Peering from behind bars, his hair shorn to prison regulation length, Mikhail Khodorkovsky maintains a quiet dignity. Once the richest man in Russia and head of the giant Yukos oil conglomerate, he has become a cause célèbre as Russia’s most famous political prisoner and an increasingly irritating thorn in the side of the Putin administration. His case highlights Russia’s ingrained authoritarianism, an image Putin has been at pains to challenge, as well as drawing attention to the uncomfortable phenomenon of the Jewish oligarch. More widely it invites consideration of the position of Jews in post-communist Russia and why it is that so many of them left.

Among the many restrictions to be lifted along with the iron curtain were the two great taboos: money and religion. At the same moment that ordinary Russians found themselves able, even encouraged, to make money and build private enterprise, they were also allowed to express the ethnicities and religions they had suppressed under 72 years of communism. Many Jews took advantage of the new freedom to emigrate — up to 1.3 million left for Israel — while those who stayed were able to benefit from the radical domestic reforms and, possibly, to play a part in helping shape the future state. Khodorkovsky himself studied chemistry, following in the footsteps of his Jewish father and Christian mother. Together with his right-hand man, Leonid Nevzlin, fully Jewish and currently in exile in Israel, in 1987 ‘Misha’ Khodorkovsky founded Menatep, Russia’s first private investment bank, with the approval of Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalising Kremlin. At the time he was a middle-level chemist and a former member of Komsomol, the Communist Party youth wing. Before the Menatep years, he had already shown entrepreneurial nous by setting up a firm to import badly needed computers from abroad. In 1991 he used Menatep proceeds to gain the fertiliser company Apatrit. Yet the big breakthrough came in late 1995 when he acquired Yukos, Russia’s second biggest oil producing company, from Boris Berezovsky in loans-for-shares auctions, for $300m. Even then the line between politics and business was hard to draw. In 1996 Berezovsky, Khodorkovsky and Guzinskii helped re-elect Boris Yelstin, according to Yelstin’s biographer, Timothy Colton. At the time Berezovsky was the most politically active of the oligarchs.

By 2000, however, Khodorkovsky seemed to breach the unwritten rules of the game. He rebranded himself with the help of a PR firm; he founded the Open Russia foundation, to encourage liberal values and broader education; he also turned Yukos into a transparent, Western-style conglomerate. This last apparently innocuous and praiseworthy gesture won Yukos increased loyalty from foreign investors, and shares soared, but worried the Kremlin inner circle, who saw it as the thin end of the wedge, a threat to their power. Misha publicly stated that the Kremlin had problems with corruption; televised for all to see, a furious Putin retorted that Yukos should be investigated for possible tax evasion. Not that everything about Yukos seemed pristine, even by Khodorkovsky’s admission. In the eponymous film by Cyril Tuschi, Khodorkovsky — whose screenings in Moscow and St Petersburg were abruptly cancelled this year — the man himself is quoted as saying: ‘Yes, we bent moral standards, but those standards matched those of the society we were in…’ The Yukos acquisition at knock- down prices saw Menatep assuming $2bn in debt; in 2001 the bank was declared broke. Worse followed when the state arrested Khodorkovsky’s deputy, Platon Lebedev. In the film Misha admits he knew he would be next, but he wanted to tell the truth in court… while admitting “I was naïve about justice”. Sure enough he was arrested onboard his private jet on a landing strip in Siberia in 2003. After an 11-month trial, for tax evasion, he was sentenced to 15 years. In 2005 Roman Abramovich ousted Khodorkovsky from Forbes magazine’s Russian Rich List — “the ultimate indignity in the world of the super-wealthy”, according to the BBC.

During the build up to the collapse of communism, there was a growing awareness among Soviet authorities that they would need to create a Russian elite, a native super-rich class, that could acquire state assets and keep them on Russian soil. Screeds have been written about the Jewish preponderance in the top-ranking business elite. One theory suggests that because Jews were traditionally excluded from the centres of Communist Party power, especially in post-war Russia, they developed skills on the unofficial peripheral market which came into play when the Marxist edifice of a centrally run economy collapsed in 1991. However, the theory develops holes when we look closer: most oligarchs were not cunning black marketeers in the Soviet days, but often clerks, scientists and technicians, even mathematics professors, who operated, quietly, within the system. As it was virtually impossible for Jews to enter high profile Moscow Universities, many studied at less prestigious establishments like the Institute of Oil and Gas where they were, later, ideally placed to develop Russia’s lucrative Oil trade. Certainly, the lifting of restrictions on Jewish professions combined with the licence to develop private enterprise may go some way to account for the fact that by the early 1990s, six out of seven of Russia’s richest tycoons were Jewish or part-Jewish.

Of the Yeltsin-era oligarchs, who enjoyed particularly close relations with the government, few have managed either to retain their fortunes or stay in Russia under Putin. Years in the KGB gave Putin a mistrust of the individual and his rule has seen the restoration of state authority over the once all-powerful magnates. Roman Abramovich, formerly favoured by the Kremlin, was forced to sell 72% of his assets to the Russian state before finding a bolt-hole in the UK, also the haven for his former business associate Vladimir Berezovsky. Heeding the warnings, Leonid Nevzhlin, Khodorkovsky’s original business partner, moved to Israel where he enjoys the status of major philanthropist and friend of Binyamin Netanyahu. Unlike his fellow oligarchs, Khodorkovsky chose to stand his ground and use his inordinate wealth to help shape the free and democratic Russia he wanted to live in.

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Three cities, three continents, three faiths. In Egypt’s Tahrir square, young secular activists worked together with members of the banned Muslim brotherhood in their shared goal to overthrow Mubarak’s regime. In New York, over 1000 people attended a Kol Nidrei service at the site of Occupy Wall Street. In London, protestors camped in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral, causing resignations of many clergy and ruptures within the entire Church of England. Religion has been a surprising but consistent presence in the movement, though its influence has often been implicit rather than overt. Whatever the individual beliefs of its proponents, in the absence of an alternative vocabulary, the Occupy movement has been forced to fall back upon the language of religion to articulate its critique of contemporary society. Today’s challenge to the financial system based on values and collective morality has unearthed a world never fully buried by the Enlightenment.

‘Occupy’ was a brand name given to an already existent movement. Widely accepted to have begun in Egypt, the Occupy movement spread to Spain with ‘Los Indignagos’, to Greece’s anti-austerity campaigners, to Israel’s tent protests and from there to New York and other American cities such as Oakland. Other countries have followed, and Canada, the UK, Australia, Italy and New Zealand have all seen spin off protests. The Occupy movement was, in fact, a response to the seismic events across Europe and the Arab world — from the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and the governments brought down in its wake (Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Spain and Italy), to the Arab Spring, which toppled tyrannical regimes. The events operated within an overall domino effect, which continues to spread. While the Western protests attack the financial system and an élite — the 1% — acting in their own interests against the majority — the 99% — the Arab protests call for democracy and regime change. But in both cases protestors are motivated by inequality and disempowerment. Arguably, the events following the collapse of Lehman Brothers ignited the revolutions in the middle east; the end of the boom era and a rapid rise in grain prices (as investors deserted the derivatives market in favour of commodities) meant that governments could no longer paper over corruption and kleptocracy with state hand outs. As a result, we seem to have a global uprising that is relatively coherent, being broad enough (and still largely powerless enough) to encompass socialists, libertarians, moral conservatives, Islamists and many others, revisiting the ‘One No, Many Yeses’ of 1990s anti-capitalism.

