Saturday, Feb 18. It’s the opening event of Jewish Book Week 2012, and Simon Schama, Linda Grant and Eva Hoffman are sitting onstage, but I’m not looking at them: I’m gazing in mild disbelief at outgoing JBW director Geraldine D’Amico, who has just introduced chair Emily Maitlis as ‘the glamorous face of TV news’. The title of the evening is ‘60 Years On’. I don’t think it’s meant to be ironic.

The years in question span the trajectory of JBW since its inception in 1952. These nine days of events are a celebration of ongoing survival — although how that makes these nights different from all other Jewish festival nights is a question worth asking. There is more here — much more — than the Holocaust and the fate of Israel. Cookery writer and food anthropologist Claudia Roden will talk eloquently about the Sephardi conversos, eating pork to deflect the Spanish Inquisition. The indefatigable 87-year- old filmmaker Claude Lanzmann, director of Shoah, will discuss his time in the French Resistance (and make mincemeat, pork or kosher, of interviewer Alan Yentob. Why does this please me so? Because any man who talks about Lanzmann and Jean-Paul Sartre ‘sharing’ the author of The Second Sex deserves to become dinner). Lawyer Anthony Julius and Deborah Lipstadt will discuss both her new book on the Eichmann trial and their joint overcoming, in court, of David Irving’s Holocaust denial. We have a rich history, we Jews. We have survived a LOT. But the question that bubbles to the surface again and again, as I shuttle between talks on books, discussions of books, readings and signings and Willow Winston’s book-covered art installation in the King’s Place lobby, is this: do we have to talk about survival all the time?

Gradually, through the week, this question gets larger and larger, like a mushroom cloud. By the time Fabrice Humbert, author of the novel The Origins of Violence, stands up and proclaims that he, as two generations removed from the Holocaust (his grandfather was a survivor), is “free, and I can speak”, it has bloomed into something huge: an investigation of what we can and can’t talk about, as Jews.

Actually, this started early, with Maitlis. For some reason, JBW chairs like to collect a bunch of questions, thus straining all the intellectual powers of authors already on the spot, who must then remember back to the first question as well as think up answers. Maitlis, that first night, used this method to ignore any question that was anti-Israel. The silence was deafening, especially since Linda Grant had just been discussing the topics, including local anti-Semitic riots in 1947, four years before she was born, that were taboo in her childhood home in Liverpool (‘this shtetl on the Mersey’), and Eva Hoffman had talked of her girlhood in Krakow, just after the war, in which Auschwitz — 45 minutes’ drive away — was never mentioned (‘experiences so traumatic it was difficult to narrativise them’). It was intensely odd to watch these guests obediently respond only to the questions they were bidden by Maitlis to answer. I like to think of Jews, particularly secular Jews, as turbulent and argumentative, willing to air any subject that smells like a good debate. And JBW is not, by any means, a narrowly pro-Israel festival — in fact last year, commentators had conniptions over a talk starring Johann Hari and Gideon Levy, both notoriously down on Israel, and sponsored by the even more hostile London Review of Books. Yet, as the 2012 festival progressed, it became clear that a people who start with the taboo of pronouncing God’s name have a fair few other words they prefer not to mention. And this in a liberal society where a man like Irving can be legally lambasted for saying the unspeakable. Grant talks of meaningful silences (“I’m British but also an outsider. I couldn’t write about the English experience…”), but Maitlis continues to ignore questions about the predicament of Palestinians and it seems significant that none of this talkative panel says a thing about it.

That is left to the Israeli anthropologist David Wesley, next day, in a talk on ‘Jews and Palestinians in Israel’. Wesley believes that geostrategic planning motivated by “the fear or threat of Arab takeover” has engendered many of Israel’s current problems. In other words, he is voicing one of the most contentious opinions available: it is all our own fault. Treat people as the enemy, he says, and that is what they will become: a view that chimes eerily with the trajectory of Umberto Eco’s latest historical novel, The Prague Cemetery, in which Simonini, a virulent anti-Semite, devotes his entire existence to discrediting the Jews, thus ensuring that world Jewry eats his life. Wesley, too, talks about the unsayable (it is, apparently, forbidden to discuss the Arab version of 1948 in Israeli schools) as well as saying the unthinkable: that Israel, if it carries on as it is, will close in on itself entirely: “we Jews in Israel are imprisoned in a ghetto of our own making,” he protests. As he talks of suspicion, isolation and paranoia, the ghost of Simonini (a fiction, but not much of one, and the grandson of a real18th-century anti-Semite) gives a hollow cackle in my imagination.

What should the sexagenarian JBW talk about, and are there subjects on which its speakers should stay silent? Lipstadt discusses the reasons for returning, 50 years on, to the Eichmann trial: in part because a trial is, precisely, a chance to bring horror into the discourse, and by doing so, dissipate it, and in part because, as she points out in one of the best talks I went to, this was the first war-crime trial where witnesses’ testimony was given airspace. So there is an argument for bearing witness, and for continuing to unpick how that should be done and what the resulting benefits might be. What about negative talk, though? What about the potentially damaging gossip of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as recounted by their friend Lanzmann, who is arguably gossiping about the gossipers? What about the forgeries of a Simonini, which are malign fiction claiming to be fact? We all have our theories on when those we disagree with should shut up: what about our disputatious selves?

One of the reasons this is such an issue at JBW is because of the heavy bias towards non- fiction. As Grant points out, Jews are a people who have been continually on the move, who locate themselves in time rather than space, and for whom, therefore, stories about movement have an uncommon significance.

Immigrants tell natives what they want to hear. People without a country live by the book. They also, as D’Amico — a first-generation Frenchwoman — points out, say ‘they’ not ‘we’ of the incumbents, and surely this is part of the foundation of Israel’s problems: a wish to say ‘we’. Grant talks of the silences and myths in her childhood: there are two versions of how Ginsburg became anglicised to Grant, and she is not sure she believes either of them. I can match this, as I discovered accidentally, over a decade after his death, that my beloved Grandpa Jack wasn’t Jack at all, but Isaac (or presumably, Yitzhak). Grant says these uncertainties give her a sense of ‘standing on sand’: ironic, surely, for those who lay claim to a desert-fringed corner of the Middle East. Her answer, often, is to write fiction. The truth is out there, but sometimes it is easier to catch it unawares. Howard Jacobson, in a raucously entertaining defense of Ulysses as the 20th century’s great Jewish novel (aided and abetted by actors Henry Goodman and Derbhle Crotty), remarks that “if history is written by the winners, literature is written by the losers”. That is funny but, unlike good fiction, it’s not necessarily true. (Or there would be no great 19th-century British novels.) Is it the lies that have been told against the Jews, the terrible truths we have had to face or the defeat of language by horror that make the organisers of an event like this lean so towards the factual? Even authors sometimes seem constrained by the invocation to remember, which is also, of course, an invocation to tell the truth. Perhaps that is why a successful novelist like Jonathan Safran Foer decided to head straight for the knottiest tangle of Jewish narrative and repurpose the Hagaddah. The Torah — the cause of all the trouble, really, when you think about it — is a complicated mixture of historical fact and zany extrapolation; according to Umberto Eco’s definition (“people need an explanation for random events”), it probably counts as an extended conspiracy theory. Now, there’s a talk I’d like to see on the agenda for JBW 2013: the Bible as plot. Eco could argue that it’s all an anti-Semitic forgery, designed to fry the Jews in various hotnesses of hell for millennia; a frummer of your choice could maintain that every word is true. A couple of political types, one left-leaning, one right, could weigh in with the ways in which the survival of the state of Israel is/is not* dependent on preserving our Biblical heritage (*delete according to preference) and Daniel Barenboim plus orchestra could be dragooned to start playing just in time to prevent the speakers beginning to thump each other with their respective books. Doesn’t that sound fun? While we’re at it, I’d like a talk, please, by Jewish women (glamorous faces optional) about feminism and misogyny on both sides of the religious divide, which would end not with questions but with a public darts game in which a photo of Alan Yentob will stand in as the bullseye.

I am joking, or rather inventing: creativity, as any reader knows, is not the prerogative of deities, although I’m prepared to admit that She may be better at it than I. But I would like to see this elderly festival limber up. Discussions of the Holocaust and debates about Israel are important, but they, too, can move with the times: just ask Deborah Lipstadt or David Wesley. And surely one of the ways in which they should do so is to show a bit more chutzpah. Lipstadt was effectively arguing against the notion that we should all shut up about the Holocaust; Lanzmann methodically blew to pieces the romantic ideals of wartime bravery (“I was always frightened”) and noble suffering: he had no tradition of Judaism to defend, he said, because his post-pogrom parents didn’t tell him anything about his heritage. If Yentob had left time for more than one question, I would have liked to ask Lanzmann if he feels any satisfaction that Hitler’s attempt to wipe out the Jews led both to his own reconnection with his Jewish roots and, in a not dissimilar backflip, to the creation of the state of Israel. But here I am talking about the Holocaust and Israel again. I blame JBW. Is that allowed?

The invocation to remember is important; as William Faulkner said, the past is never dead; it’s not even past. But as Schama pointed out at the very beginning of JBW, it doesn’t just apply to the Holocaust. David Abulafia and Philip Mansel talking about Mediterranean coexistence was fascinating because it wandered far back into history, where the Portugese Jews faced the cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition on one side and specially benign treatment from the economically savvy Grand Duke of Tuscany on the other, and much farther around the Mediterranean than Israel. Similarly, Claudia Roden, who has just written a huge tome The Food of Spain, gave us ‘the past in a saucepan’, and utterly delicious it was, too. These, and the Ulysses event, were serious yet playful, rigorous but also broad-minded. They permitted ideas to circulate and in so doing, followed that invocation to remember into the farthest reaches of the Jewish past, where the Mishnah was created by a bunch of clever Jews arguing about the Torah, and the Gemara by a clutch of their descendants arguing about the Mishnah. If we do not talk we are nothing. If we fence in talk, limit it to permitted subjects, we are ghosts in a ghetto of our own making. If we are really clever, really creative, if we wring everything we can out of both fact and fiction, perhaps we can quiet our ghosts and resolve our problems. I see no better solution, but if you do, I’d be happy to discuss the matter.

Nina Caplan is drinks critic of The New Statesman and editor of Metropolitan, the Eurostar magazine. She also writes about everything that interests her — principally food and drink, the arts and travel — for publications including Time Out (where she used to be Features Editor), the Telegraph, the Financial Times, the Independent on Sunday and Condé Nast Traveller.

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

© Yuri Dojc. Last Folio: Textures of Jewish Life in Slovakia by Yuri Dojc and Katya Krausova published by Indiana University Press

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).

When Schulz’s work began to appear in English it was accompanied by the dramatic story of his death. As a Jew with valuable artistic talents, Schulz had enjoyed the protection of a Nazi officer named Felix Landau who employed him to paint murals for his children. During an anti-Jewish action known as ‘Black Thursday’ in Schulz’s home town of Drohobycz on November 19, 1942, Landau allegedly shot a Jewish dentist who was protected by another Nazi officer named Karl Günther.The story, told by Izydor Friedman to Ficowski, is that Günther shot Schulz in revenge, with the line ‘you shot my Jew; I shot your Jew’. These words, uttered over the body of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, are so ghoulishly mesmerising that they threaten to overshadow Schulz’s own luminous words.

He never gave up searching for Schulz’s legendary lost novel, The Messiah

This death-scene has acquired mythical status. For many Jewish writers, it has come to represent the rupture with a golden age of Jewish writing to which they lay claim by virtue of their own second-generation experience of displacement and unresolved trauma. David Grossman (See Under: Love), Cynthia Ozick (The Messiah of Stockholm), and Philip Roth (The Prague Orgy) have all built legends around Schulz, invoking his biographical figure as a trope in their own stories. Each of these works incorporates a fictionalised character or lost literary father based on the figure of Schulz, who is easily identified by references to his stories, the lost manuscript of his novel, The Messiah, and the dramatic story of his death.

