Misreading Roth

Is The Controversy that Follows Philip Roth Justified?




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.
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Appropriations of Bruno Schulz

Despite his tiny oeuvre and tragically short life, the legendary Polish writer’s legacy to Western literature continues to grow

The Street of Crocodiles—Celina Wieniewska’s translation of Bruno Schulz’s stories (originally published in Polish under the title Cinnamon Shops)—is the tree from which Jonathan Safran Foer carves his latest work, Tree of Codes. Carves, with a knife—a real rather than metaphorical one—excising most of Schulz’s words to form new phrases and sentences with those remaining. Foer writes that he has long wished ‘to create a die-cut book by erasure, a book whose meaning was exhumed from another book’ and that he chose The Street of Crocodiles, being the richest text that he knows,‘feeling that [he] was…transcribing a dream that The Street of Crocodiles might have had’. Tree of Codes, he acknowledges, ‘is a small response to that great book’ and part of ‘The Great Book’ from which all Schulz’s stories come. Foer takes his place in a line of western writers who have appropriated not just Schulz’s modest oeuvre but also his life story, rendering the figure of Schulz himself as a symbol of loss and absence.

Bruno Schulz’s literary career began in 1934 and was abruptly cut short by the Second World War.As early as the 1920s he had received some recognition as a graphic artist but his discovery, by the psychological-realist prose writer, Zofia Nałkowska, led to the publication of his short story collection, Cinnamon Shops.This established him as one of the leading proponents of the Polish avantgarde, alongside such writers as Witold Gombrowicz and Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (‘Witkacy’). Following the war, all experimental writing was suppressed by the Communists, who enforced a rigid cultural agenda of Socialist Realism, and it was not until the Thaw in 1956 that Schulz’s works were published again. Schulz’s biographer, the poet Jerzy Ficowski, dedicated much of his life to tracing his lost letters and drawings; he never gave up searching for Schulz’s legendary lost novel, The Messiah, which is said to have been given to non-Jewish friends for safekeeping (or perhaps sent to Thomas Mann, whose Joseph and his Brothers he greatly admired).

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

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

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

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Faith and The Believers

What prompted you to explore a specifically Jewish family?

I knew early on that I wanted to write about the child of atheist parents becoming religious and the daughter of atheist Jewish parents becoming a ba’al teshuvah, it seemed particularly rich in possibilities. I liked the idea of having one kind of religious Jewish identity confront another secular form of Jewish identity based on progressive politics and social activism. My husband and I have had a series of debates/negotiations over the years about Jewishness and Judaism and in particular how we want to raise our children. (We are both atheists, but I grew up celebrating Christmas and my husband was raised Orthodox). Making my fictional family Jewish was, at one level, a convenient way to translate some of these discussions into the novel. Read more

Afterword: on translating The Seventh Well

Fred Wander called his recollections Das gute Leben,  The Good Life — good not in either of its narrow senses of virtuous or epicurean, but rich, full, kindly, generous.  Its alternate title is Von der Fröhlichkeit im Schrecken — something like ‘remaining cheerful in the midst of horror. ’ He was born in Vienna in 1917,  and died there almost ninety years later,  in 2006. The horror was, if one may so put it,  in the midst of the cheerfulness. Between 1939 and 1945,  he was an inmate of twenty different Nazi camps in France, Germany, and Poland.   Read more

Yehuda Amichai: The Making of Israel’s National Poet

by Nili Scharf Gold

Brandeis, 2008, £29.95

Yehuda Amichai is one of that great generation of Israeli poets who shattered traditional forms and used the materials of daily life and the language of the streets. The voice in his poetry is unapologetic, wry, matter of fact. It was very much the voice of the man I first met in Jerusalem at a party given by the theatre director Arieh Sachs. Amichai was then in his forties, short and compact,with an amused shrug I thought peculiarly Israeli: that is to say, less weary than an Eastern European shrug, but acknowledging equally the awkward unpredictability of events.
Amichai was a courageous soldier who ran guns for Haganah in 1948 and fought in all Israel’s subsequent wars. Like most Israelis then he recognised a human dignity in fighting, after so many European Jews had found the limits of putting their faith in law-abiding passivity. But he didn’t like soldiering, and he never forgot the murderous cost of war.

The bereaved father
has grown very thin:
he has lost the weight of his son

Two decades later, when I met him again in his refurbished home in Yemen Moshe, I remembered his poem about the impermanence of any building in Jerusalem where the stones of the mountains roll down at night towards the stone houses ‘Like wolves coming to howl at the dogs/Who have become the slaves of men’.  The last time I saw him in London he had just been given a literary prize in Egypt and was uncharacteristically glum. When I asked why, he said simply: ‘They hate us.’ Read more

A Time to Speak Out

Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish Identity

By Anne Karpf, Brian Klug, Jacqueline Rose, Barbara Rosenbaum (eds.)