Despite this theoretical diversity, the ‘movement’ finds unity, and is distinguished by two key features. The first is a critique of current society, that is so thoroughgoing it demands a wholesale rethinking of underlying assumptions. The second is practical action: the taking and holding of space. Functioning as a declaration of presence by groups in the middle and bottom of society, the right to assemble and live on both public and privately owned land has become a cornerstone of the movement.

Construction of St Paul’s Cathedral began in 1669 in the wake of the English civil war, and the restoration of the monarchy. It was the first post-reformation cathedral in England and was designed by Sir Christopher Wren, who had designed over fifty churches in the City of London, already a major centre of banking and international trade. By the time it was completed in 1708, England was on the way to becoming a leading economic power. St Paul’s stands as a monument to the triumph of bourgeois capitalism, having seen off the twin challenges of overbearing monarchy from above and radical populism from below. The Church of England at this point was already stepping back from political affairs in a move that would culminate in its eventual relegation to guardian of faith and personal morality. This kind of privatised religion went hand in hand with a new Enlightenment liberal philosophy which championed the individual above the community; the state over the local, and the progressive over the traditional. In economic terms, this meant encouraging flexible and open markets based upon a belief in rational, self-interested behaviour. Issues of meaning and purpose were increasingly confined to the private sphere, as the new and revolutionary doctrine of separation between church and state took hold.

From the Middle Ages up until that point, the church had been the epicentre of a society in which community, politics, ritual and custom were intrinsically bound together. It had offered a vision of a unified, stratified society in which each man had his place, and the sum of all its parts was in accordance with divine design. This system survived many major economic and political developments. Christian socialist R.H. Tawney writes of the 16th century’s ‘constant appeal from the new and clamorous economic interests of the day to the traditional Christian morality, which in social organization, as in the relation of individuals, is still conceived to be the final authority’. Despite the vast economic changes of the late middle ages, the idea that society was a spiritual organ designed for salvation subjugated economic activity to some notion of the greater good.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Church power in Europe was decimated, slowly losing any privileged role as guardian of community and values. But it was never replaced, and its vacuum left a thin social fabric, a lack of third space between work and home, and a public discourse that had difficulty agreeing any set terms for moral debate. The contemporary result of this process is that any movement wishing to build a moral critique of our economic system almost inevitably falls back upon the vocabulary of religion, as the cultural memory of the Church represents our only notion of an alternative society. Hence Occupy London’s language of usury, indulgence, unfair gain and of a breakdown of the social fabric of assembly and community. This is to say nothing of explicit religious slogans around moneylenders and the temple, or the large banner outside St Paul’s asking ‘What Would Jesus Do?’ A pertinent critique has been made of those who profit without creating anything of use, targeting the high pay of those who traded in currencies and derivatives rather than in actual commodities. This is an ancient idea, echoing the words of Gratian, a 12th century monk and canon law jurist:

Whosoever buys a thing, not that he may gain sell it whole and unchanged but that it may be a material for fashioning something, he is no merchant. But the man who buys it may gain by selling it again unchanged and as he bought it, that man is of the buyers and sellers who are cast forth from God’s temple.

This alternative religious ethic appeals to a perfectionist ideal of human behaviour, holding that each individual should do useful work in a ‘real’ economy, and that continuous economic growth is less important than values of stability and community.

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

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

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

A: I don’t like the Israeli-type macho hero. I prefer my Jewish heroes old school.

B: Like Bar Kochba?

A: Like Franz Kafka. The little specky guy who thinks too much. Who can’t really get his head round having a body — let alone putting it in danger. Not the IDF commando with his wraparound shades. There’s nothing Jewish about wraparound shades.

B: Yeah, but without the commando to protect him, Kafka gets killed by the Nazis.

A: The Nazis didn’t kill Kafka. B: Communists, then.

ME: Can’t you two shut up while the game’s on?

Which, I realise now, implicitly put me in B’s camp. As for the Maccabees, if they are heroes they are curiously uncelebrated ones. At cheder the details of the Chanukah story were always left vague. Occasionally I, or another mystified child, would pipe up, asking who exactly the Maccabees were fighting, and over what, and why they sounded so Scottish. No one ever explained. No one bothered to mention how Alexander the Great conquered most of the known world; how his empire fused local traditions with Greek culture — the gym, the games, the theatre, the household as a hive of economic productivity (this was ancient Greece); how little Judaea managed to retain a degree of religious and political independence as part of the Seleucid empire; how tensions between Hellenized and traditional Jews escalated into something close to civil war; how the Seleucid king Antiochus IV waded in on the Hellenisers’ side, massacring Jews, banning traditional practices, gruesomely torturing dissenters; and how these outrages kindled a rebellion under the command of a provincial priest’s son called Judas Maccabeus, who waged a guerilla campaign against the might of the empire. (In addition to their vagueness about the bigger picture, our teachers glossed over the little details left on the ground when the Maccabees forcibly mass circumcised the Hellenised Jews they conquered. But rest assured that that’s one bit Mel won’t cut.)

The apocryphal texts certainly trumpet Judah as a great military and religious leader. He is implicitly compared to the judges, especially Joshua, who, like him, waged a divinely inspired war of conquest against pagan neighbours. And yet, being a great military leader does not make him a hero in any way that his people would have understood. Nowadays the term ‘hero’ can be used loosely to describe any protagonist, or, for tabloid newspapers, any professional soldier. But the word was originally, of course, Greek. And the notion of a Jewish hero, to a traditional Jew of Judah’s time, would have been nothing less than a contradiction in terms. For heroes were not only foreign — they were blasphemous. The Greeks were literal hero-worshippers: the cultic worship of figures like Hercules and Theseus was ubiquitous across the Greek world. Indeed, having a cult in your name was the only absolute requirement for the job of hero. That said, an all-action background was preferred: some heroes were great statesmen or lawgivers or even artists in life, but being big and violent was a definite plus. The basic mould of the hero was the warrior or the athlete, and the foundational texts of Greek culture were the Homeric epics, in which prodigiously big and strong men relentlessly compete — in war, games and sometimes love — for honour. This battle for personal martial or athletic glory and cult worship is what makes these heroes so unjewish. ‘Kafka heroes’ were thin on the rocky ground of Greece. It’s true you get the odd outlier like Odysseus, who’s big and violent but also wordy. And then there’s Oedipus, who’s big and violent but has a complicated relationship with his mother. But what is lacking is anything akin to Judaeo-Christian morality. Certainly, Homeric heroes had a value system. But the key value they fought and died for was their kleos: their honour, their name, the story that would be told of them down the ages, accompanied by the sacrifices that would nourish their immortal shades. They were not required to embody or fight for anything that we — or the Judeans — would have recognised as good against evil.