Ozick’s The Messiah of Stockholm recounts the obsession of Lars Andemening, an unappreciated literary reviewer for The Stockholm Morgentorn, with the stories and drawings of Bruno Schulz, whom he believes to be his actual father. He embarks on a quest to find the lost manuscript of The Messiah and is aided and thwarted in his goal by an elderly book dealer, Heidi, and her usually absent husband, Dr. Eklund. He obtains a manuscript, authenticated by Dr. Eklund as Schulz’s, that describes a desolate Drohobycz in which the people have been replaced by stone idols.The Messiah arrives—a feathery creature with wings resembling pages from a book—to find the idols burning each other. The Messiah gives birth to a small bird that lands on all the idols, causing them to burn up, leaving Drohobycz empty. Having read it, Lars becomes suspicious. He accuses Dr. Eklund of forging the manuscript and rashly sets it on fire in its brass jar. Eklund is an acknowledged forger, but it is unclear in the end whether he has forged the manuscript or if the manuscript itself was real but he had faked other documents for the purpose of smuggling the manuscript out of Poland.

The symbolism of Ozick’s proposed reconstruction reflects a postwar vision of a Jewish land without Jews. Its former population, having escaped to the familiar destinations of Jewish emigrés, are replaced by stones. Even the stones are burned up,like the markers of Jewish graves bulldozed after the war to make way for progress.The remarkable fiction of Drohobycz has been ‘invaded by the characters of an unknown alphabet’.With the former Jews of Drohobycz succeeded only by their remnants, the text experiences its own Holocaust inside the brass amphora.
The problem of the work, and one it shares with Grossman’s and Roth’s, is the seeming incommensurability that the postwar generation feels with regard to the world of their parents and grandparents.With the loss of family ties to Russia and Eastern Europe, those born in the West also lost the linguistic ties necessary to maintain continuity with that culture. The age of Schulz is, for these later writers, what the Age of Genius was for Schulz, as he described it in a 1936 letter to the critic Andrzej Plesniewicz—a time of ‘primordial childhood’ or a ‘messianic time’, which ‘is promised and sworn to us by all mythologies’.

The age of Schulz is, for these later writers, what the age of genius was for Schulz… a time of ‘primordial childhood’ or a ‘messianic time’, which ‘is promised and sworn to us by all mythologies’.

Philip Roth’s epilogue to the Zuckerman trilogy, The Prague Orgy, is cast as a fragment from Nathan Zuckerman’s notebooks, in which he meets a Czech writer, Zdenek Sisovsky, and his companion, an actress, Eva Kalinova, (famous in Prague for her Chekhovian roles). Sisovsky describes his father as a Jew who wrote stories about Jews in Yiddish (unlike Schulz). This father has a Czech wife and children (who do not resemble him), but then the resemblance to Schulz grows: he is a shy high-school teacher who is protected during the war by a Nazi until he is killed by a rival Gestapo officer, a revenge killing for a Jewish dentist killed by the first officer, explained by the unmistakable line: ‘He shot my Jew; so I shot his.’ It later transpires, however, that Sisovsky’s father was hit by a bus, and the story about the revenge killing ‘happened to another writer, who didn’t even write inYiddish.Who didn’t have a wife or have a child.’ On the one hand, it seems that Roth is indulging in the creation of a literary father from Schulz’s biography, and at the same time, he recognises that it is a lie.The strength of Roth’s story rests in that tension between the desire to have had such a literary father and the acknowledgment of its impossibility. David Grossman’s ‘Bruno’ section of See Under: Love begins with an author from Drohobycz named Bruno, who is taken under the wing of the Polish writer and artist Zofia Nałkowska (known for his grotesque drawings in which he often portrays himself in submissive positions under the heel of a servant girl named Adela). Grossman’s Bruno is described as carrying a manuscript called The Messiah and jumping off a dock in the port of Danzig where he has escaped to see the Edward Munch exhibition.These details come from Schulz’s biography (except for the escape to Danzig) and several lines quoted later in the chapter come from Schulz’s texts and are attributed to those works by title: Bruno’s works are the works of Bruno Schulz, though Grossman’s Bruno is not actually Bruno Schulz—a fact acknowledged by the author-narrator within the work, who confirms that‘[i]t’s not their Bruno I’m writing about’ and then recounts his first encounter with The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. It goes without saying that he retells the ‘I killed your Jew’ story of Landau and Gunther, although Grossman reverses the sequence of events.Then he spins a tale of his Bruno being consumed by the ocean, stirring elements of reality (the words ‘I killed your Jew’) into fantasy—the moment of death expanded over about a hundred pages. Still haunted by these words years later, Grossman went on, in 2009, to publish an interview in The New Yorker with Ze’ev Fleischer, a survivor of the Nazi ‘Black Thursday’ action in which Schulz was killed. Fleischer’s account of the sequence of events leading up to Schulz’s death affirms the rivalry between Landau and Günther, but raises questions about whether Schulz was actually shot by Günther or by common soldiers, and whether he said those dramatic words at the time of Schulz’s death, if at all.

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss does not have an explicit Schulz figure or a manuscript called The Messiah but is shot through with fragments of Schulz: a lost manuscript that emerges from a correspondence between the author and a woman who inspired him; several references to The Street of Crocodiles; a mysterious writer character named Bruno who functions as the conscience of one of her protagonists;Leo Gursky, an aging retired Jewish locksmith who once aspired to be a writer but here functions as a lost father in search of his son. Gursky’s structural counter- weight—perhaps a literary granddaughter—is a young woman named Alma Singer in search of the ‘Alma’ she was named after, who inspired a character named Alma in a novel entitled The History of Love. In keeping with the ancient mythology mapped out in Schulz’s own writing, the evanescent Yiddish manuscript is drowned in a flood, although in the supremely interconnected world of Krauss’s novel nothing is ever quite lost: the lost father knows where his son is, and the son eventually knows where the father is, and the author of the lost manuscript knows who has it, and even when the original is lost it appears in translation and a translation of a translation. There is some hope, in the fragmented world, of restoring lost connections.

Poetry happens when short-circuits of sense occur between words, a sudden regeneration of the primeval myths.

Salman Rushdie offers a fascinating and unmistakable homage to Bruno Schulz, first identified by Canadian scholar and novelist Norman Ravvin, in the last section of The Moor’s Last Sigh. The hero and narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, travels from Cochin, India, to Benengeli (a mountain village in Andalusia) to see Vasco Miranda, a long lost admirer of his mother’s. The village takes on a magical quality akin to Schulz’s Drohobycz, particularly a district called the Street of Parasites which resembles the very ‘parasitical quarter’ Schulz names the ‘Street of Crocodiles’:
…I felt as if I were in some sort of interregnum, in some timeless zone under the sign of an hourglass in which the sand stood motionless, or a clepsydra whose quicksilver had ceased to flow. [...] I wandered down sausage-festooned streets of bakeries and cinnamon shops, smelling, instead, the sweet scents of meat and pastries and fresh-baked bread, and surrendered myself to the cryptic laws of the town.
The hourglass is a clear reference to Schulz’s second collection of stories—The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass—and is translated into Polish as klepsydra (either a sandglass or a mercury or water clock—‘clepsydra’ in English). ‘Under the sign of the hourglass’ is a common idiomatic form in Polish for referring to a business establishment, usually a cafe or restaurant, denoted by a distinctive sign or architectural ornament above the door. What Rushdie borrows from Schulz, however, is not merely an architectural idiom or biographical detail, but a metaphysical essence of Schulz’s imagined world: a sense of suspended time and a feeling of rootedness in displacement itself, which he transposes onto his own historical and cultural context.

In contrast with Western writers at pains to use Schulz as a cultural conduit to their own European past, are Polish and East European writers who come from the same cultural tradition as him. For these writers, Schulz is not a distant figure representing absence and loss but an exciting figure of the interwar avantgarde that paved the way for the most adventurous work of the postwar era in Poland. Key to this movement is Schulz’s idea that there was a mythological structure underlying all language and repre- sentation, which he articulated in his brilliant essay ‘The Mythicisation of Reality’:

Poetry happens when short-circuits of sense occur between words, a sudden regeneration of the primeval myths. . . . Not one scrap of an idea of ours does not originate in myth,isn’t transformed, mutilated, denatured mythology.The most fundamental function of the spirit is inventing fables, creating tales. . . . [T]he building materials [that the search for human knowledge] uses were used once before; they come from forgotten, fragmented tales or ‘histories’. Poetry recognises these lost meanings, restores words to their places, connects them by the old semantics.

This idea—that even the trivial and mundane had an underlying mythic structure—shaped the imaginations and work of countless Eastern European writers and artists, and the proliferation of Schulzean figures and references across this work testifies to this legacy.The Polish dramatist and visual artist,Tadeusz Kantor, uses characters and images from Schulz and from the work of Witold Gombrowicz’s interwar avant-garde fiction, in his great work for the stage, The Dead Class. Kantor’s work in the theatre began with underground productions of the pre-war dramas of Witkiewicz, who was also a great advocate of Schulz’s work. Kantor adapts characters like Adela the servant-girl, a sexually dominant woman in Schulz’s mythology: in Schulz, she sweeps her broom through the air to clear the birds from the father’s attic but in Kantor’s mythic world she becomes a force for destruction.There is a distinct pall of death hanging over this work,but it comes from Kantor’s own experience of the war rather than his references to the world of Bruno Schulz.

The contemporary Polish writer, Olga Tokarczuk, whose own novel Primeval and OtherTimes is required reading for Polish high school students, recently cited Schulz as one of her greatest influences. Unlike other writers she does not appropriate the paraphernalia of Schulz’s world. But she comes closer to its essence through this infusion of the everyday with the mythic. but As a trained Jungian psychologist, her work deals with the intersection of the archetypal with daily life and her recent novel, Drive Your Plough Through the Bones of the Dead (not yet translated into English) reveals a keen interest in astrology. A pre-scientific art of psychological or social types (like astrology) should, she suggests, be seen as a rich source of symbolism and wisdom, a power Schulz acknowledges in the story ‘Tailors Dummies’ in which the sight of two fish top-to-tail on a plate transforms ordinary time into mythic time:
We assembled again around the table, the shop assistants rubbed their hands, red from the cold, and the prose of their conversation suddenly revealed a full grown day, a gray and empty Tuesday, a day without tradition and without a face. But it was only when a dish appeared on the table containing two large fish in jelly lying side by side, head-to-tail, like a sign of the zodiac, that we recognised in them the coat of arms of that day, the calendar emblem of the nameless Tuesday.

In your novels, past calamities are nothing but milestones of self-discovery.