Yale University Press, 2008, £30

When Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) announced its existence in February 2007, with an article in The Guardian by Brian Klug and the publication of a founding declaration with one hundred signatories, it created a stir of controversy in the British Jewish world and beyond. They were described as ‘Jews for Genocide’ by the Jewish Chronicle’s columnist Melanie Phillips, who accused them on a Newsnight debate of straying ‘into the realm of demonisation’ of Israel. Even the vastly more thoughtful Howard Jacobson characterised IJV’s position as ‘self-indulgent fantasy’ and ‘gesture politics’. But the new group also received enthusiastic praise, and the initial signatories were soon joined by hundreds more. Read more

Jewish Book News and Reviews

Brief News

Wallace Collection
The Wallace Collection will be holding an exhibition ‘Treasures of the Black Death’, Jewish jewellery from Thuringia from 19th February to 17th May 2009. Read more

Seven Days in the Art World

By Sarah Thornton

Granta, October 2008, £15.99

Seven Days in the Art World is a slightly misleading title. The book doesn’t cover a continuous week, but takes place over seven disparate days, during which Sarah Thornton attends seven very different contemporary art events. It’s a testament to Thornton’s skill as a narrator that she’s able to combine these distinct facets into a coherent account that’s informative and entertaining, and that never feels weighted down by her five years of research.
Opening with a vignette of a Christie’s auction in New York in 2004, and ending with a chapter on last year’s Venice Biennale, this is a portrait of the art world during the peak of its boom years, marked by crazily escalating prices and levels of hype. Thornton visits the annual Basel art fair, the Turner Prize awards ceremony in London, and the Tokyo studios of superstar-artist Takashi Murakami. She also, as an alternative to such glittering occasions, attends a student seminar at a Los Angeles art school and drops by the New York offices of Artforum magazine.
Thornton has a doctorate in sociology and the most engaging parts of the book are when she’s describing human relationships and social hierarchies: Murakami lording it in first class during a plane journey while fawning museum curators sit back in economy; Read more

Out of the Shadows: A Life of Gerda Taro

By François Maspero

Souvenir Press Ltd, October 2008, £12

There’s a sentiment halfway through François Maspero’s biography of Gerda Taro that speaks volumes about both the young war photographer and about the author himself. People must, Maspero supposes, feel a twinge of sadness not to have been the famous photographer Robert Capa. And women must surely also experience a longing, occasionally, to have been his lover Gerda Taro. It’s quite a claim. It is through this lens that Maspero views the brief yet eventful life of Taro and this ardour that motivates his struggle to bring her out of the shadows. Yet it is also this sentiment that at times renders the telling problematic.
Spain. July 1937. Fifteen miles from Madrid, the Battle of Brunete is waged in a desperate attempt to push the nationalists back from the capital. By mid-July the Republican offensive gives way to a fierce nationalist counter-attack. Both sides are raving with thirst, heat and hunger. The countryside is flecked with the human debris of conflict. And then come Franco’s planes, soaring overhead. In the midst of this chaotic scene on July 25th, a petite blonde crouches amid the Republican fighters sheltering in a dugout. She takes picture after picture, calmly reloading her camera as shells explode around them. Her name, La Pequena Rubia, is Gerda Taro. Read more

Elaine Feinstein: The Russian Jerusalem

Carcanet, May 2008, £9.95

What remains?

Elaine Feinstein’s The Russian Jerusalem calls itself ‘a novel’, and so it is. It’s a time-travelling, magical-realist compendium of a fiction, in which the protagonist — a British Jewish poet, somewhat resembling the author herself — is transported into the lives of the Russian poets of the Silver Age. That it tells the life, and often tragic death, stories of Tsvetaeva, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelstam, Ehrenburg and Babel means that a swathe of history from the dark days of the twentieth century is covered by its less than a hundred and fifty pages. However, Feinstein writes with a passionate celerity which makes The Russian Jerusalem the very opposite of trite costume drama or literary-biographical summary.
It is in particular a book about poetry, and the costs poetry exacts from those who believe in and write it. Arguably, this is what deepens its concerns and, indeed, informs its high style. Fourteen of Feinstein’s own poems stud the text. These are themselves inlaid with quotations from the author’s beloved Russians, as is the surrounding prose narrative, which serve as both summary and breathing space. The effect of these palimpsests is of a conversation between poets; one which the author, with her specialist’s knowledge and wearing her poetic identity-like colours, enters as an equal protagonist. Read more

Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love

By Lara Vapnyar

Pantheon Books, June 2008, $20

The comingled complexities of love and food are familiar ingredients in modern fiction, but in Lara Vapnyar’s new collection of short stories it is largely the absence of love that is assuaged or intensified by cooking and eating. Like Vapnyar herself, the protaganists of Broccoli and Other Tales of Food and Love are émigres from Eastern Europe, cast dazedly adrift in the United States, suspended between assimilation and homesickness. Varying in age, gender and preoccupations, the characters nonetheless share an air of stunned dismay, a somnambulant passivity akin to depression. In each of these six elegantly crafted stories, it is the experience, memory or consequences of a meal that in some way bring them back to life. Read more

Benjamin Harshav: The Moscow Yiddish Theatre

Yale University Press, 2008, £30

The Moscow State Yiddish Theatre (Moskver idisher melukhisher teater), usually referred to by its Russian acronym, Goset, was one of the crown jewels of modern Jewish creativity. Its story has the making of Shakespearean drama: daring, uplifting and tragic. It is a tale of innovative artistry, personal talent, Jewish commitment, political shenanigans, great hopes and broken promises which ends with assassination and institutional liquidation.  Read more