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The notion that Jewish men are somehow less masculine than their gentile counterparts is an old anti-Semitic trope: Jewish men menstruate, medieval anti-Semites asserted, and need periodic top-ups of human blood.The ancient Greeks abhorred circumcision, and Antiochus IV, the Seleucid king, tried to have it banned. ‘The castration complex,’ said Freud, ‘is the deepest unconscious root of anti-Semitism; for even in the nursery little boys hear that a Jew has something cut off his penis—a piece of his penis, they think—and this gives them the right to despise Jews.’

No one has done more to spread the notion that Jewish men are not real men than Otto Weininger, the fin de siècle Viennese philosopher who divided humanity into two types:masculine and feminine. His distinction was based not upon biology but temperament, thus the world was peopled by masculine women and feminine men.Weininger (who converted to Christianity) conflates what he calls feminine traits (cowardliness, passivity, amorality, unreason and sex) with ‘Jewishness’. Genius, naturally, is Christian—or, to be more precise, Aryan. He excoriates Judaism, attributing to it all the faults he finds with modernity—capitalism, materialism, Marxism, amorality, decadence, deracination, decline. Avoiding both the ‘biological’ racism of the Nazis that followed in his wake and the religious prejudice that preceded him,Weininger identifies Judaism as ‘a tendency of the mind, as a psychological constitution which is a possibility for all mankind, but which has become actual in the most conspicuous fashion amongst the Jews.’ In his magnum opus, Sex and Character, he describes the paradig- matic feminised Jew. It bears an uncanny, albeit jaundiced, resemblance to The Herring Wonder, the boxing moniker of cult novelist Jonathan Ames.

Jonathan Ames—I hesitate, post-Baudrillard, to say the ‘real’ Ames, so let’s just call him the flesh and blood Ames— made his literary debut in 1989 with I Pass Like Night, the edgy, blackly funny story of Alexander Vine, a young doorman who trawls Manhattan’s underworld for sex.The novel, written in a non-linear ‘mosaic’ style, was published when Ames was 25 and established him as the successor to ultra-cool WASP doomster Brett Easton Ellis—all but inevitable given his age and the book’s hardcore sex scenes. He was compared to JD Salinger and Phillip Roth called Alexander Vine ‘a cross between Jean Genet and Holden Caulfield in the age of AIDS’. A decade later Ames wrote The Extra Man, a novel which catapulted more low-life male casualties into the pantheon of literary characters: Louis Ives, a disgraced cross-dressing schoolteacher, shares a shabby New York apartment with Henry Harrison, a flamboyant would-be playwright who supports himself financially as an ‘extra man’ (a companion to moneyed elderly women). Like Vine, Ives is a sex junkie who spends his nights consorting with transsexual prostitutes. In a further Weiningerian twist, Ives cultivates good manners and aspires to be the perfect English gentleman, ‘a sort of a Jewish Duke of Windsor’. According to Weininger, the English are less manly than Aryans though not as bad as Jews, and, unlike Jews and women, capable of being considered ‘gentlemen’. When Ives ruminates on the impossibility of being a gentleman and a Jew he could very well be talking to Weininger. ‘There were no such Jewish [gentlemen] characters in any of [the books he reads], and to make things worse, all my favourite authors, I always found out, were heart-breakingly anti-Semitic. I worshipped them and they wouldn’t have even liked me. So their anti-Semitism and my Semitism were the major flaws in my young gentleman fantasy, but I tried not to think about these things most of the time.’

A decade later Ames published his third novel, Wake Up, Sir!, in which alcoholic writer Alan Blair checks himself into a Saratoga Springs artists’ colony populated by an assortment of oddballs. Alan Blair is virtually identical to Jonathan A., the hero of Ames’s graphic novel The Alcoholic (drawn by Dean Haspiel), and readers will recognise not only his trademark perversions, afflictions and biographical details (Jewish, New Jersey upbringing) but also his peculiar physiognomy—the pale skin, white, near invisible eyebrows, closely cropped hair disguising a vanishing hairline and curved nose. Like Ives, Alan Blair also suffers delusions of Englishness, although this time it is not the delusion that he is a gentleman but the delusion that he is constantly attended to by a gentleman’s gentleman: a phantom Wodehousian butler called—what else?—Jeeves, who gives him succour and arch, but practical, advice. Once again, the disconnect between the romantic longing for a genteel way of life and the sobering reality of a dipsoma- niacal New Jersey Jew on a self-destructive bender receives satirical treatment. ‘Satire,’ says Weininger, ‘is essentially intolerant, and is congruous with the disposition of the Jew and the woman.’

Ames belongs to a long tradition of self-referential writers and comedians. He credits Kerouac, Hunter Thompson and other writers whose legends precede their art with his own ‘fantasy of being a writer’. Stories abound of Ames living out various writer fantasies, notably his ‘Hemingway phase’, in which his nose got broken in a bar fight, and his Fitzgerald fantasy, in which he adopted the sartorial style and alcoholic excesses of F. Scott Fitzgerald. These fantasies are part of a more persistent hard-man fantasy which Ames plays out through his curious boxing career, undermining the machismo of the violent sport by fighting under the moniker ‘The Herring Wonder’, while his fans waved home-made herrings made from tinfoil and cardboard.

‘The Jew,’ says Weininger, ‘is ready to be witty only at his own expense or on sexual things.’An uncharitable critic might say the same of Ames. Send him on an assignment, as GQ did, to cover the gentrification of New York’s Meatpacking district and he’ll tell you of an encounter there thirteen years earlier with a transsexual streetwalker. Give him a column in the New York Press and he’ll tell you about his pre-teen trouble with an undescended left testicle, or the nice French woman doctor who broke his heart when she smiled as she dipped his penis in brown liquid to get rid of his genital wart, or even the Mangina, a prêt-a-porter prosthetic vagina for men created by his performance artist friend Patrick Bucklew (a.k.a. Harry Chandler). But his emasculation, according to Weininger, begins before all this, in the very moment in which he picks up his reporter’s notebook:‘The congruity between Jews and women,’ he writes, ‘further reveals itself in the extreme adaptability of the Jews, in their great talent for journalism.’

Bored to Death, an HBO comedy series recently broadcast on Sky Atlantic, stars Jason Schwartzman as Jonathan Ames, a troubled writer (drinks, drugs and an overactive libido) who moonlights as an unlicensed private investigator. The show was based on a short story of the same name about a troubled writer named Jonathan Ames whose stint as an unlicensed P.I. ends as darkly as a David Goodis or Jim Thompson paperback. The show and the hardboiled tale were written by Jonathan Ames, a troubled writer who has never worked as a private eye. ‘The psychological contents of the Jewish mind are always double or multiple,’ writes Weininger. As the title of the anthology where you can find the story of Jonathan Ames, the troubled writer who poses as something he is not, puts it, The Double Life Is Twice As Good.

Bored To Death series 1 is on Sky Atlantic at 10pm on Mondays. The new second series will be on Atlantic later in the year

Sean Shapiro is a freelance journalist. He and co-editor Dominic Lee founded the (now defunct) South African culture magazine, MIMIzine. He is currently working on a comic book adaptation of Oliver Onion’s classic ghost story, Benlian.

© 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.