An obsession with Schulz seems to satisfy a particularly American search for the self, a trope not lost on the Eastern European writers of today. Anya Ulinich, the young Russian-American translingual author of the satirical novel, Petropolis (2007) about Russian immigration in the United States, has a story called ‘The Nurse and the Novelist’. This includes a conversation between a young male novelist and a woman who has sacrificed her own education to work as a nurse to support her graduate-student husband. The novelist, now successful and living with his family in a condominium near the nurse’s apartment, began his career as a depressed Manhattan writer wrestling with the demons of his identity and searching for his East European roots in a suburb of Minsk that had once been a shtetl destroyed during the war. They meet in a grocery store and arrange to have coffee, where the nurse tells the novelist: ‘In your novels, past calamities are nothing but milestones of self-discovery. The central question is: “Why am I collecting toenails in a jar?” It only takes a village of dead Jews to figure it out.’ Ulinich denies, despite the resem- blances, that this is a satire on Foer’s first novel, Everything is Illuminated, but it is instructive that it was widely ready as such, because it seems to capture what Foer’s detractors find so infuriating—the assumption of the identity, and, by implication, the suffering of others for narcissistic ends. Beyond Schulz and his oeuvre, there is a broader tension around the appropriation of East European identity that has manifested itself in contemporary ‘translingual’ writers like Gary Shteyngart, Andreï Makine, and Wladimir Kaminer—Russian-born writers with Western literary careers, writing in Western languages. Adrian Wanner, in an excellent essay on this subject published in The Slavic Review in 2008, recounts the illustrative tale of two reviews of Makine’s Le Testament Français by the Russian writer Tatiana Tolstaia, praising the novel for its ‘Russianness’ in The New York Review of Books and vilifying it in her review for Znamia for a Russian audience. Everything is Illuminated, in which an American student sharing the name of the author travels to Ukraine in search of the rescuer of his grandfather, likewise wasn’t received with as much enthusiasm in Ukraine as it was in the United States. Ukrainian scholar Ivan Katchanovski typified this response in his review in The Prague Post in 2004, criticising the novel for its negative stereotypes of Ukrainians and for omitting important details about the role of Ukrainian partisans who resisted the Nazis and defended Jews during the war in the towns named in the novel.
Perhaps these works that revive Schulz in fiction are only a sign that what we want is more Schulz. Krauss, at least, offers the hope that something lost is only lost to those who don’t know where it is or haven’t looked hard enough to find it. Perhaps the reason that Schulz appeals to writers struggling with a very personal sense of loss is that though he appears, from the postwar perspective, to have come from an Age of Genius, he, too, is writing about a lost world.The Drohobycz of Franz Joseph and the Emperor Maximilian, figures in Schulz’s postage stamp album, was actually a childhood legend (Franz Joseph having passed through the region in 1880, twelve years before Schulz’s birth): oil refineries and businesses were pushing aside the culture of that former era,and transitional urban spaces like the ‘Street of Crocodiles’ were displacing the ‘Cinnamon Shops’ of old. If modern readers don’t always recognise the absences in Schulz’s world, it is because he paints such a vivid picture with the remnants of the lost world that we can hardly recognise it as already lost. And if we strip away that richness, and use him as a proxy for a sense of loss we cannot remedy, we willfully blind ourselves to what does, miraculously, survive.
David A. Goldfarb is Curator of Literature and Humanities at the Polish Cultural Institute in New York and is currently working on a book about the work of Bruno Schulz.

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.

Born Iosif Grossman but accustomed to being called Vasya (diminutive of Vasily), Grossman adopted the emblematic Jewish-Russian pen name ‘Vasily Grossman’. His first novel, Glück Auf!, a Soviet Germinal devoid of desire or violence, is stronger and less formulaic than his next novel Stepan Kolchugin (1937-1940), a story of a working class youth’s path to Bolshevism. His early prose of the 1930s is a search for his own voice, via the styles and artistic devices of other Soviet writers, both Jewish and non-Jewish. Perhaps Grossman’s greatest inspiration was Chekhov (he would title one of his Stalingrad essays ‘Through Chekhov’s Eyes’; the essay zoomed in on the experience of the famous sniper Anatoly Chekhov). To write in a form that resisted pathos and narrative closure would remain a lifelong aim, even as a Tolstoyan novelistic ambition pulsed in his temples. These early works gave little indication of the authorial voice Grossman would acquire in 1941 at the war front reporting from the trenches, gathering his material directly from the fighting soldiers. There is courage and sacrifice in his wartime articles, but there is also humour and tenderness; despite being a time of personal trauma the war against Nazism was also, for Grossman, a time of glory—literary, civic, and military. For him and many other Jewish soldiers, including poets and novelists serving as military journalists, this was a war with double the cause and double the commitment. (In the notebooks, Grossman recorded a comment by a Jewish commanding officer that ‘in a war like this Jews should be fighting like fanatics’).

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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.Can you identify distinctly Jewish values underpinning The Believers?

No. Unless you want to claim disputatiousness as a Jewish value. I like to believe that my values are non-denominational.

How do you see the relationship between politics and religion within the book?

I suppose one of the things that the book suggests is that religious and ideological stances have more in common than is often acknowledged. The Talmudic tradition is as much about ratiocination and intellectual argument as it is about faith per se, while most strongly-held political positions have a good deal to do with emotional allegiance and faith. The militantly anti-religious books written in recent years by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett et al. do a fine job of skewering the illogic of religion, but the truth is all belief systems, including the ones that style themselves ‘scientific’, seem to come with an elaborate set of defences for fending off logical arguments that are injurious to themselves.

Could this book be set anywhere other than New York?

Yes, but it would be a different book. I’m pretty sure that the questions The Believers asks — How do we arrive at our beliefs? How do we cope when the beliefs on which we have staked our identity fail us? — are internationally applicable. But every story tends to suggest its own location and this one always seemed to me to be a New York story.

Religion, ideology, social activism, politics, marriage are all fraught with hypocrisy and compromise in The Believers. Why do the characters cling to them?

Well, you put it very bleakly. I’m aware that some people have read the novel as a satire on the hypocrisy of its protagonists, but I don’t see it that way. What I set out to write was a sympathetic portrait of people wrestling with various sorts of belief — wrestling being the operative word. They don’t just ‘cling’; they struggle in more or less good faith. I agree with Joel Litvinoff:  ‘Only ideas are perfect. People never are.’The book’s epigraph is a quote from Antonio Gramsci: ‘The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned.’In part, I think, the book is about the supreme difficulty that all of us have in meeting that challenge.

As Das gute Leben relates, he did plenty of things besides  merely — merely — survive. He was born into a Jewish working-class family in Vienna; his father, an itinerant salesman, was often away, and, too much for his mother to manage, the young Fred grew up largely on the street. He left school at fourteen, kept himself by casual labour in Austria and, later, in Holland and France, was a vagrant, an autodidact. He was often hungry. As he beautifully puts it, he had an ‘ahasverisches Selbstver ständnis’ — he was, by instinct and conviction, a wandering Jew. After 1945, he returned to Vienna, as a self-taught photographer and reporter. In 1955, he took up an invitation to study at the newly created Literaturinstitut in Leipzig, in East Germany, where he lived with his second wife, Maxie Wander, and wrote books, including illustrated travel books and reportage (most notably about Corsica and the south of France, for which he felt a lifelong attachment). In 1983,  following Maxie’s death in 1977, he went to live in Vienna again, with a third wife, Susanne.

It won’t come as a surprise to readers of The Seventh Well that Wander keeps a rigid sense of proportion about his life; childhood, youth, and camps are all over by about page 100 of a 400-page memoir. It is part of the man’s unassumingness, but also part of his philosophy of life, and of survival too, to keep things within limits, not to grumble or curse.  His cheery stoicism here reminds me of Joseph Brodsky, who ends his fortieth birthday poem, May 24, 1980:

What shall I say about my life?

That it’s long and abhors transparence.

Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelet, though, makes me vomit.
Yet until brown clay has been rammed down my larynx, only gratitude will be gushing from it. 

The camps don’t even come over as the very worst thing Wander was put through: his own portion of suffering always seems tolerable to him; what happens to others is always worse, the deaths of  friends and comrades in the camps,  but also Maxie’s death from cancer in 1977,  and most especially the death of their daughter,  Kitty, at the age of ten, suffocated and crushed in a landslide while playing on a building site outside their house in East Berlin.

The Seventh Well is dedicated to the memory of Kitty, and it is her loss and the sight perhaps of her body bringing to mind all the many, many dead bodies Wander saw in his youth, that stung him, twenty-three years after the end of the war,  to make his heroic effort to give them back their existence and their power of speech. The first body in particular, that of the Polish boy Yossl — frozen between life and a death no one is willing to credit — is perhaps the most nearly explicit memento to Kitty.

No doubt, publication in the Communist East at the height of the Cold War did much to stifle the book’s impact in the West; far from being, as one might have hoped, immune to such things, Holocaust literature has always been exaggeratedly and dismayingly susceptible to swings of fashion and timing. Primo Levi’s is only the most famous instance of such accidents of reception and translation — the silence greeting Se questo è un uomo on its first appearance in 1947 (prompting the author’s fifteen-year silence) matched only by the clamour attending Survival in Auschwitz (the same book in its American form and title) in the 1960s and 1970s. In the case of Fred Wander, it was the republication of Der siebente Brunnenin 2005 by the Göttingen publisher Wallstein Verlag, with an afterword by Ruth Klüger, that promised to get the book some of the attention it deserves.

Wander resists the temptation — if it ever was a temptation — to be exhaustive, to say everything, even about his own experience. ‘Six million murdered Jews!’ he writes in Das gute Leben. ‘It’s not possible to say anything about so many millions of dead. But three or four individuals, it might be possible to tell a story about!’ Therefore, even in his recollection, he tells highlights, he excerpts, he suggests a paradigm, like a mapmaker he represents to scale; and, in The Seventh Well, a novel, he fashions, and — from true ingredients — he invents. It seems to me that — the outstanding example would be Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table — the welter of extreme and unbearable content demands an exceptional awareness and use of form to master it, in Wander’s case the crystalline, episodic chapters relating individual destinies, but also such essay or prose poem subjects as ‘Bread’ or ‘Faces.’ Though it’s a complicated book ranging backwards and forwards, taking in different locations and different journeys and telling many different stories (it doesn’t observe the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action), there remains something admirably pared down about it. It consists, you might say — and again, this is not Aristotelian — of a middle and an end. It is a modestly brief account of the crisis of his experience in captivity, but even as it begins, Wander takes it away from passivity and suffering; instead he wants to learn how to tell a story, from the master storyteller Mendel Teichmann, the first of, his many tutors in The Seventh Well.

The book has a subtle but undeniable activist streak and implication. What, in different hands, might have been a protocol of hardiness, victimization and chance becomes, amazingly, a sort of Entwicklungsroman, a tale of personal development and learning. (Maxim Gorky, had he written The Seventh Well, might have called it My Universities.) In his writing, Wander displays the same measure of obduracy he displayed in the camps: a persistent desire to differentiate, to see and understand. The shutting down of curiosity and, vitally of gratitude, would have been the end, in either case. In Das gute Leben, Wander recalls a crucial and oft-repeated lesson: ‘“A man, if he is alive at all, lives by the words and pictures in his head,” I can still hear Vladimir Krumholz saying. He lies buried in Buchenwald.’ But the lesson is not invalidated by that; it remains true that a man dies as much from within as from external agencies.

The Seventh Well is the struggle to maintain an inner life. It is a work about absorption. If Wander is to exist at all, he exists with reference to, and by virtue of, what he can learn. ‘No man is an island, sufficient unto himself,’ says John Donne; it might have been Wander’s motto. (The books of Primo Levi discover and follow exactly the same principle.) Even the survival of a single man is a collaborative enterprise. And his collaborators, his witting or unwitting helpers, his preceptors, they in turn continue to exist in him, even if they perished. In its serial structure,  The Seventh Well has something of those grand old foundationist works like Dante’s Inferno or Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. The narrator at the centre meets people, falls under their sway, older, wiser, more vehement and more distinct. He describes them, gives back the monologizing Dantesque tumble of their speech, and then — like Krumholz above, or like the many, many dead here, Teichmann, or Pechmann, or the farmer Meir Bernstein or the singer Antonio or the nurse Karel or the child prodigy and sleepy rebel Tadeusz Moll, or the unnamed smiling bearded Jew in the children’s ward at the end — they die. But it is a redeemed, memorial-ized, collected death, death robbed of some of its anonymity and purposelessness and brutality. The Wander character at the heart of the book identifies himself, establishes himself and, you might say, grows by listening — to Teichmann, to Chukran, to Pepe, to Moll. Then, when he has listened enough, he speaks, telling his own story of incarceration in the camp of Rivesaltes near Perpignan in the southwest of France — the fires, the dancing, the rats, the fragrance of lavender and thyme — where he remembers first having heard the name Auschwitz. Then, once he has spoken, he learns in silence and delirium from the silent children around him, from what they do, from who they are. And at that point he begins to believe in a future again.

There is a strangely beautiful French term,  univers concentrationnaire — I don’t know who coined it. Primo Levi uses it — the ‘world of the camps,’ one would say in English. In The Seventh Well, Fred Wander evokes and describes this univers concentrationnaire, while all the time insisting, by memory, by faith and by listening to the accounts of others, that there is also a real world outside the camps. Granted, the camps are a law unto themselves, a deformed closed system, but they are not finally a separate or substitute world. More a microcosm of the real world, by synecdoche, by pars pro toto. In Das gute Leben he puts it like this:

Basically the same rules and conditions obtained in the camps as in the world beyond the barbed wire — which is to say power and violence,  opportunism and corruption — only in an exaggerated, distorted form.
But there is another side to this as well, which is hardly ever mentioned, but which seems even more crucial to me: the fact that you could observe — if you had eyes to see — how a few of us struggled to keep alive our true and actual selves, our self-respect, our human bearing, some vestige of our human dignity.

