons, who kindly wrote back to say that Malamud would have liked it, and that he would send it on to Malamud’s widow. When I finally met Ann Malamud near the end of 2002, she had no memory of ever having received it.

How I came to write the first-ever life of Malamud, and meet him that way at least, goes like this. It was graduation day at the University of Liverpool, summer 2002, and after the ceremony I was talking to Hermione Lee, the biographer, who had just been presented with an honorary degree. I said to her that I had seen an advertisement a few months earlier for a conference on biography in Oxford, where not only was Hermione featured but also Malamud’s daughter. Was Janna Malamud Smith going to write her father’s biography, I asked her, because I really wanted to read that book. There had been nothing for sixteen years following his death, the family apparently set firmly against intrusion. At my question Hermione Lee looked really startled and said she had only just stepped off the plane from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she had spoken to the Malamud clan. They were now, at last, considering giving permission for a biography, she said, because of Malamud’s dwindling fame. Though she insisted it was not in her gift and that she could act only as an intermediary, she nonetheless said to me directly: ‘Why don’t you write it?’

It was chance, or a calling, something never imagined that I hadn’t even tried for, when many things I had tried for hadn’t come off. It made me wary. I sent on to the family and the estate, via Hermione Lee, what I had already written about Malamud. What followed was a series of informal interviews. Later in that summer of 2002 I met Janna Malamud Smith and her husband David on their holiday in London. We talked and though they were very bright and kind, they did make me accompany them to a Tom Stoppard play. Rightly they insisted upon the difficulties and disadvantages of the enterprise. There were family secrets, they said; I might not like Malamud so much after I knew more about him; there were many examples of biographers who had grown to hate their subjects; and for the purposes of inwardness it really wasn’t ideal that I was English rather than American. The matter was left open until, a month before Christmas, without any guarantees as to the outcome, I travelled to the States, where I had never been, to meet Ann Malamud, the widow, in Cambridge and Tim Seldes, Malamud’s agent, in New York. I got the job, I think, because they could see I loved the work and would put that first, as Malamud himself would have wished. My subject was notoriously reticent and thin-skinned, and he didn’t want his work ‘explained’ by his life. I myself had never written a biography before.

Ann Malamud, I found, had multiple sclerosis, but at the end of the discussions that November she sent one of her helpers to drive me and my wife to Mount Auburn cemetery where Malamud’s ashes were buried under a small stone lozenge bearing Malamud’s words from the introduction to a selection of his stories: ‘Art celebrates life and gives us our measure’.We had only rough directions as to where to find the stone but, superstitiously perhaps, I knew that of the three of us I would find it. And that was the final confirmation, where I made my promise. It was a personal work. Stanley Middleton had once said to me that literary criticism was a very minor art, but that the best thing a critic could do was rescue and fight for the literary reputation of a writer he admired — like Leavis with Lawrence.

The initial work fell into two main parts: interview work and archive work, followed by the writing of the biography itself. First there were interviews to be conducted in the States. Many of Malamud’s friends and colleagues had already died, and the rest were wryly warning me to get to them fast. I spent two weeks recording an extended interview with Ann Malamud in January 2003; then the summer on what my family called ‘The Malamud trail’ — a schlep from New York (Malamud was born in Brooklyn in 1914) to Oregon (where he got his first teaching appointment in a cow college in 1949). The first interview I conducted that summer was with Malamud’s own publisher Roger Straus of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I had wanted the old firm to publish the biography, but Straus had already cheerfully described the project as ‘ridiculous’. Malamud hadn’t had a life, Straus told me: ‘Saul Bellow’s filet mignon, Bernard Malamud’s a hamburger.’ Later the other partner, the real literary man, Robert Giroux told me that Malamud was acutely aware of how the rich and glamorous Straus looked down on him.

But Giroux was like Malamud, a poor boy who had lost his mother early. Malamud’s mother was a schizophrenic who died in a mental hospital, probably a suicide, when the boy was fifteen. I remember Ann Malamud telling me how her husband had described his last sight of his mother, waving to him from a window in the hospital he wasn’t allowed to enter. This was when I first began to realize that there is nothing like being the first biographer. The life of Bernard Malamud was not yet a history, not yet in that public domain I was supposed to turn it into, but still just that — a life, raw and in pieces, remembered by chance, in snatches or notes, and not wholly recoverable. For every one thing I found or heard, I uneasily suspected that there would be another thousand lost or unspoken, arbitrarily or deliberately. But there among the papers in Ann’s flat, for example, were letters from the father, Max Malamud, impoverished grocer, barely literate immigrant, to the clever literary son — letters which had lain seemingly untouched for years. This wasn’t an archive: this was someone’s flat, an incapacitated person who let me into the back study to open drawers and rifle papers as I wished.