In 1938 Zweig intervened on behalf of a different, more humane workshop by writing an appeal in support of the Inter-Aid Committee for Children from Germany. This pamphlet was preceded by a piece on The House of Thousand Fortunes, written for the fiftieth anniversary of the Shelter in London and first published in Buenos Aires. Zweig wrote,‘The Shelter? I had never heard of it, despite residing in London for some time. Never has anyone alerted me to this place, this institution. But the curious thing is that all these Jews coming from the most distant and exotic destinations are fully aware of its existence. In Poland, the Ukraine, Latvia and Bulgaria, from one end of Europe to the other, all the poor Jews know the London Shelter.’ It was rare for Zweig to concern himself with ‘the poor Jews’; thoughts on East European Jewry in the Hapsburg Empire appear with the same frequency as God himself in Zweig’s writing. A rare exception occurred when he saw Galicia in 1915 and described it as the ‘Job amongst the peoples of the world’. But it was mainly through his friendship with Joseph Roth that Zweig gained insight into the reality of poor Jewish life in Eastern Europe.

The essence of Jewish identity was to demonstrate to the world that Jews could transcend it

Was the London Shelter a transit place for Jewish refugees from yet another of God’s workshops? Who was this God in Zweig’s view? Clearly not the master of the largely inactive ‘angel of history’, in Walter Benjamin’s terminology, but the supreme agent of world affairs, a fusion of Yahweh, the Christian God, Allah and Visnu, a divine force who made it hard for people to believe in him.

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‘Nous sommes tous des juifs allemands!’We are all German Jews. This is the famous slogan taken up by throngs of students during the May 1968 protests in Paris.The cry was most immediately the response of a crowd to the news that the movement’s leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit had been denied re-entry into France after a brief trip abroad. This spontaneous act of sympathy marked an event in the history of France’s Jews, a moment when the Jew, understood as a figure on the margins of the culture, a rootless wanderer, a foreigner, publically came to represent a political ideal. As such, this event registered the history of the figure of the Jew perhaps more than the history of the Jews themselves: a moment when a shift in value, wrought by the crucible of the Shoah, manifested itself publically and politically.

May 1968 was not of course the first time that a Jew’s plight before the French authorities of Justice had incited a public outcry. One could even say that the students’ expression of solidarity with Cohn-Bendit self-consciously echoed that of the Dreyfusards, the intellectuals and politicians who defended Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish French army captain falsely accused of treason in 1894. However, the Dreyfusards acted in the name of the Enlightenment ideal of humanity, an ideal uniting men above and beyond differences. As Émile Zola famously said in 1898 in his open letter to President Faure: ‘I have but one passion, that of the Enlightenment, in the name of the humanity that has suffered so much and that has a right to happiness.’ Dreyfus’s Judaism was, for his supporters, almost beside the point.The student protestors of May 1968, in contrast, allied themselves with Cohn-Bendit by adopting his Jewish identity. They protested, not in the name of an idea of humanity, but in the name of the ‘The Jew’; instead of claiming the status of the universal for Cohn-Bendit, they claimed the status of exception, of Jewish particularity for themselves.

They protested, not in the name of an idea of humanity, but in the name of the ‘The Jew’

Much was made of the slogan ‘We are all German Jews’ in the years following the student uprisings. In The Imaginary Jew, Alain Finkelkraut, a child of two World War II refugees, describes his mixed feelings of pride and violation, as the protesters declared the banner of the Jew one that could be taken up by anyone, regardless of ethnicity or religious upbringing. Maurice Blanchot, the enigmatic writer, theorist and a prominent figure within the May ‘68 movement, in contrast, not only lauded the students’ chant as one of the most powerful political acts in modern France, but also seemed to do so for the reason that Finkielkraut criticised the protesters: the students were taking up the position of the outsider rather than defending their own Frenchness. For this reason, Blanchot called it an ‘inaugural speech-event, opening and overturning borders.’ And the philosopher Jacques Rancière has described it as a paradigmatic political moment, its power arising from the very impropriety of the students’ performance, a moment of disidentification, when the students aligned themselves with a name that could not be appropriated. In examining this variety of responses, we must consider how the figure of the Jew came indeed to function as such a powerful signifier. At the heart of these responses is the question of what the figure of the Jew had itself come to symbolise in a postwar era in which the nationalist ideals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had become an anathema. It is, I contend, for the very reasons Jews had historically been maligned that among postwar French intellectuals the Jew comes to represent an ideal to be emulated.

Although the association between the Jew and rootlessness is at least as old as the medieval tale of Ahasverus, the legendary wandering Jew, it is within the context of modern nationalism that the image of Jewish rootlessness developed specifically political overtones as the foreign Jew came to represent a threat to the integrity of the nation state. In France, ear coalesced around Alfred Dreyfus, whose alleged act of treason was seen as symptomatic of the danger posed by the deracinated Jews posing as Frenchmen contaminating French blood and poisoning its soil. Dreyfus is himself depicted in a period postcard as a modern Ahasverus, hunchbacked and pulling a rickety cart. For rightwing nationalists such as Maurice Barrès, it hardly mattered whether or not Dreyfus had truly committed any crime: his guilt was ontological:‘[H]e has no roots…That Dreyfus is capable of betraying I conclude from his race. . . As for those who say that [he]. . .is not a traitor . . .So be it! They are quite right: Dreyfus doesn’t belong to our nation, so how could he betray it?’ Dreyfus was a symbol for Barrès, as were the Jews themselves. It was not so much a question of who had done what to whom but that the crowd ‘had a word of war to rally itself. It wants some cry of passion that makes abstract ideas tangible,’ Barrès wrote already in 1890 in an essay for Le Figaro about anti-Jewish sentiment.

One could say the same about the student protesters of 1968.They too needed a word around which to rally themselves and once again ‘the Jews’ functioned as the necessary symbol. The representation had largely not shifted but its value had. The Jew was still the rootless foreigner whose power derived from his very marginality. However, by 1968 the dissociation between the Jew and hegemony gave this figure a political significance. The 19th century philosopher G.W.F Hegel had declared the Jews a people standing outside of history, and it was their exterior position—historically at least—to the machinations of national powers that made the Jews an evocative figure in 1968, if not for the students directly than for those intellectuals influencing the student movement and for those influenced by it.

The figure of the Jew is never distant from Sartre’s descriptions of existentialism

By 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre had already begun indirectly to rehabilitate the figure of the Jew in Réflexions sur la Question Juive (published in English as Anti-Semite and Jew). He defined the anti-Semite as the one who flees his existential destiny by clinging to determinist ideas of essence, nature and race. In contrast he presented the Jew as something of an archetype for the everyman: faced with existential groundlessness and struggling against the fact of being over-determined by the other. Sartre asserted on multiple occasions that he himself identified with the Jew,‘a type who has nothing, no land, an intellectual.’That these are characteristics that could seem appealing, worthy even of emulation, is, to some extent at least, a result of Sartre himself, even if he himself could hardly be said to fit this description.As is clear from some of Sartre’s short fiction written in the thirties, this ideal was crafted as a direct contrast to Maurice Barrès’s conception of the self as developed in his Culte du Moi trilogy. For Barrès the identity of the self is ultimately discovered by way of the ties that bind us to nation, ancestry and soil. Thus even when not presented in these terms, the figure of the Jew is never distant from Sartre’s descriptions of existentialism.