While at no stage blinding himself to the realities of the camps — the cruelty, the cold, the disease, the degradation — Wander retains an eerily sharp awareness of what one might call the persistences and the intrusions of the greater,  truer world outside: such things as memories, talents, stories, beliefs, and hopes. There are physical things such as prayer shawls, photographs, scraps of letters,  ingeniously made tools and shoes, but more powerful are the immaterial things.

In the oddest, most heroic way, these most physical of settings — Auschwitz,  Buchenwald,  Crawinkel — are relegated to a shadow-world,  and what really defines existence are such shadowy things as words and stories.  Even in his monochrome,  death-bounded circumstances, where all are reduced to wretchedness and anonymity, he registers age, class, character, nationality, religion,  and language. He becomes aware (surely for the first time) of the many types of Jews — not types, of course, but individuals — and in addition to the Jews, of the politicals, the gypsies, the sexually deviant. Inmates vie for airtime for their stories — like ‘de Groot’ and ‘Chukran’. The faithful are celebrating Passover in the wash-barracks, and Wander hears Baudelaire and Lear, he is taken on phantom nocturnal tours of the Louvre, he experiences renditions of grand opera, he attends learned debates on Flaubert and Stendhal, he can smell the air in cities where he has never been. He becomes acquainted with Jewish mysticism, with the arguments of Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the doctrinaire patience of Communists. A grain of wheat in a piece of bread unfolds for Wander into landscape and climate, the slab of wood off which the bread is eaten — in itself, an earnest parody of something liturgical — comes to stand for all forests everywhere. He becomes a connoisseur (like the soldiers in the trenches of the First World War) of sunrises and sunsets, he is even able to take some pleasure in the monstrous paramilitary airs and graces of some of the camp elders and the Prominenten.

The severe and harrowing depletion, harshness, reduction, brutality — concentration, even — is replenished. In Wander’s account and, one may hazard, his experience, the camp became an unreal world in which the ‘unrealities,’ or the subversive ‘lesser’ or ‘inconsequential’ realities, not only gave value and consolation, but helped in the determined effort to turn this world upside down, so that monochrome became colour, a board (in the hands of Pechmann) became a jazz ensemble,  meals and women and family were conjured out of thin air, barked orders in German were greeted with rebel songs and profanities in Spanish, where two starving prisoners put on an impromptu dumbshow sketch of a man ordering a meal in a restaurant. And the common name for all these things? If one may venture to say such a thing, the indestructibility of the human spirit.

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.’
The man I knew is not much present in this book. This is partly because it is not in the ordinary sense a biography, though it illuminates much about Amichai’s life I did not guess. It is a scholarly exploration of his German childhood, a painful early love affair and the years before the state of Israel was established. Nili Scharf Gold was given access to a box of letters, sealed in 1948, by Ruth Z, — as she is named in the book — in New York, after Amichai’s death. This is a treasure trove of 98 love letters written by Amichai to Ruth Z after she left Israel for the States. They were written in the months after the United Nations vote on 29 November 1947, which recognised the right of the Jews to a sovereign state in Palestine.
Read alongside jottings in two hand-bound notebooks from Yale’s Beinecke Library, the letters serve as a journal of the period before Amichai became a published poet. The material chronicles far more than Amichai’s youthful emotions at the end of a love affair; they also record, invaluably, the details of his daily life, his early ambitions to become a poet and his determination to build a life in Palestine. The letters resurrect the voice of a boy whose proud Hebrew surname, Amichai — ‘my people lives’ — was chosen for him by Ruth Z. The name was eminently suitable to an Israeli poet, whose aspirations were already clear to the poet himself. Sadly, as Amichai wrote in a poem 33 years later:

she fled to America
and left me with my new name

Our attention is held because Amichai writes as if every feeling he has will be of interest to the woman he loves. So it is he reveals openly his memories of growing up in Wuerzberg, Germany, a city of bridges, statues and cobblestone alleys, surrounded by a Bavarian landscape wholly different from that of Israel. Ludwig, as he was called in those years, lived in an orthodox Jewish home filled with books and music, in which Shabbat was a special day, but not an oppressive one. His father was much loved by his children, and his love filled the household. The Torah service was familiar to the young boy.
His girlfriend in his school days, before the Nazi threat led the family to leave for Palestine, was Little Ruth, who was also Jewish. In December 1934, after some childish argument, Little Ruth rode off angrily on a borrowed bicycle and was pinned so seriously between two cars that one of her legs had to be amputated. Amichai felt some responsibility.Their friendship did not come to an end, however, and Amichai remembers an occasion when they were both attacked by boys from Hitler Youth, and the sound of the thugs beating Little Ruth’s wooden leg continued to haunt him. He always felt remorseful at failing to write to her after his family left Germany. The girl died in the Holocaust.
The letters give a memorable picture of Amichai as a young man who was a teacher by day and a soldier by night. It wasn’t the life he wanted. But the letters show him as an obedient if reluctant soldier. They describe his first encounter with gunfire on 11 December 1947 while on guard duty — to which he took a bag of books — his first battle, and his blowing up of the Arab houses from which gunfire had come. His own wish to be out of the conflict is expressed in a refrain running through one of his most famous poems:

Like slits in a tank, their eyes were uncanny
I’m always the few and they are the many.
I must answer. They can interrogate my head.
But I want to die in my own bed.

The sketches of daily life in these letters are invaluable. These are days that many Israelis and most of the outside world has forgotten, days when the outcome for Israel was far from certain: the daily risks palpable, the details vivid and surprising. For instance he describes the special scent of children’s fear: ‘sweat and wool wet with urine’
.    All this is fascinating, but the driving thesis of Nili Scharf Gold’s book is her contention that he needed to cover up the depth of his involvement with his German childhood and particularly his love of German literature in order to become a good Israeli citizen, and even more so to become a national poet. I was not altogether convinced by this. I find his wish to bury that part of his life less surprising than she does. Memories of Germany were raw, and fugitives from European murders customarily shed more than their names. The brilliant novelist Aharon Appelfeld, who survived in the forests as a young child, abandoned his native German speech altogether when he reached Israel. Amichai’s family of course arrived in what was then Palestine not long after the Nazis took over, and so made a less brutal transition. Nevertheless, there were many reasons other than ambition to make the young Amichai reluctant to identify with the European world he had left.
Scharf Gold has discovered in these papers a part of Amichai’s development which she insists he has decided to erase. If this were so, would he have used similar material in his novel Not of this time, not of this place? She makes much of his reverence for Rilke, but is there any European poet of that period who did not feel the power of Rilke as a poet?
There is genuinely new and useful material is this book. Scharf Gold modifies Amichai’s account of Israel’s War of Independence as the trigger for his own poetic aspirations, and shows that his emotional situation in 1947–48 was far more complex. She finds that Amichai’s important poem, ‘In the Public Gardens’, was intended as a birthday poem for Ruth Z. But Amichai wanted to become an Israeli even more forcibly and with stronger reasons than immigrants to the United States wanted to become Americans. He wanted to write in the present about the world around him. He was not unreasonable when he pointed out in a poignant lyric: ‘Jerusalem is full of used Jews worn out by history.’
He was not insensitive to the conflicts within his homeland, but unlike, say Natan Zach, he was compassionate rather than indignant, more sad than angry. In his poem, ‘Jerusalem 1967’, he wrote memorably, as he looked at an Arab’s hole-in-the-wall shop selling buttons and zippers and spools of thread close to the Damascus gate,

I told him in my heart that my father too
Had a shop like this, with thread and buttons.
I explained to him in my heart about all the decades
And the causes and the events, why I am now here
And my father’s shop was burned there, and he is buried here’

Nili Scharf Gold is an impressive scholar, and her reading of Amichai’s poems is enormously valuable. She presents us with a vulnerable and charming young man, as good looking as the young face on the cover of this book. The portrait is not much like the man I knew, but then I never knew Amichai as a young man, and this is a peril all biographers have to confront. I remember him as less desperate, more affectionate, warmer. He was always Israel’s best ambassador whether on a public stage or in a social gathering, and that is the memory that will endure. But Nili Scharf Gold has given us fresh look and an important book. Anyone interested in Amichai will be grateful for it.

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.
Most of IJV’s founding statement consists of generalities in favour of human rights, peace and security for Israelis and Palestinians, and against racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. These are sentiments to which one hopes any mainstream British Jewish leader would subscribe. Similarly, the aspiration for a negotiated settlement between Israel and the Palestinians (without mentioning specifics in terms of timetable, territory, refugees, the status of Jerusalem or anything else) is not in itself especially contentious. What really caused the vitriol was IJV’s challenge to the institutions and attitudes within British Jewry in their declaration that ‘those who claim to speak on behalf of Jews in Britain (my italics) and other countries consistently put support for the policies of an occupying power [the Israeli government] above the human rights of an occupied people [the Palestinians]’. They also reject accusations of ‘disloyalty’ made against Jews who oppose Israeli government policies. The bitterness that IJV generated was not really surprising; no issue has the potential to generate bad feeling more quickly among British Jews than the politics of Israel-Palestine. IJV’s platform was as much about this community as anything happening between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan.
But was this more than a storm in a bowl of borscht? The publication over a year later of A Time to Speak Out, a volume of twenty-seven short essays by IJV signatories and sympathisers (including two involved in similar Jewish initiatives in the United States and Australia), provides an opportunity to take stock. A book, after all, can give space for more nuanced and measured arguments than those usually associated with the immediacy of newspapers, the Internet, or the studios of Newsnight.

This volume does dispel some myths about IJV’s signatories. They are not by definition estranged from Jewish life. The contributors include a some-time synagogue president, a university Jewish society chair, a graduate of Leo Baeck College, and the director of  the Institute for Jewish Policy Research. Many of the essays demonstrate a meaningful intellectual engagement with issues of Jewish identity, which goes beyond the politics of Israel-Palestine. This is not surprising if one considers that the contributors have between them published on matters of Jewish interest ranging from spirituality, the Holocaust and Primo Levi, to Jewish music and cooking. Furthermore, several essays include reflections on family histories and personal experiences of Jewish life. ‘“What are you then?” people ask, as they detect my foreign accent,’ begins Donald Sasson’s contribution: a challenge that has been faced at one time or another by members of every Jewish family in Britain. There is no uniformity in the response of the contributors to questions of Jewish identity, nor is there any sense that being an IJV signatory entails any disdain for Jewish life. Jon Benjamin, Chief Executive of the Board of Deputies, commented ‘If [they] chose to engage with the institutions of the Jewish community, rather than shouting from the sidelines, they may find that most Jews disagree with much of what they say’. On the basis of this volume, he and others will have to do much better to cast IJV’s signatories as inherently marginal to British Jewish life.

This volume does not demonise Israel. Jeremy Montagu explains that he became an IJV signatory ‘as a Jew who loves and supports Israel, who has children and grandchildren who live there, who visits the country regularly’. Several contributors have spent years living in Israel. The focus of the political comments by all the contributors is to change Israeli government policies, not to vilify the state or the society; even the two who describe themselves as non-Zionist do not suggest that the state should be radically reconfigured. These essays cite the work of Israeli initiatives such as B’Tselem and Breaking the Silence, and individuals such as Tom Segev, Uri Avnery and the former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg. Thus the contributors to this volume align themselves with a political minority among Jewish Israelis, but to deduce from this that they must be the enemies of Israel per se is entirely unconvincing.