Those letters from the father to Malamud were mainly from 1949-52. In 1949 Malamud had left for Oregon with a new young family, having married out of the faith. It was a move that also precipitated the breakdown of Eugene, Malamud’s younger brother, who it turned out had inherited the mother’s schizophrenia. At the end of 1951, Eugene was committed to King’s County, the same hospital where the mother had been a patient. Max’s anguished letters to Bernie were written in heavy black pencil on the brown pieces of shop-paper that the grocer used to wrap goods and write bills, capital letters put in ungrammatically to mark what Max thought were The Important Words. ‘When you talk to Eugene you see he is a Sick Person . . . I don’t think he Will be all right Soon . . . Any time I see him I go home with a Broken Heart.’ ‘Bernie let me know if you Understand my writing if not I will have Somebody to write the letters for Me.’ And this most poignantly on 15 November 1951: ‘I Asked Eugene how he spels psychiatrist and he speled that for me’. Of all people (who else?) he had to ask Eugene how to spell it, suicidal within that medical hospital. A guilty but determined Malamud, safe in Oregon, had to read these letters. Just as later, he had to read and reply to twenty years of regular letters from poor Eugene himself. I read them, as if over Malamud’s shoulder, in the Harry Ransom Center. Malamud had kept every one of them, it seemed, though even outside the mental hospitals Eugene had had nothing to say, an intelligence with no life to report on. I began to know Eugene’s handwriting so well that I could recognise from the sheer physical nature of the hand when he was heading for the next major breakdown. I could hardly convey this in the finished work. But it came out of Bernard Malamud’s damaged and lingering first life — the life he left behind but never got over — even as he began the second as a writer. As a woman says to the protagonist of Malamud’s first novel, The Natural: ‘We have two lives, Roy, the life we learn with and the life we live with after that.’ I loved Malamud because he was the writer of second chances — not the man who gets everything almost effortlessly, it seems, by sheer genius the very first time, but the more ordinary one who struggling makes his achievements the second time around. Malamud’s characters are ordinary equivalent strugglers. ‘What have you made of yourself?’ Malamud would ask his students.

I may still be naïve as a biographer but to me the most cheering thing about the interviews was that they weren’t much good unless the person loved Malamud, beneath his prickly, easily-jarred exterior. But love comes in various forms, and I also had to get involved in Malamud’s sexual infidelities: part of the human story, also part of what he used to make Dubin’s Lives. Malamud was a plain and awkward man, disguised, defensively formal — aware of himself as sacrificing almost everything he had to his work, and as having had even less in his first life. But when he was famous, when he was a teacher in the all-girl liberal arts college at Bennington, he had chances for compensation. So it was that I became an honorary member of the Bennington alumnae sorority, as I was passed on by telephone from one ageing gal to the next. Most of them said they didn’t want to talk about themselves — but they would tell you what Malamud did with X or to Y. When I rang X or Y to seek confirmation, they would usually threaten to sue me (especially if it was true).

I recall a distinctly fruitless trip down the aptly-named Cow Pat Lane in Bennington where a loyal lady resolutely managed to tell me nothing for a length of time that grimly pleased her. Or the writer-colleague of Malamud’s who invited me to his hospital bedside, the day before heart surgery, only to reassure me as to Malamud’s sexual purity. He was all wired up; I could see the monitors: what would happen on them if I told him outright that I knew he was now lying to me? It is not often you can so gauge response or responsibility. But sometimes it was Malamud I could have killed for his neediness or sleaziness.

Ann Malamud herself had been as bravely honest as she could bear to be. The family secrets were ordinary hurtful things, not Good, not Evil, troubles between man and wife, troubles with the children, things often made disproportionate by people making me guess at them through their reticence. It depressed me that some feelings had died in Ann, who herself died just before my book came out (as indeed — she wryly said to me — she rather wished). Yet when I got to the actual writing, I was less bothered by the sexual stuff, and also had to concentrate on pretending that the wife and the daughter and the son were all (as it were) dead so that I could write the thing straight. To their great credit, they never asked to see the text and I would never have let them.

Here is how it ended. Between the summer of 2003 and the summer of 2005, I could do nothing because my time was wholly filled with being Head of the School of English at the University of Liverpool. In July 2005 I spent two weeks looking at letters and notebooks at the Harry Ransom Center out west (37 boxes). That November I spent a month back east at the Library of Congress in Washington, working my way through the manuscripts and revisions of the novels and short stories (13,000 items, 77 containers, 30.6 linear feet). This was an education in writing. This was where I found him inside his day-to-day work, using and using up his life, transforming it amidst his words, still moving me in minute detail.

But all this you will find in the book — which took me a further year to write — though I would sooner you read his books first or instead: The Assistant, The Fixer and Dubin’s Lives above all, because he was a great novelist and is now best known only for the (fine) short stories.

I care about him more now, not less. I can’t bear it when others don’t and so I buttonhole people with my tale of his neglect, like some Malamud street crazy. I write this with a little comic figure of a Hassid in front of me on my desk. Ann Malamud gave it to me: it was on his. She asked me what I would call the little bending gent with his large sad eyes. I told her that was easy: Manny.  ‘May he ensure that it is a good book’ was what she replied.