It is however the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish émigré to Paris from Lithuania, and a former disciple of Martin Heidegger, who set out most clearly to revalorise the trope of the Jew. Like Sartre, Levinas is motivated by the failures in the philosophical project of the West to find an alternative to the dichotomy that pits a determinist particularism against a notion of freedom founded in abstract universalism. For Sartre, however, the Jew merely reflects the social and cultural dilemmas created by this dichotomy. For Levinas the history and culture of the Jew reveals a way out. Once again, it is the very reasons for which the figure of the Jew was maligned that this figure should now be venerated. That is to say, it is the Jew’s supposed position of passivity in the face of power, his uprootedness, his rejection of the cult of blood and soil that make him worthy of emulation. To the myth of Ulysses returning to Ithaca, a metaphor for the way in which European culture has privileged self-mastery over the encounter with the other, Levinas opposes ‘the story of Abraham, who leaves his fatherland forever for a yet unknown land.’ While Abraham is for Levinas first and foremost a model of ethical subjectivity and thus universal, Levinas asserts that Judaism has historically been the culture that testifies most clearly to this truth. Levinas will even suggest that it is for this very reason that the Jews have been historically maligned and persecuted. To the cult of power and earthly greatness, forces which nearly triumphed in World War II, Judaism, according to Levinas, offers not merely an escape toward transcendence, a path he identifies with both Christianity and abstract humanism, but rather, an emphasis on the neighbor, the other to whom I am responsible to the point of abnegating my own needs.

This is not to say, of course, that the student protestors of 1968 were thinking of Levinas when they claimed for themselves the banner of the German Jew. Certainly very few of them had ever read or heard of Levinas at the time. Levinas, a loyal De Gaulle supporter and fairly politically conservative by French standards, was not even sympathetic to the student movement. And his post-1948 sympathies with Zionism led him on occasion to make political interventions that seemed in tension with his own diasporic ideals. Nevertheless, Levinas’s revalorisation of the association between Jewishness and uprootedness does tell us something about Maurice Blanchot’s interpretation of the slogan in the months following the May events. It is Blanchot and ultimately Jacques Derrida who exploit for political ends the association Levinas makes between deracination and Judaism.

In their hands Levinas’ representation of Judaism becomes a cogent critique of the very nature of political belonging, one that can even be redirected against Levinas’ claim that the Jewish people could instantiate the ideal of uprootedness. For Blanchot, a life long-friend and conversation partner of Levinas’, Abraham’s act of leaving the fatherland in Genesis 12, for which he was maligned by Hegel in The Spirit of Christianity, is a diasporic lesson which bears on more than our relation to soil. It signals to the very dangers of nationalist chauvinism. ‘Everything that roots men by values, by sentiments, in one time, in one history, in one language, is the principle of alienation that constitutes man as privileged insofar as he is what he is (French, of precious French blood) imprisoning him in contentment with his own reality and encouraging him to offer it as an example or impose it as a conquering assertion.’ In contrast, he writes, ‘If Judaism is destined to take on meaning for us, it is indeed by showing that, at whatever time, one must be ready to set out, because to go out. . . is the exigency from which one cannot escape if one wants to maintain the possibility of a just relation.’ Judaism has, under Levinas’s tutelage, become for Blanchot a trope for resisting the hegemonic call of political allegiance. It is not surprising, thus, that Blanchot perceived the student chant of 1968 as a great political moment; not, as Finkielkraut understood it, one in which France’s youth tried to usurp the position of Jewish victimhood, but rather a moment when the students chose to resist their natural identification with the state and chose to go outside. It was a moment when the Jews’ supposed disconnection from soil made them a heroic exemplar, one, however that could never be properly claimed or owned by anyone. For Blanchot, Finkielkraut’s experience of usurpation was part of the point; the moment one claims to instantiate the ideal of deracination, one has elevated the value of belonging over and above the command ‘to go out from your father’s house.’ Levinas’s powerful critique of nationalism as a modern paganism requires one further step, which Levinas failed to take: its disengagement from the claim that the Jews are the paradigmatically uprooted people.This is this final step that Blanchot sees performed in the students’ gesture, not because they claim to take the place of the Jews, but because their very act reveals that the space of deracination is only occupied in a gesture of disavowel. Blanchot leads the way toward this final deracination by way of his reading of May 1968. It is, however, Derrida, the philosopher of deconstruction, much better known for his effect on American English departments than for his treatment of Judaism, who takes up the mantle.

The students of 1968 probably had no sense of themselves as performing an ironic political gesture: claiming to be what they could never be, and in so doing critiquing dominant modes of political identification. It is only analysis that unearths this significance. Derrida, on the other hand makes the ironic gesture of identification (which can simultaneously be read as an act of disidentification) a self-conscious political performance. If the students of 1968 transgress the boundaries of political identity by claiming to be what they are not, Derrida takes this procedure a step further: he claims to be a marrano. He claims, that is, to be a Jew only in secret. An impossible gesture if there ever was one and yet it follows perfectly from the history of the trope of the Jew in 20th century Europe. If the rootless Jew is, in the words of Paul Celan, the one to whom nothing belongs,‘which is not on loan, borrowed, never to be returned,’ then, in the words of Derrida, who was himself born into an Algerian-Jewish family,‘It makes it possible to say that the less you are what you are, the more you are Jewish, and as a result the less you are Jewish, the more you are Jewish . . .’ And thus the only way to remain true to the legacy of the wandering Jew is, as Derrida put it,‘to be the least and thus the last of the Jews.’ For Derrida, this claim acknowledges the inevitability of allegiances while, at the same time, performing a final act of uprooting on that structure. For Derrida, there is no doubt that this play of identity had a political significance. It was meant to trip up the impulse toward exceptionalism that accompanies claims to exemplarity. It was meant as a sign of hospitality to the other. One that was received, whether knowingly or not, when a Palestinian repeated the same trope.

The less you are what you are, the more you are Jewish, and as a result the less you are Jewish, the more you are Jewish

In August of 2000 Edward Said in an interview with Ari Shavit for Ha’aretz said, in terms that were, no doubt, meant to be provocative, ‘I am the last Jewish intellectual . . . the last one, the authentic follower of Adorno. I will articulate it like this: I am a Jewish Palestinian.’ Not surprisingly, in Said’s words Alain Finkielkraut once again smelled a threat. He registered his offense in an article for Le Débat in 2004. This claim to be the new Jews,‘the ethical Jews’ was the last frontier, he argued, in a battle to deprive ‘the ethnic Jews’ of their identity. But once again he misses what is at stake in the claim. Said is doing more here than aligning himself with a discourse of the margins. He is calling attention to the irony that the Palestinians have been uprooted by Jews. Said clearly understands that he is playing with a trope and that the impact lies in this very play. In this claim, he sets in motion a double irony: at the moment he calls himself a ‘Jew,’ he himself is acting as the ‘occupier.’ At that very moment he can no longer claim the mantle of the rootless Jew. In claiming it, he has also forfeited it. Said’s statement and Finkielkraut’s response both reveal the political relevance of the figure of the Jew. Its history—both the history of the Jews and their representation as the other—has become paradigmatic.Whether we like it or not, to speak in the name of the rootless Jew, the foreigner, the victim, is to set in motion an irony; for we annul our right to the position the minute we claim it as our own.To be the last of the Jews, will always mean being the least of the Jews.