In addition to being half-hearted Jews, and to hating Israel, the third major accusation made against IJV is that they have manufactured the claim that they are marginalised by the ‘official’ bodies of the community. It is true that criticism of Israeli policies is freely heard in the general press, but Emma Clyne’s contribution to this volume illustrates that this need not be the case within the Jewish community. As chair of her university’s Jewish student society, she was troubled by the limited interest of the national Union of Jewish Students (UJS) in any aspect of Jewish life beyond supporting Israeli government politics. This came to a head when her society attempted to hold a meeting at which three IJV signatories would speak on nationalism and Jewish identity. Ms Clyne resisted UJS’s demand that she cancel the meeting (backed up by an accusation of ‘disloyalty’ to the Jewish community). UJS styles itself as a non-political body for all Jewish students. Yet this account of the group’s activities (which chimes completely with this reviewer’s observations over seven years as an undergraduate and graduate student) suggests that it sees its role as policing obedience to a communal ‘line’ on Israel-Palestine, and delegitimising those who stray rather than respecting the diversity of Jewish opinion.  Together with the essay on communal politics by Antony Lerman (director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research), this contribution will make it difficult for anyone to be complacent about the room for open debate in the official bodies of our community.

On the one hand A Time to Speak Out dispels myths about IJV, yet at the same time the volume’s editors engage in what feels like an attempt at some myth-making of their own. IJV is very far from being the first British Jewish group with this platform. The Israeli movements Meretz and Peace Now have always had active British branches; there is little or nothing in IJV’s declaration that contradicts their positions. Among several home- grown organisations, the Jewish Socialists’ Group has existed since the mid-1970s, while Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JfJfP, founded in 2002) remains by far the largest and most active of the community’s critics of Israeli policies towards Palestinians. (JfJfP has over 1,300 signatories, IJV has fewer than 600). Yet the editors’ introduction to this volume fails to mention any of these other groups, implicitly presenting their initiative as the first challenge to an Anglo-Jewish consensus on Israel-Palestine. This impression is quietly corrected in some of the contributions that follow, and is not as serious as the distortions to which IJV has been subject, but it is unsettling nonetheless.

A second piece of incipient myth-making comes from the founding document of IJV (reproduced in this volume), which states that ‘we hereby reclaim the tradition of Jewish support for universal human freedoms, human rights and social justice’. This statement, together with the editors’ introduction, and IJV’s other public pronouncements, fails to acknowledge that there is in Britain a flourishing network of Jewish organisations engaged with wide-ranging questions of human rights. At a local level there are numerous synagogues that purchase Fairtrade products, or provide practical support for asylum seekers, or offer a platform for campaigning against human rights violations in Darfur. At a national level, the development charity Tzedek, René Cassin (and its initiative the Jewish Human Rights Network), JCORE, the Make Poverty History Jewish Coalition, as well as the major synagogue bodies Liberal Judaism and Reform Judiasm, among others, all articulate Jewish support for universal human rights. In recent years they have gone far beyond traditional and uncontentious Jewish charitable concerns to tackle some politically charged topics.
It is a pity that no British Jewish group yet systematically integrates an analysis of human rights violations in Israel-Palestine into a universalist political vision. (Although perhaps discretion is the better part of valour; it would be a pity if worthwhile universalist projects were derailed by debates about Israel-Palestine). IJV as a group has gone in the opposite direction, speaking the language of universal human rights but focusing on Israel-Palestine to the exclusion of other issues. It has not even addressed topics that involve Israeli government policies not directly connected to Palestinians, including the development of weapons of mass destruction, the denial of full legal standing to non-Orthodox Jewish denominations or the activities of Israeli mercenaries. A number of Israeli groups, such as Rabbis for Human Rights and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, have succeeded in combining campaigns on a range of universal human rights with trenchant engagement in the specific circumstances of Israel-Palestine. Perhaps attempting to bridge the gap would be a useful activity for IJV; and it is clear from this volume that many of its signatories are exercised by human rights issues far beyond Israel-Palestine.

A Time to Speak Out is unlikely to change the attitudes of anyone, Jewish or not, on questions of Israeli-Palestinian politics. The volume as a whole does not attempt to say anything about facts or attitudes on the ground in Israel-Palestine which are not amply documented elsewhere. This volume, like the furore that surrounded IJV’s launch, is really about being Jewish in Britain, and on this subject it provides food for thought. As the editors acknowledge, there is real variety among their contributors, but it is possible to make out some interesting unifying themes. Most notable is that IJV’s signatories have chosen to live in Britain. This is, after all, a very good place to be Jewish. We are able to participate fully in wider society, while enjoying the benefits of a fairly well-developed communal infrastructure, from Jewdas to Gateshead Yeshiva to Limmud. The contributors as a whole seem comfortable in their skins as Jews in Britian. This is worth emphasising, because the overwhelming experience of British Jews is tolerable comfort (as is not the case for most other ethnic and religious minorities in this country), but far too often the community is characterised as being under siege by anti-Semities. The volume as a whole (and Julia Bard’s contribution in particular) serves as a critique to this notion.
It is also worth noting that the contributors are unapologetic about not living in Israel. The longer-established Meretz UK and British Friends of Peace Now derive their status from their left-Zionist Israeli parent groups, but IJV and JfJfP are products of the British Jewish world. When Ehud Olmert said that ‘it would be good if every Jew in the world would make aliyah to Israel’ he expressed a widespread assumption within the Israeli political establishment, which is ultimately dismissive of Jewish life in Britain and across the world (even if it values diaspora support for Israeli policies). Actually, it would not be good, now or in the future, for all Jews to move to Israel, and it is doubtful that any serious British Jewish leader would really welcome communal self-destruction though aliyah. Yet the rhetoric of political solidarity with Israeli policies prevents a challenge to the view that diaspora communities are secondary to Israel. By placing participation in Jewish debate ahead of ‘Israel solidarity’, the essays in the volume implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) point towards a more self-confident basis for Jewish life in Britain than that articulated by many of the community’s established leaders.

This volume also draws attention to the variety of Jewish stories in Britain. The notion that we all came from the shtetl is as unsatisfactory as the one that we are all on our way to make aliyah. Some of the most compelling involve South Africa. Stan Cohen’s reflections on seventeen years as a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem draw in part on his South African experiences. Richard Kuper (a founder of JfJfP) and Gillian Slovo similarly came to Britain due to their participation in the struggle against apartheid. It is worth reflecting both on why these Jews have made their homes in Britain and what has prompted their involvement with IJV. Other British-based contributors talk of personal and family stories relating to Australia and Sweden, Egypt and France. Sami Zubaida’s thoughts on being an Iraqi Jew are a salutary reminder that these have not always been mutually exclusive categories. Cumulatively these essays, together with the contributions from Australian and American sympathisers, present an ever-changing multi-centred Jewish geography, which is much more satisfying than the oft-repeated but over-simplistic Israel-Diaspora dichotomy.

The biggest division among the contributors here is not somewhere on a left-right spectrum of Israeli politics. Rather, it concerns their attitudes towards Jewish identity. The bulk of these contributors situate their position on Israel-Palestine in the context of more general reflections on Jewish life, but a noticeable minority do not. The tactical employment of Jewish identity in pursuit of justice for Palestinians may be a worthwhile political project, but it does not on its own make for a satisfying contribution to Jewish life. It may be, though, that this limitation is due in part to editorial policy. Most of these essays are too short. The best dozen or so contributions could have been extended to make for a more thoughtful and challenging whole, and move further beyond the journalistic imperatives of the debate surrounding IJV’s launch. Even if IJV is less than the sum of its parts, this volume as a whole deserves neither to be dismissed nor feted. Is it too much to hope that it can simply be received thoughtfully?

Dr Bernard Gowers is a historian and a member of the Jewish community in Oxford

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. Details from the Wallace Collection: The Wallace Collection, Manchester Square, London W1U 3BN; tel.: 020 7563 9500. The exhibition was first shown in Paris in 2007. The exhibition’s curator, Maria Stuerzebecher, will be giving a lecture on the subject: ‘The Erfurt Treasure: A Jewish hoard from Thuringia at the time of the Black Death’ at the Society of Jewellery Historians at the Society of Antiquaries, Burlington House on February 24th, 2009. Enquiries to the Society of Jewellery Historians
Scientific Research, The British Museum, London WC1B 3DG; contact: info@societyofjewelleryhistorians.ac.uk

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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; dealers desperately competing for the best location for their booth at Basel; the sneering condescension of established collectors towards arriviste ‘speculators’. As a ‘statusphere’ — Thornton borrows the word from Tom Wolfe — the art world revolves around these sorts of rituals of power and authority. Sometimes it’s Thornton herself on the receiving end: when she asks a friend of Turner Prize-nominated Rebecca Warren to help broker an interview with the sculptor, Thornton gets told: ‘She doesn’t need to talk to you. She’s going to win anyway!’(In fact, painter Tomma Abts wins.)
Fortunately others are more forthcoming. Each event is interwoven with conversations with art world players, some of whom are surprisingly upfront: Nick Serota quietly criticizing previous Turner Prize juries for not choosing enough women winners, for instance; Amy Cappellazzo, a Christie’s codirector, advising on the kind of works that sell well at auction (blue or red paintings, not brown ones, is the first rule). Though, it has to be said, many interviewees are much more circumspect; or, alternatively, tend to endlessly spout vacuous art-speak.
Still, for a casual overview of how the international art scene operates, in all its ruthless, eccentric, spectacular glory, Seven Days in the Art World is hard to beat. Apart from a few omissions — no mention of the explosion in Chinese contemporary art, for example — Thornton manages to evoke this giddy global circuit well, with its merry-go-round of bi- and triennials, its perpetually itinerant curators and artists. In particular, she captures the atmosphere of fraught, febrile excitement that accompanies such unprecedentedly vast sums of money — where every auction and fair breaks previous sales records, but where dealers can be heard anxiously whispering about how the bubble has to burst sometime.
As it turns out, they’re right. While Seven Days in the Art World could have been written at almost any time during the past decade, it has the misfortune to be published in what’s suddenly a completely different economic climate. Although nobody really knows yet how the art market will fare, Thornton’s book already seems rather dated — not that that’s her fault, of course.
What is her fault, though, is the rather superficial tone that runs throughout the book. While she carefully notes all the peripheral details — the clothes people wear, the cars they drive, the kind of desk Serota has in his office — the art itself tends to get skated over too briefly, as if it was merely an adjunct to the real business of selling — which to be fair, is how a quite a few of the dealers seem to regard it.
For this reason, the most interesting chapter in the book is the one set in the Artforum offices — not only because it’s one of the few times when the value of art, beyond its commodity status, is considered; but also because it reflects on what Thornton herself is doing: writing about art. During a conversation with Thomas Crow, a regarded art historian and critic, a comment gets made that functions as an indictment of Thornton’s book as a whole: bemoaning the art world’s cult of personality, Crow states that ‘there has to be a space between you and the people that you’re writing about, so you’re not just echoing the situation you’re trying to analyze.’.
It’s this distance that Thornton’s own writing lacks. Although she’s not writing art criticism as such, Seven Days in the Art World could have done with being more opinionated and analytic; more, well, critical. As it is, Thornton gives the impression of sharing the art world’s values too fully. There’s too much respect given to the personalities she interviews, too many questions that go begging — about how the art market shapes art historical importance, for instance; or about the effect of the endless biennial circuit on the kind of art that gets made. Without these sorts of issue being explored, there’s little sense of why any of this art stuff should actually matter in the first place.