Sarah Hammerschlag is assistant professor in the department of Religion at Williams College in Massachusetts. She is the author of The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar France, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2010.

Emmanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse

There is a familiar view about Judaism—and specifically its difference from Christianity—that is expressed in the contrast between particularism and universalism. On this view, Christianity is inclusive, embracing all people everywhere regardless of their national or ethnic identity. Judaism, in contrast, is exclusive, a private club for the chosen few. There are Jews as well as Christians who subscribe to this view. Some are embarrassed by our so-called tribalism. Others take pride in our supposed superiority. Sometimes, especially these days, this pride takes the form of a politics that asserts our prerogative and privilege over other groups. But, whatever form it takes, there is a fatal flaw, a tiny ingredient that is missing from this characterization of the Jewish people: its Jewishness.

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It peaked in particularly dramatic fashion just before the Russian Revolution. Less than 5 percent of the total Russian population at that time, Jews numbered over 50 percent of the students at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, a demographic feat that produced its own commentary. Students joked that it was the only school in the Russian Empire with a quota for non-Jewish students. In Odessa the situation reached a point of absurdity. With over 80 percent of the student body Jewish, in 1916 the Conservatory officials reacted by launching a novel affirmative action scholarship program for ethnic Russians. Of course, Jewish visibility in a bitterly antisemitic regime had an obvious downside. Charges of Jewish opportunism were common, particularly since a conservatory degree provided a draft deferment and a legal pathway out of the Pale of Settlement. Professional antisemites, such as the music critic Emil Medtner, a leading member of the Russian symbolist movement, spoke darkly of a plague of ‘little Jew boys from Lodz’ ruining Russian and European music with their ‘Asiatic’ and ‘barbarous’ ways. Even well-meaning friends were liable to resort to specious racial explanations for the preponderance of Jewish musical talent. The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin once declared that without Jews, ‘music would die out.’ Yet, he went on to explain that this talent stemmed from the biologically feminine character of the Jewish race, which predisposed them to more sensitive, lyrical instruments: ‘For an orchestra to sound right,’ he confided to a colleague, ‘it must have no less than 15 percent Jews in the string and horn sections.’

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Now an international phenomenon, the orchestra began life as a small-scale series of music workshops, put together in 1999 to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Goethe’s birth. As part of Weimar’s programme of ‘Cultural Capital of Europe’ events, Barenboim was asked to establish a workshop to bring together young musicians from across the Middle East. With the support and interest of Said, Barenboim invited applications from players in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Israel. The response was overwhelming. Speaking at the 2006 Reith lectures, Barenboim recounts:
‘We expected to have a small forum of maybe eight or twelve young people who would come and make music together and spend a week or ten days at a workshop with us, so you can imagine the surprise we had when there were over two hundred applicants from the Arab world alone.’ Twenty-five young musicians attended, alongside a number of established, high-profile performers including cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The workshops comprised chamber music lessons and master classes, and an orchestra that performed Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. The name West-Eastern Divan was given, chosen after Goethe’s 1819 collection of poems (the Westöstlicher Diwan) inspired by the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafiz.
The Weimar ‘experiment’, as Said and Barenboim termed the first workshop in Parallels and Paradoxes, was expressly not designed as ‘an alternative way of making peace’. Rather, Said suggested, ‘the idea was to see what would happen if you brought these people together to play in an orchestra in Weimar, in the spirit of Goethe, who wrote a fantastic collection of poems based on his enthusiasm for Islam.’ Said held that, just as Goethe’s poetry entered into an open dialogue with a cultural ‘other’, so such a workshop enabled participants to explore and traverse those boundaries engendered by difference in nationality, background and political stance: ‘no one felt under any pressure to hold things back. And since the groups were so miscellaneous, both animosity and cordiality were almost always in evidence.’ Barenboim likewise views the venture as creating a new channel of communication and cooperation between assumed antagonists. Speaking in his 2006 Reith lectures, Barenboim states categorically that ‘the orchestra cannot bring peace.’ However, he proposes it can ‘bring understanding. It can awaken the curiosity, and then perhaps the courage, to listen to the narrative of the other, and at the very least accept its legitimacy.’ Music, and specifically the orchestral experience, is celebrated as the ideal vehicle for open interaction. On describing a young Syrian and young Israeli musician sharing a music stand, Barenboim suggests ‘they were trying to play the same note, to play with the same dynamic, with the same stroke of the bow. They were trying to do something together, something about which they both cared… Well, having achieved that one note, they can’t look at each other the same way, they have shared a common experience.’
The potency of this image and its accompanying rhetoric—young Arab and Israeli musicians working as one, letting music soar across political adversity—was not lost on the orchestra’s European hosts. What had been created as a one-off workshop was quickly established (and funded) as a touring orchestra, formed of up to 120 permanent players, drawn from across the Middle East—Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan—and other Muslim countries including Egypt, Iran and Turkey. Since 2002, the regional government of Andalusia has sponsored the group and provides a fixed base for the orchestra in Seville, a development that has led to the inclusion of young Spanish musicians in the ensemble. The orchestra now meets each summer and rehearses in the city before launching an international tour, which often includes live television broadcasts, stadia appearances and recording deals. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra’s blend of musical excellence and apparently humanitarian vision has proved a heady mix for liberal European audiences, provoking intense, proselytising excitement among commentators. In response to the orchestra’s various BBC Proms appearances over the past seven years, UK critics have praised the group with a particularly emotive quality of endorsement. Reviews have applauded the orchestra as an ‘astonishingly moving act of creative coexistence’, claiming ‘there is an extra power of passion and motive, of music meaning something’ and that the orchestra’s ‘magic derives from the unique chemistry between its members, its charismatic creator, and the political tragedy to which it is a defiant response’.
Indeed, the idea that the orchestra is uniquely vibrant through a connection to ‘political tragedy’ has been a source of contention for more critical accounts of the orchestra. Some accounts have charged the orchestra with impeding Palestinian solidarity on the international stage through its normalisation of Palestinian-Israeli interaction. Other studies have examined the orchestra’s ideological position by exploring what the ensemble actually offers its players. Various scholars working alongside the orchestra have concluded from their fieldwork that the ensemble seems driven more by young musicians hungry for an opportunity to play professionally (and under the gleaming baton of Barenboim) than by any will to build bridges through music or explore the ‘other’. Indeed, the composer and political activist Raymond Dean has drawn attention to the published collection of West-Eastern Divan player testimonies, An Orchestra Without Borders, noting that the orchestra appears to have done little to enhance the Israeli musicians’ insight into the political realities surrounding them. He suggests, ‘the impression ultimately gleaned from Arabs and Israelis alike is that the real glue binding these young people together is ambition… In itself, of course, there is nothing reprehensible about this—but it is a far cry from stylising the orchestra as an exemplary space of reconciliation and understanding.’

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

It had struck us, and not surprisingly many others at around the same time, that the category of the ‘Jew’, not the history of Jews, Judaism or Jewish culture, but the way in which the ‘Jew’ had been perceived in modern culture, was relatively unexplored. While issues surrounding race, identity, colonialism, and Eurocentrism have become the focus of endless debate and scrutiny, the ‘Jew’ had largely been left out. It is as if the issue of the ‘Jew’ is just as much an embarrassment to contemporary cultural theorists as it was to their European ancestors.¹Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

Freud and the early analysts (almost all of whom were Jewish) enabled psychoanalysis to flower as a marginal discipline offering a critical perspective on its host society. It thrived particularly because of the acuity with which it named sexuality as the core disturbance in European culture; in a society dominated by extreme sexual repression and hypocrisy, Freud named names. Sex was at the heart of everything. Sexual drives are people’s key motivational impulse (opposed by ‘ego preservative drives’), and Freud’s general picture of mental activity was based on a sexual metaphor. The ‘pleasure principle’, understood as a kind of orgasmic release of psychic tension, was the major principle of psychological functioning. Libidinal energy, held at bay and repressed, is always seeking freedom; if it cannot have it directly, it comes through as symptoms of disease, jokes and dreams. Please Login or Register to read the rest of this content.

And of course there was Louis B. Mayer, who ‘had forgotten exactly where in Russia he had been born and on what day,’ and whose voortrek took him to Canada, then to Boston where he made money in the salvage business, before heading west to found Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Benjamin Warner left his wife and children in Poland, worked as a cobbler in Baltimore, brought his family over to the new world, then ‘…For years, he roamed the East and Canada, peddling notions from a wagon before finally settling in Youngstown, Ohio.’ Here Warner raised the four sons whose purchase of a broken film projector set them on the road to become the eponymous Warner Brothers.

Gabler’s contention is that what typified all these Jewish men was ‘a patrimony of failure’, which led to an: ‘utter and absolute rejection of their pasts’, with a concomitant ‘absolute devotion to their new country’. With these luftmenshen in the role of Polybus, the founding Oedipuses of Hollywood took the road west, unconsciously intent on using the nascent movie industry as a means of storming the precincts of American ‘gentility, respectability and status’ that they were otherwise prohibited from entering.

So far, so lacking in contentiousness. This much we know: the white picket fences of the Andy Hardy movies, behind which Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland romped in pubescent faux-innocence; or the carpenter gothic that was the required framing for the ‘wonderful life’ limned in by Frank Capra at the behest of Harry Cohn — these were clever gestalts of Americana, fabricated in the central European Jewish psyche, then projected on to giant screens, so that the movie-going masses might emote, then cathect. This does not much interest me — it seems a given.

But what does grab me — worry me, even, a terrier at my imagination — is how Gabler’s account of this Jewish empire-building is so lacking in a spatial or geographic context.  Apart from the bald schema mittel-European plain – Ellis Island – Beverly Hills, and a few remarks on the condition of Los Angeles in 1900s ‘a primitive outpost…paved roads ended abruptly downtown… its main architecture small shacks engulfed by orange and pepper trees.’  There is only a nod to the topography we all know: ‘Hollywood…Twelve miles from the Pacific Ocean and isolated on a gentle swell,’ before the place itself sinks to the substratum of Gabler’s narrative of men, a handful of women and power.

If Los Angeles locations are scouted at all in Gabler’s 432-page history of the movies, it is only to furnish sets for a handful of scenes — such as the notorious ‘consultations’ by members of the House Committee for Un-American Activities at the downtown Biltmore Hotel in May 1947; or the meetings of the celebrated ‘comedians’ circle’ at the Hillcrest Country Club; or again, the vast mansions and fantastical estates created by the Hollywood elite in Beverly Hills and Bel Air, which, with their Cuisinart of architectural styles represented the dernier cri of pretension, certainly, but also of arrival.

Of course, it’s reasonable to ask: why should An Empire of Their Own concern itself with Hollywood and Los Angeles as places at all? Apart from the balmy climate, and the particular southern Californian quality of light that made it possible to film year-round without the use of costly Klieg lights, there was surely no greater geographic imperative that made this basin, the valley of the Los Angeles river, the cockpit of an entertainment industry; one which — I would argue — fed for the greater part of the twentieth century the entire globe’s insatiable appetite for narrative and image. Hollywood and movies are not, in this respect, like the Ruhr with its coal and iron, or the Ukrainian steppe wavering with wheat — the movies were not there already, waiting to be dug out of the ground.

I suppose it’s precisely because it was Hollywood that shaped and defined our perception of the greater Los Angeles area that the jibe between reality and representation looms so much greater in these parts than anywhere else in the Western world. Let me elaborate: I take it as a given that the technological advances in mass communications and transport that typified urban development in the twentieth century have resulted in the detachment of human from physical geography. We can point to the covering over of the Fleet River in London as the locus in quo of this new epoch. Henceforth neither physical features — rivers, hills, ravines — nor physical limitations — the traction of men and beasts — would define the urban landscape: cities would come, increasingly, to conform to Guy Debord’s formulation of the ‘society of the spectacle’, places shaped by economic imperatives, and even seen within the framing of work, entertainment and consumption.

What makes Los Angeles so special in this regard is the id of Hollywood itself. When Tod Hackett, the art director protagonist of Nathanael West’s great Hollywood novel The Day of the Locust comes upon the jumble at the back of his studio’s lot, he pushes his way through ‘a tangle of briars, old flats and iron junk, skirting the skeleton of a Zeppelin, a bamboo stockade, an adobe fort, the wooden horse of Troy, a flight of Baroque palace stairs that started in a bed of weeds and ended against the branches of an oak, part of the Fourteenth Street Elevated station, a Dutch windmill, the bones of a dinosaur, the upper half of the Merrimac, a corner of a Mayan temple, until he eventually reached the road’. (Incidentally, in case you’re wondering, the Merrimac referred to is almost certainly the USS Merrimac, the first ironclad built in the Civil War, so West juxtaposes eras, built environments with their pockets of herbage and modes of transport.)

Hackett, confronted with this ‘final dumping ground’, thinks of Janvier’s story In the Sargasso Sea, a history of civilisation encapsulated in the form of a marine junkyard. As an evolution of this, the studio’s back lot is, he realises, ‘a dream dump. A Sargasso of the imagination.’ Moreover, it is a dump that continually hypertrophies, for ‘there wasn’t a dream afloat somewhere which wouldn’t sooner or later turn up on it, having first been made photographic… Many boats sink and never reach the Sargasso, but no dream entirely disappears.’

Is it significant that West, a satiric writer and himself Jewish, was the first to grasp this particular aspect of Hollywood’s psychogeography? Probably. West understood that the process whereby cities are cut up by the economic imperatives of production, then re-edited by those of consumption, would reach its apogee in Los Angeles. The Day of the Locust, written in the mid-1930s, is less well known for its bucolic scenes — campfire picnics in the canyons of the Hollywood Hills — than its justly celebrated climax: a hideous riot by crazed fans outside a movie premiere being held at a thinly veiled Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, ‘Kahn’s Persian Theater’, on Hollywood Boulevard.