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.
Whereas other correspondents had fled Brunete, Taro remained, excited to be taking her best pictures yet. But she knew it was time to leave. That afternoon she jumped on to the running board of a vehicle transporting wounded to the nearby village of Villanueva. It proved a fatal leap. A Republican tank struck Taro and threw her from the car. She died hours later, her stomach lacerated by the impact. She was 26 years old: the first female correspondent to die on the front line.
It is here, at her dramatic death in Spain, that you feel Maspero should begin his telling. Or perhaps at her grave in Père Lachaise cemetery, Paris, where Taro was given the funeral of a martyr, mourned by thousands, her tomb designed by Alberto Giacometti. Today, wandering its overgrown paths, the tomb lies neglected, its inscription illegible. If anything inspires a refocusing of the spotlight of history, it is this sight. But instead, Maspero’s mission to bring Taro out of the shadows begins with an imagined interview, an illusory meeting with an elderly Taro, fragile and tiny, who talks about Spain, about Capa, about her cats. You can’t help but feel cheated by his crafted conceit. And it’s with relief when the true narrative of her life begins.
Gerda Taro was born Gerta Pohorylle to Polish Jews in Stuttgart. By the time Hitler took power Gerta was already involved in anti-Nazi activities. It was this political commitment that led to her arrest in 1933 aged 23. The young Gerta fled to Paris where she met Hungarian émigre Andrei Freidman. He was 20, she was 24. Both were well read, left wing and idealistic. Both were good looking, struggling but ambitious. Both were Jewish refugees living in Paris. It wasn’t long before they fell in love.
It was through the couple’s shared émigre identity and their mutual love of photography that the phenomenon of Robert Capa was born. It was in fact Taro who created Capa. In a city reverberating with anti-Semitism to have a professional name that sounded German and Jewish was a hindrance at best. Instead, Taro picked a new name: Capa. Aurally it evoked the quality of Hollywood director Frank Capra and, crucially, seemed to be a name from nowhere. Inspired by the same reasons, and no doubt by the allure of Greta Garbo, Gerta Pohorylle also changed her name, to Gerda Taro. But for now, the two would work together under the contrived guise of photographic legend Robert Capa.
Andrei taught Taro how to use a Leica and Rolleiflex camera. They began to cover the war in Spain, travelling from Barcelona to the front at Cordoba. Today’s dispatches of rolling news and instant pictures were a mere glint in the eye. The wireless let the voices of war drift into living rooms, but they were faceless voices. Editors were desperate for photographs from the front, true images of the war that had gripped Europe’s imagination. Taro and Capa provided publications such as Ce Soir and Regards with that visual immediacy, confronting readers with unprecedented realism, and suffering.
Maspero is at his best when placing Taro in context of place and time, in characterising her as a free spirit, achingly glamorous in the midst of the dust and detritus of war. It is in the details that his book succeeds: the description of Taro arriving in a German prison cell dressed to go dancing. Or the stylish figure she cut, always in heels, even on the front line. The minutiae of the Capa invention and of her growing professional independence are beguiling. Maspero paints a picture of a woman whose career was in the ascendant, who resisted Capa’s proposal of marriage but loved him and worked with him, criss-crossing Spain to bring images of the war to Europe’s readership. The book grapples with the question of whether Taro was a communist but leaves you little the wiser. Maspero loads his discussion by siting at its climax Taro’s famous photo of a republican soldier replacing the nationalist slogan ‘Ariba Espana’ with ‘Viva Russia.’ What matters, surely, is that Taro — like Capa — was passionate about the need to stem the fascist tide that was sweeping across Europe.
Maspero depicts Taro and Capa as electrons, with the autonomy of free movement, despite being effectively embedded with the Soviet-controlled troops. There is no doubt that Taro was light of touch and seduced everyone she met, as did Capa. She was a risk taker, both politically and in her work. But she was also fiercely intrepid. This fact doesn’t come through enough. Lightness, bravery and political commitment are not mutually exclusive. Taro may have been a woman in a man’s world, but you never forget this biography is written by a man.
Maspero’s passion for Taro is an enticing premise, yet is undermined by the unsatisfying truth that he never really allows Taro to step out of the shadows, despite his title’s claim. The book’s greatest irony is that it is Maspero himself who overshadows Taro with his narrative intrusions and conjecture. His quest for biographical truth descends repeatedly into hazy fictionalised imaginings. Maspero admits in his postscript that his fascination for Taro took form through fiction: first through two characters in his novel The Fig Tree then through his short story Gerda. This genesis is apparent throughout, and the frequent vacillation from biography to fantasy is disorientating.
Any biography of Gerda Taro deserves promotion without caveats. Her story needs to be told. Taro was the woman who invented Robert Capa; who when she died Capa claimed his life ‘came to a kind of end’ despite later affairs with Vivien Leigh and Ingrid Bergman. She was the woman who fled the Nazis to pursue her political ideals; the woman whose photos encapsulate what Orwell famously remembered of the war: ‘First of all the physical memories, the sounds, the smells and the surfaces of things.’
And as to Maspero’s claim that each of us must harbour a desire to be Taro or Capa? His claim is true, at least for me. Gerda Taro has long lingered within the perimeters of my imagination. My great uncle, Dezo Hoffmann, was a Czech photojournalist sent on assignment to Spain in 1936. He was soon caught up in the impassioned anti-fascist struggle that gripped Taro and Capa. His story, like that of Taro and Capa, has always inspired me. But Maspero’s claim is also accurate because we all surely aspire, to some degree, to the tight fit between conviction and existence that Taro, in her brief tragic life, achieved.

Photographs by Gerda Taro
Previous spread:
Republican militiawoman training on the beach, outside Barcelona, August 1936 © International Center of Photography.
This spread:
Boy wearing cap of the FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation), Barcelona, August 1936 © International Center of Photography.
Recruitment and training of the new People’s Army, Valencia March 1937 © International Center of Photography.
Republican soldiers La Granjuela, Cordoba front, Spain, June 1937, © International Center of Photography.
A Gerda Taro exhibition is on at Barbican Art Gallery until 25 January 2009.  www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery

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.
Its epigraph, Marina Tsvetaeva’s All poets are Jews, sets The Russian Jerusalem’s tone. The protagonist enters ‘St Petersburg, 1913’ by way of ‘Raskolnikov’s police station’ and its literate inspector, and: ‘Was this the Underworld? A steamy cloud which smelt of hot irons on damp cloth like an old-fashioned laundry. There were twittering sounds, like birds. Or the sound of grasshoppers rubbing their legs together. It was the sound made by human shadows: a crowd of them pressed towards me, blindly, their flesh seemingly as flimsy as that of moths.’ For this is more than merely the ghost town of history.  Feinstein shows us that the hellish fate of Russia’s twentieth-century poets, especially those with Jewish backgrounds or connections, still matters. Marina Tsvetaeva — whom Feinstein was the first to translate into English — becomes the poet’s Virgil as she enters this Inferno.  The charged writing demonstrates instantly how Tsvetaeva is both role model and symbol. Despite her first appearance in its pages as an anonymous refugee, she is presented as an object of literary and personal admiration.
For this is a book which deals not only with the roles of poet, Jew and woman as heretic, but with the passionate romance between writer and reader. That enchantment, the novel seems to suggest, is so potent it can break through the page, precipitating the reader into a writer’s world with all the immediacy of which imagination and emotion are capable.  That it does so here is a function of the high literacy of the writing. But Feinstein is also a master storyteller.  There’s no tricksy palimpsest narrative or role-swapping here. Instead she tells the story of that romance in straightforward terms: as a quest for how things will turn out, in which the reader is led on — educated in the true sense of that word — by the writer.
The world into which Feinstein herself leads us is of course highly educated in every sense. Not only is her own knowledge of Russian literary history displayed with the casual touch of thorough-going authority; but the world about which she’s writing is a highly-cultivated one, in which a group of exceptional protagonists are alert and more than sympathetic to the giant strides each accomplishes and the challenges each faces. Sometimes, as on the famous occasion when Stalin rang Pasternak to ask whether Mandelstam was a genius, their fates collide. The collegiate sense of a generation that became a movement binds the book’s individual stories skilfully together. What might otherwise read as a series of hammer blows emerges instead as pattern. This is largely that of the Stalinist purges; but such is the book’s coherence — and indeed its page-turning intensity — that Feinstein is able to finish with the exile and fatal illness of Joseph Brodsky, at the very end of the century, with no sense of its consistency being broken. Indeed, it’s to Brodsky that she gives The Russian Jerusalem’s last word.
His verdict is that ‘what remains is the book’ . But, at least for British readers, it’s hard to escape hearing in these words an echo or contradictio to Philip Larkin’s famous ‘What remains of us is love’. And, indeed, The Russian Jerusalem itself suggests that something more than books does remain. The passion — both intensity and sacrifice — of poets from the Russian Silver Age and beyond does count for something: whether to inspire the poets who follow them or remind us all of the lessons of history.  Feinstein shows us all this with the lyric intensity of a true poet.

Fiona Sampson’s latest book is Common Prayer (2007), shortlisted for the T. S.Eliot Prize.  She is the Editor of Poetry Review.

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.
Vapynar left her native Russia in 1994 and became fluent in English only after settling in New York. She drew on the immigrant experience in her first collection of short stories, the critically acclaimed There Are Jews in My House, and her subsequent novel, The Memoirs of a Muse. Here she continues to address displacement, loneliness and loss of status with wry humour and lightness of touch, sidestepping sentimentality and inviting genuine sympathy for her disenfranchised characters; isolated individuals slaving to send money to their aspirational families back home; scientists, artists and intellectuals turned into computer programmers in the heat of the melting pot.

In the opening story, ‘A Bunch of Broccoli on the Third Shelf’, Nina is one such computer programmer. But unlike her new circle of bohemian fellow-immigrants, Nina was a computer programmer in Russia too. She feels dull among these aquaintances, to whom her husband introduces her simply as ‘a lover of vegetables’. Since her arrival in the United States, buying vegetables has been Nina’s passion. She revels sensuously in the delights of the markets and lingers over receipe books in bed, meanwhile neglecting to cook what she has bought and allowing it to rot in the ‘vegetable graveyard’ of her fridge. When her husband leaves her, Nina can only stare numbly at the index in her cookbooks: ‘broccoli:gratin, 17; macaroni with, 7…’, lacking the heart to turn the pages. But it is thanks to her love of vegetables, specifically the eponymous broccoli, that Nina is coaxed tentatively towards new hope when a fellow-émigre invites himself over for a ‘cooking date’.
It is with food that Vapnyar’s love-starved protagonists share their real moments of romance. Food warms and tenderises them, returns them to an almost childlike state of trust, enables them to be vulnerable and honest. In ‘Borscht’, lonely carpet-fitter Sergey seeks out a prostitute from the small ads in a Russian newspaper but finds himself miserably unaroused, even repelled by the ministrations of the woman he visits in Brighton Beach (‘the parody of Russia, that made the real Russia seem even further away and hopelessly unattainable’). It is only when she persuades him to stay for a bowl of soup and he watches her ‘light, fast hands’ preparing the dazzlingly colourful borscht that he begins to see the beauty in this ordinary woman, and the similarity in their shared exile.
In not all of the stories does food have such a positive effect. Perhaps the most memorable tale in the collection is ‘Luda and Milena’, in which two aging women in an English-language class vie for the attentions of an elderly widower by cooking him traditional Russian fare, with catastrophic results.
Vapnyar is gleefully comic here, describing Milena’s face as ‘a battlefield for anti-aging creams’ and the sound made by Luda’s armchair when she sinks into it as ‘the groan of someone who was profoundly annoyed with Luda but still loved her very much’. Alongside the humour come sharp, painful insights: Luda notes that her presence disturbs married women of her age, ‘not because they saw her as a threat but rather because her widowhood and loneliness reminded them that they could soon end up like that too’.
My favourite story in the collection is ‘Slicing Sauteed Spinach’, in which Prague-born Ruzena, fearful of the unfamiliar words in restaurant menus, allows her lover to order for them both. Consequently she eats nothing but various forms of spinach, her lover’s favourite food. When he attempts toend their affair on the grounds that Ruzena is becoming too dependent, she invents an imaginary boyfriend in Strasbourg, whose existence reignites her lover’s interest. Over many lunches the fictitious Pavel grows in character and conviction until Ruzena finds herself expressing Pavel’s loathing for spinach, and realising that it is in fact her own.
The collection ends with a round-up of the receipes featured in the stories. Chattily informal and full of infectious enthusiasm for good food, it is a delightful conclusion to a highly enjoyable read, which whets the appetite for hot borscht and more work from Lara Vapnyar.

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. 
During its lifetime (1918–50) and the decades following its brutal demise, the theatre has been the subject of several books of scholarly and semi-scholarly nature, as well as personal memoirs, written in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, French and German. Essays in English appeared every so often in specialized academic journals, yet in the absence of an English-language monograph, Goset remained below the radar. Two reasons for this relative obscurity appear to be the cultural tensions created by the Cold War and the fact that the theatre never toured Britain or the United States.
This situation began to change sixteen years ago. In 1992, the Guggenheim Museum presented Marc Chagall and the Jewish Theatre, an exhibition that captivated New York, and later Chicago, with a display of the large mural paintings Chagall had prepared for Goset’s first home in Moscow. The fate of the murals was tied to the oblivion to which the Soviet authorities had consigned the theatre: after its demise in 1950, the murals had been rolled up and left in storage in the State Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow; Goset was written out of theatre history. Chagall himself did not know if his work had survived, and only in 1973, when he returned to the Soviet Union for the first time since 1922, did he reunite with the murals and apply his signature to the canvases.
Interest in Goset was enhanced by en masse emigration of Russian Jews — including family members of the theatre’s leadership — to Israel, America, and Western Europe, where they created disaporic communities that were greatly interested in their Russian/Soviet roots. In 2000, historian Jeffrey Veidlinger published the first English-language history of Goset, taking advantage of archival materials that had become available since the fall of the Soviet Union. The saga of Goset and its artists has also inspired Jewish artistic works, notably an opera and a couple of stage plays. Last but not least, a new exhibition, titled Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theatre, has recently opened at the Jewish Museum in New York and is attracting numerous visitors.
Benjamin Harshav, professor of  comparative literature at Yale University, has chaperoned and enhanced the growing interest in Goset since his involvement in the 1992 Guggenheim exhibition. Prior to the exhibition, he conducted research in Moscow and wrote an important essay on the Chagall murals for its catalogue. His attractive new book, The Moscow Yiddish Theatre: Art on Stage at the Time of Revolution, contributes handsomely to the literature on the now celebrated artistry of the Moscow State Yiddish Theatre.
The history of Goset consists of a prologue, two main acts and an epilogue. Founded in 1918 in St Petersburg, its creative path was carved out by Alexander Granovsky, its artistic director, a brilliant regissueur who had studied with Reinhardt in Berlin and collaborated with Maxim Gorky and Fedor Chaliapin before fully devoting himself to the creation of a modernistic Yiddish theatre. Granovsky, a cerebral director, had no interest in illusionist literary theatre and was keen on developing a new theatrical vocabulary that synthesized text, rhythm, movement, sound and visual devices. This approach reflected the new spirit of the Russian theatre. It was fascinated by machine-age contructivism and the notion of the crowd as hero, adored the carnivalesque and experimented with non-western theatrical practices. While Stanislavski was revered as the grand old man of the Russian stage, it was Meyerhold and his system of biomechanics, which demanded rigorous acrobatic training for actors, that was fresh and appealing.  When such modernistic practices merged with traditional Jewish materials, the results were innovative and exciting.
The most celebrated period in the life of the theatre began with its move from St. Petersburg to Moscow, where it began to perform in January, 1921. There, in the capital, Granovsky and his actors, well-trained in acrobatics, captivated the art world with an original and iconoclastic theatrical language that they applied to classical Yiddish works, notably Goldfaden’s operetta The Witch, Sholem Aleichem’s 200,000, I. L. Peretz’s Night in the Old Market and Mendele Moykher Sforim’s The Voyage of Benjamin the Third. Shortly after the move to Moscow, Chagall became associated with Goset. He decorated the theatre with his now famous murals, and applied his folksy modernism to the design of sets, costumes and make-up, influencing the aesthetic of Goset productions and sharpening its acting style.
The theatre’s creative chapter lasted until 1928, when the Soviet authorities ended Goset’s triumphant tour of central Europe and Granovsky decided to defect to the West. The company returned to Moscow, where the government began to intervene in artistic matters, implementing a policy that would lead to the imposition of Socialist Realism as the officially required style. Actor Solomon Mikhoels was appointed director. He was a phenomenal actor but not a great director. This, and the increasing stringency of policies governing the arts, caused Goset to lose much of its original artistic edge, while Mikhoels, a wise politician, immersed himself in navigating the murky waters of the Stalinist regime. In 1934, after a few lacklustre years of forgettable productions, Mikhoels stunned the theatre world with his breathtaking rendition of King Lear, with Benjamin Zuskin, his perennial sidekick, in the role of the Fool. It was Mikhoels’s crowning role, marking him as a Shakespearean interpreter of the first order. It is most fortunate that segments of his performance were recorded on film. To this day, the old and grainy images convey the power of an exceptional performance. The story behind this extraordinary production is uniquely Russian: it was conceived by Les Kourbas (neé Oleksander), the most important Ukrainian theatre director of the twentieth century. Kourbas, known as the Ukranian Meyerhold, knew Yiddish, and Mikhoels had been trying for years to get him to work with Goset. He finally did so in 1933, but before completing his work was arrested as a counterrevolutionary and executed four years later (1937). The production was finished by the more conventional director Sergei Radlov, a party favorite, who was given full credit for the stage direction.
During the Second World War, Mikhoels became a prominent Jewish leader. He became involved in the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, travelled to the West and the United States and established contacts with Jewish organizations outside the Soviet Union. He was to pay dearly for his involvement. On the night of 12 January 1948, Mikhoels was murdered in Minsk on direct orders from Stalin, the murder camouflaged as a traffic accident. Some 10,000 people paid their respects when the body lay in state in the auditorium of Goset. But the theatre was doomed and a year later it was liquidated. On 12 August 1952, actor Benjamin Zuskin, Mikhoels’s right hand and friend, was executed with eleven other Jewish Soviet writers and intellectuals.
In his book, Harshav focuses on the period up to 1928, setting the intellectual and artistic context for a deeper understanding of the theatre’s achievements at its most creative stage. The book consists of two main parts. The first part includes two essays by the author: ‘The Yiddish Art Theatre’ and ‘Chagall’s Theatre Murals’. The rest of the book includes translations from Yiddish and Russian of source materials, as well as translations of two skits by Sholem Aleichem produced by Goset. The book includes a bibliography and two generous sections of beautifully produced colour plates. Of these, the first is devoted to works by Chagall and other designers who worked for Goset, while the second offers a potpourri of set and costume illustrations and images, including those prepared by Robert Falk for Granovsky’s production of The Travels of Benjamin the Third, sketches by Alexander Tyshler for the 1935 production of King Lear, designs prepared for the Belorussian, Ukranian and Birobidjan State Yiddish Theatres, and five sketches by Eugene Nivinsky for Habima’s 1925 Hebrew-language production of The Golem.
One of Nivinsky’s costume illustrations for The Golem appears on the visually arresting cover of the book, though the book is devoted to Yiddish, not Hebrew, theatre. It is easy to understand Harshav’s eagerness to reproduce all the gorgeous pictures included in the book, all of them from the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum in Moscow; yet, at times one has the impression of a child who won’t let go of any single piece of candy. True, Harshav mentions the Habima in his essay, and notes briefly that ‘Jewish’ and ‘Yiddish’ mean one and the same in Russian, an argument that may explain his deliberately vague title ‘Moscow Yiddish Theatre’ rather than ‘The Moscow State Yiddish Theatre’ which was Goset’s official title. This double meaning of ‘Jewish’ is reminiscent of older people who, years ago, would say that someone sopke ‘Jewish,’ by which they meant ‘Yiddish’. For today’s reader, however, this double meaning is anachronistic and confusing.
I wish Harshav had provided us with an explanation for his choice of source materials as well as a brief introduction to the excerpts he selected, the cumulative effect of which borders on hagiography. The same applies to the raison d’être of the two Sholem Aleichem skits. Such authorial clarifications would give the book a more focused rationale. This being said, the author and the publisher must be praised for this sumptuous volume, which enhances our understanding and appreciation of a sterling example of Jewish creativity at its very best.

Philip Roth

For a writer who has claimed that ‘the art of impersonation’ is ‘the fundamental novelistic gift’, impersonating his own interviewer came naturally enough to Philip Roth. In 1973, at the age of forty, having published seven books, he took a moment to sit back, reflect and interview himself on the shape of his career to date. Asking himself about his alternation between the ‘serious’ and the ‘reckless’, Roth gave a long response that eventually cites Philip Rahv’s 1939 essay ‘Paleface and Redskin’, which posited two polarised types of American writer. Paleface writers, like T.S. Eliot and Henry James, were refined, educated, East Coast figures, exhibiting an old-world interest in moral concerns. Redskins, like Walt Whitman and Mark Twain, were the writers of the frontier and the big city: emotional, vernacular and energetic, whose work reflected the new world’s vitality and the explorer’s spirit of curiosity. After introducing Rahv’s dichotomy, Roth claims membership in a new, hybrid category of American writer — the ‘redface’, who remains ‘fundamentally ill at ease in, and at odds with, both worlds’. It is telling that Roth does not go on to claim that he writes like some combination of paleface and redskin — there is no assertion here of the ways in which he has been influenced by, say, both James and Twain — but rather it is the alternation between opposing modes, the awkward uncertainty as to which path to choose, that is emphasised:

To my mind, being a redface accounts as much as anything for the self-conscious and deliberate zigzag that my own career has taken, each book veering sharply away from the one before, as though the author was mortified at having written it as he did and preferred to put as much light as possible between that kind of book and himself.

This year, as we mark Roth’s seventy-fifth birthday, and inevitably reflect upon his by now mountainous body of work, this ‘self-conscious and deliberate zigzag’ seems as apt as ever a characterisation of the man’s oeuvre: Roth the sharp-eyed chronicler of the affluent Jewish – American suburbs; the best-selling celebrity author of sexual transgression; the keeper of the flame of Jewish humour; the self-hating Jewish writer, eager to drag his people through the mud to sell a few more copies of his books; the politically incisive satirist in the tradition of Swift and Orwell; the self-obsessed teller of psychoanalytic tales of the self; the champion of the work and traditions of Eastern European writers behind the Iron Curtain; the playful postmodernist, blurring the lines between fiction and fact; the nostalgic bard of Newark, New Jersey; and the unabashed Great American Novelist, writing works that condense and comment upon whole decades of American experience. How are we to make sense of such a career?

Roth’s work has a way of making literary critics — or at least those critics prone to sweeping, summarising statements — look silly; just when you think you’ve got him pegged, he goes off in the opposite direction, with apparent glee at proving you wrong. Asked by Hermione Lee whether he writes with a Roth reader in mind, he admitted, “No. I occasionally have an anti-Roth reader in mind. I think, ‘How he is going to hate this!’ ”That can be just the encouragement I need.’ I have begun to think of Roth as possessing the characteristics of The Escapist in Michael Chabon’s novel The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay — using his superpowers to break out of handcuffs, straitjackets, chained trunks and the assorted confinements imposed upon him by critics, ordinary readers, and sometimes by himself. As if by magic, Roth has been able to wriggle out of the many traps set for him over the years: the trap called ‘the Jewish-American writer’, the trap called ‘the counter-culture provocateur’, the trap called ‘self-hating Jew’. This last trap was first set during Roth’s origin story. Every superhero needs an origin story, a set of extraordinary events that grant him his unique powers. Roth’s origin story, the story of the birth of ‘Philip Roth’ the public writer, is also the story of the birth of the ‘anti-Roth reader,’ the superhero’s nemesis, always right behind him, an enemy never fully vanquished.

Roth was twenty-six when his first book was published in 1959. Goodbye, Columbus, a collection including the title novella and five short stories, was an auspicious debut, a picture of American Jewish communities in flux, having awoken to find themselves not poor, urban and precarious but wealthy, suburban and secure. Neil Klugman, Eli Peck and Nathan Marx, three of the book’s protagonists, all find themselves caught between old ways and new ways — and respond to this predicament with a moral seriousness and sense of responsibility that is the mark of Roth’s youth. Despite the reputation he would earn himself with Portnoy’s Complaint, Roth was a very serious, bookish young man, a graduate student of the 1950s, proudly disdaining the simplifications of mass culture for the complexity and difficulty of art (in particular, of Henry James and the great modernist writers). But it was not Roth’s depiction of moral complexity that many of his Jewish readers noticed in Goodbye, Columbus; it was his portrayal of Jews — some of them (imagine!) less than perfect human beings — that stirred up a controversy that would instantly define the young writer’s career.

It began with the publication of ‘Defender of the Faith’ in The New Yorker in March of 1959, and continued when the story was reprinted as part of Goodbye, Columbus three months later. Defender of the Faith, narrated by US army sergeant Nathan Marx, takes place on a base in Missouri during World War II. One of the base’s new recruits, Sheldon Grossbart, proceeds to extract a series of favours and privileges from Marx, based upon their shared Jewish heritage. ‘All I ask is a simple favor,’ his refrain goes, ‘a Jewish boy I thought would understand.’ Although Marx is deeply uncomfortable and confused about giving Grossbart special treatment, Grossbart takes advantage of Marx’s compassionate nature for his own ends. The story deals with Marx’s troubled conscience, as he must eventually decide between his allegiance to a fellow Jew and his allegiance to his own sense of justice. It was the character of Sheldon Grossbart, a manipulative, conniving, greedy — and human — Jew, that enraged readers; fictional characters like Sheldon Grossbart would only provide fuel to the fire of anti-Semites, eager to characterise all Jews as Sheldon Grossbarts.

Almost immediately after the story was published, letters poured in, both to The New Yorker’s editorial office and to Roth himself. One reader wrote, in a personal letter to Roth, ‘With your one story, ‘Defender of the Faith’, you have done as much harm as all the organised anti-Semitic organisations have done to make people believe that all Jews are cheats, liars, connivers.’ Another letter, to the New Yorker, imparted the message that ‘we cannot escape the conclusion that [this story] will do irreparable damage to the Jewish people. […] Clichés like ‘this being art’ will not be acceptable.’ The controversy soon spread to American synagogues, where Roth and his work became the subject of intense debate. Rabbis made Roth the topic of their sermons, pointing out the dangers that lurked within Goodbye, Columbus. One rabbi wrote in his synagogue newsletter that ‘the only logical conclusion any intelligent reader could draw from [Roth’s] stories or books, is that this country — nay that the world — would be a much better and happier place without the “Jews”.Another rabbi wrote to the Anti-Defamation League, asking, ‘What is being done to silence this man? Medieval Jews would have known what to do with him.’ At the age of twenty-six, with a single book published, Roth had acquired greater notoriety within the Jewish community than anyone could have predicted.

Although Roth would later claim that ‘the last thing I expected, having chosen this vocation — the vocation — was to be charged with heartlessness, vengeance, malice, and treachery’, his response to his critics did not reveal a young writer overwhelmed by a disproportionate and shocking attack. Instead it seemed to bring out Roth’s inner pugilist, the hidden part of him that — no matter how serious he tried to be — was looking for a fight. Many of his angry correspondents may have been surprised to find Roth’s even-tempered, thorough refutations of their letters waiting in their mailboxes. He went to many synagogues and Jewish community centres to speak, taking questions from the often-angry audience members. And in 1963, he published ‘Writing About Jews’ in Commentary, an essay that explored in great detail the attacks upon him and his work. What stands out, even today, from ‘Writing About Jews’ is the energy, the avidity, with which Roth takes on his critics. It is an astonishing piece of critical writing, an impassioned defence of his own work, and a point-by-point demolition of his critics’ accusations, pulled off with apparent relish. Although his mode is neither aggressive nor arrogant, it is not conciliatory either; re-reading the piece, I cannot find one point that he concedes to his critics. Nonetheless, the wrongheaded response to the stories of Goodbye, Columbus did force Roth to do what few writers ever do: explicitly outline a conscious, well-reasoned justification for what is usually spoken about, vaguely and mysteriously, as a writer’s ‘sensibility’, ‘approach’ or ‘sense of life’. In having to defend himself, Roth had to think long and hard about the purposes and aims of the literary arts, for he had been charged with perverting them. Perhaps this was the unexpected benefit of the ordeal, the fostering of a valuable literary self-consciousness that would guide Roth through a long career of fiction-making. But there was also the value of antagonism itself: the thrill of having to argue his case, the dramatic possibilities of verbal attack and defence. To my mind, this is the true legacy of Roth’s origin story.

Of course, the ‘self-conscious and deliberate zigzag’ of Roth’s career has itself been a sort of argument, one held with himself, each new book in some way ‘refuting’ what came before it. This began at the beginning as well. In 1962, Roth took the stage at New York’s Yeshiva University, alongside Ralph Ellison and the Italian – American writer Pietro di Donato, for a symposium on ‘The Crisis of Conscience in Minority Writers of Fiction’. Despite the lofty title and his esteemed colleagues to share the attention, the evening soon devolved into a full-blown tribunal for the case of Philip Roth’s Crimes Against Jewry. At the end of the event, Roth was quickly surrounded by some of the more vocal audience members, who crowded him and shouted insults into his face. Describing the evening in his 1988 autobiography, The Facts, Roth remembers it as ‘the most bruising public exchange of my life’,bringing with it ‘as harsh a judgment as I ever hope to hear in this or any other world’. Afterwards, over pastrami sandwiches at the Stage Deli, Roth told his friends that he would never write about Jews again. He had already followed up Goodbye, Columbus with Letting Go, a long, dreary novel that uprooted his Jewish characters and placed them in the seemingly humourless environs of the American midwest. Now though, he would go one better: his next novel, When She Was Good, also set in the midwest, is a book without Jews. It is also a book largely without comedy, and thus a very strange work in the Roth canon. As a seeming reaction to the controversy over Goodbye, Columbus this was a clear example of a writer painstakingly attempting to write outside of what he knows. When She Was Good is interesting precisely because it shows Roth fighting against the unspoken assumption that was implied by his Jewish critics: aren’t accusations of ‘you, of all people, shouldn’t write that way about us’ another way of saying, ‘you are ours’? Whatever else When She Was Good is, it is an argument against those that would label him a Jewish writer — with whatever restrictions that label implies. Roth has said that his protagonist ‘has to be in a state of vivid transformation or radical displacement. “I am not what I am — I am, if anything, what I am not!”. It is this paradoxical, self-denying statement that seems to underlie many of Roth’s artistic choices: he writes his way into a corner, then somehow writes his way out of it.

Of course, Roth’s time as a writer of finely wrought, morally complex tragedies without Jews would not last long. Within months of the publication of the humourless, uptight When She Was Good, came a new story from Philip Roth, distinguished author and winner of the National Book Award, in the pages of Partisan Review, the hallowed magazine of the New York Intellectuals. Entitled Whacking Off, it begins, in medias res, with the following sentence:

Then came the years when half my waking life was spent locked behind the bathroom door, firing my wad down the toilet, or into the soiled clothes of the laundry hamper, or with a thick splat, up against the medicine chest mirror, before which I stood in my dropped drawers to see how it looked coming out.

One of four excerpts from Portnoy’s Complaint published in various magazines over the next year and a half, ‘Whacking Off’ is a segment of the psychoanalytic monologue of Alexander Portnoy, Jewish son of Newark, New Jersey, sex-obsessed chronic masturbator, guilt-filled bearer of his parents’ love and expectations, and the Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity for the City of New York. Filled with Portnoy’s graphic, first-person descriptions of his sexual exploits (both with women and on his own), in prose equally informed by pop culture and Freud, and very, very funny, Roth’s fourth book was his big break — both in literary terms, as a break with the seriousness that had characterised his earlier writings, and in cultural terms, as the book that would make Roth a celebrity. As a raucous, vulgar, sexually candid book about Jews, Portnoy’s Complaint was also another shot across the bows to Roth’s earliest critics. Whereas When She Was Good seemed motivated by a desire to show that he could write about other people besides the Jews he knew, Portnoy seemed fuelled by an equally provocative desire to show that he could — and would — write about Jews in any manner he wished. Of course, I sell Roth’s considerable artistry short by discussing these books as purely resentful responses to misguided readers — Portnoy’s Complaint is a masterpiece of a literary monologue, surprisingly durable for a book so seemingly tied to its era — I merely want to suggest that the vividness and energy so apparent in Roth’s writing may have its roots in a writer’s stubborn need to settle a score.

‘Half of being a writer is being indignant. And being right. If you only knew how right we are.

Show me a writer who isn’t furious about being misrepresented, misread, or unread, and who isn’t sure he’s right. You can’t.’ Roth is speaking here of his 1984 novel The Anatomy Lesson, in particular the presence of esteemed literary critic and Jewish intellectual Milton Appel, a character clearly modelled on Irving Howe, who famously demolished nearly all of Roth’s writings with great relish in a 1972 piece in Commentary magazine. Zuckerman, Roth’s Roth-like novelist protagonist, slighted by Appel in much the same way, writes draft after draft of impassioned, insane rebuttals. Doped up on painkillers, he angrily phones Appel, and takes him to task for his sanctimony, fulfilling every novelist’s fantasy of telling his harshest critic where to get off. Later, Zuckerman masquerades as a pornographer (he publishes the magazine Lickety Split), named, you guessed it, Milton Appel. Contemporary critics, reading The Anatomy Lesson upon its publication, eagerly seized upon these scenes as clear evidence of payback: this was Howe’s comeuppance for having bashed Roth in print. But it’s worth noting that, in Roth’s novel, it is Zuckerman — the Roth-figure — who comes off far worse than Howe’s stand-in. Milton Appel, aside from the crime of writing a negative review of Zuckerman’s fiction, is portrayed as a sensible, mature figure, whereas Zuckerman makes a fool of himself in his rage and unhinged lunacy. ‘Of course you give the other guy the best lines,’ Roth explained, ‘Otherwise it’s a mug’s game.’ The lesson to be learned here is not that Roth uses his fiction to settle scores, to win arguments or even to prove a point or two: it’s that Roth has recognized the dramatic appeal of argument itself.

The pleasure of re-reading ‘Writing About Jews’ should remind us that, if he had wanted, Roth could have used his considerable talents to be an excellent career critic instead of a novelist. His astute command of rhetoric, his naturally ironic mind and the easy mix of learned professor and streetwise cynic all lend themselves to critical writing of a rare quality. Instead of writing to win arguments (and isn’t that a critic’s job, most of the time?) he has chosen to stage these arguments in his fiction, pulling the strings as he sees fit to create the maximum dramatic effect. People are always arguing in Roth’s novels, regardless of whether they have someone to argue with. Think of the dinner Henry sits down to in the West Bank in The Counterlife, one person shouting over another, each frighteningly compelling on the subject of Israel’s future. Or Philip and his wife in Deception, at loggerheads over what he will or will not include in his seemingly non-fictional novel. Or Seymour Levov’s brother Jerry, in American Pastoral, who, when Seymour opens his heart about his daughter’s disappearance, takes the opportunity to lecture his brother on everything he’s done wrong. When Zuckerman, in narrating Coleman Silk’s story in The Human Stain, talks about ‘the antagonism that is the world’, he is thinking about the many ways that the world conspires to frustrate individual self-definition — in particular the antagonism that puts an end to Silk’s attempt to author his own story free of the historical realities of race and ancestry. But in much of Roth’s fiction, ‘the antagonism that is the world’ need not be seen as the tragic sense of life; it is an exciting, provocative and life-affirming antagonism, embodied in the countless human voices straining to be heard between the covers of Roth’s books. There are many joys to be found in Roth’s writing, but few are as consistently dependable as the simple joy of a heated argument between characters armed with some of the most gloriously vivid prose in all of literature.

Responding for the millionth time to an interviewer’s question about his role as a Jewish author, Roth once remarked that, if his books are to be considered Jewish in some way, it’s not due to their subject matter. What makes his books Jewish is ‘the nervousness, the excitability, the arguing, the dramatizing, the indignation, the obsessiveness, the touchiness, the play-acting — above all the talking. The talking and the shouting. It isn’t what it’s talking about that makes a book Jewish — it’s that the book won’t shut up’.

So perhaps Roth’s earliest Jewish critics did succeed, if indeed their goal was to make him more of a Jewish writer. Those angry and self-righteous readers, so intent on teaching Roth a lesson on how to write (and how not to write) about Jews, may have been valuable teachers after all. For, if nothing else, they taught Roth the value of antagonism, the fact that crazily impassioned argument, even if it’s at the service of foolish prejudice, is nothing if not compelling. With that lesson taken firmly to heart, Roth was granted the ability to transform from an ordinary, mild-mannered, nice Jewish boy into, if not a superhero, something far more interesting.

David Gooblar recently completed a PhD on the work of Philip Roth at University College, London. He lives in London.