Now that the narrative cinema that Hollywood dominated for almost three-quarters of a century is moribund, its celluloid body gnawed at by the microscopic, digitised parasites of television and the Internet, we are left with a Sargasso Sea of an imagined Los Angeles, for never before in the history of humanity has a city been so relentlessly depicted and yet so little comprehended. Frame, zoom, pan, track, wide-angle or close-up, how many tens, hundreds, thousands, even millions of views of Los Angeles have we been sold, without ever seeing the whole picture? Is it fanciful to suggest that this slipperiness, this ungraspability of the sprawling conurbation, is itself a correlate of those other cities — from ancient Rome to modern London — that have been constructed from plaster and lath on the back lots of Paramount, Universal, MGM, et al.?

I think it worth swimming some more in West’s Sargasso of the imagination, because while he was the first to nail down its implications, the authors of two other important Hollywood novels were also notably taken by the spatial incongruities of the studios’ back lots. Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? was a cause célèbre when it was first published in 1941. In part this was because Schulberg was himself a Hollywood princeling — the son of Paramount production head B. P. Schulberg — in part because its depiction of a ruthlessly ambitious Hollywood producer was seen as inescapably anti-Semitic, but mostly because Schulberg’s privileged access to the imperial secrets made him able to lay bare the oedipal rage that Gabler characterises as the driving force of the moguls.

The Sammy of the title, Sammy Glick, is a second-generation American Jew whose steely nature is tempered in the forge of Manhattan’s lower East Side, and by his hatred for his frum father, a failed patriarch who, unable to earn a living in the New World, davens behind a handcart. Glick’s unwilling amanuensis, Al Manheim — significantly from a kindlier, reformed, small town Jewish background — discovers where Glick (né Glickstein) comes from: ‘Between a synagogue and a fish store, in a tenement laced with corroded fire escapes and sagging washing lines. It looked as if one healthy gust of wind would send its tired bricks tumbling into the narrow street. The hallway gave off a warm, sweet and infinitely unpleasant odor of age, of decay, of too many uncleaned kitchens too close together.’

Equally significant, to my way of thinking, Manheim has walked to Rivington Street in the East Village, downtown from Central Park. His 60-block traverse has afforded him the opportunity to meditate on ‘the irony of the fascist charge that the Jews have cornered the wealth of America, for here, where there are more Jews than anywhere else in the world, millions of them are crowded into these ghetto streets with the early American names’.

On the West Coast, the Hollywood inhabited by Glick, Manheim and the other characters is still recognisably the enlarged village that Gabler describes; the same faces are seen again and again at Hollywood and Vine, while all the major players can be witnessed, any evening, at the Brown Derby or Musso’s. However, Al Manheim and his lover, the wiseacre — but presumably gentile — screenwriter, Kit Carter, take this promenade upon leaving a meeting of the nascent Writers’ Guild: ‘We walked out past the sound stages and the machine shops and the labor gangs to the back lot. We walked past the New York street and up through the Latin Quarter of Paris until we came to a South Sea Island with a little beach leading down to real water. We crossed a little bridge to the island and sat down on the sand in front of a native hut. The hot April sun was just what the set designer ordered. I dug my hands into the warm sand and lay on my back, looking up through a palm tree supported with piano wire, at the cloudless sky.’

So far, so Nathanael West — and again, note the significance of walking — but the scene then opens out into another: the lovers leave the Sargasso of the imagination and drive west along Sunset Boulevard ‘past Westwood village, the home of UCLA, which is either the model for Hollywood’s version of campus life or vice versa.’ Then to the sea, where they visit Julian Baumberg, the creative nebuch, and then north towards Malibu. On the coastal road Kit remembers a real beach where she’s really swam, and they make their way down to it. Manheim remarks: ‘I almost broke my neck on the jagged path that angled down to the little beach that lay concealed and virginal below. Natural hydraulics working overtime for a couple of million years had scooped it right out of the cliffs.’

Schulberg thus tries to place Hollywood’s ingurgitation of the wider world within the context of a spatial awareness of Los Angeles, its guts and its flanks. When we pull back further from the cannibalistic tale of Sammy Glick eating his way to the top, we can appreciate that Schulberg — a native Angeleno — understands the physical geography of southern California perfectly. Throughout the novel Manheim, Glick and company shuttle back and forth from east to west coasts, by train, by car, by train again. Manheim says of his train flight from Sammy Glick: ‘It was consoling to lean back and let the distance between us widen tie by tie.’ What is underscored here is that Hollywood is integral to the western expansion of American civilisation, remaining then, now, and — if recent events are anything to go by — always at its final frontier.

F.  Scott Fitzgerald is the bridge between West and Schulberg spatially and metaphorically. Schulberg was his neighbour in the writers’ building, and the older author was one of the important champions of What Makes Sammy Run? Schulberg returned the compliment by writing The Disenchanted, an account of a great alcoholic novelist washed up on the desert island of Hollywood. West, bizarrely, died in a car accident on his way to Fitzgerald’s funeral. The Last Tycoon, Fitzgerald’s Hollywood novel, was published posthumously, also in 1941, although its action takes place in 1935. The familiar motif of the Sargasso returns this time described by the narrator, Celia Brady: ‘Under the moon the back lot was thirty acres of fairyland — not because the locations really looked like African jungles and French chateaux and schooners at anchor and Broadway at night, but because they looked like the torn pictures of childhood…’

More laboured than West or Schulberg, I’m sure you’ll agree, and arguably in Celticising his female narrator (who was in fact based on David Selznick’s wife — and Louis B. Mayer’s daughter — Irene), Fitzgerald suffered from a certain cowardice in the face of the actualité: Hollywood was never an Irish empire. However, there is much The Last Tycoon has to teach us about the psychogeography of Los Angeles. Kathleen, the love interest of Monroe Stahr — the novel’s protagonist and the fictional alter-ego of the great producer Irving Thalberg — arrives when the Sargasso of the imagination is flooded: ‘On top of a huge head of the goddess Siva, two women were floating down the current of an impromptu river. The idol had come unloosed from a set of Burma, and it meandered earnestly on its way, stopping sometimes to waddle and bump in the shallows with the other debris of the tide.’ When Stahr makes his move on the young woman, it’s during an industry function at the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard.

The following afternoon they rendezvous there again, and Stahr drives her west along Wilshire to Santa Monica, their progress — into infatuation — mirroring the expansion of Los Angeles itself. This is the road that exemplifies the city’s capitulation to the automobile, with its Streamline Moderne office blocks and apartment buildings, and its department stores purpose-built to be accessible by car. Like Al Manheim and Kit Carter, Stahr and Kathleen are an interfaith couple heading via one of Los Angeles’ human ecologies — Autopia — to another — Surfurbia. When they make love in Stahr’s half-built beach house, they are indulging as much in topic miscegenation as racial. No wonder the fog is so thick that they can’t see where they are: they are violating the utopia of Los Angeles by being anywhere at all.

So, there it is, whipped out in the open — the phallic car. In The Last Tycoon Celia Brady, all of twenty, turns on the car radio and accelerates up Laurel Canyon, describing herself thus: ‘I had good features except my face was too round, and a skin they seemed to love to touch, and good legs, and I didn’t have to wear a brassiere.’  You may have noted my insistence on the pedestrian in my consideration of The Day of the Locust and What Makes Sammy Run? And some of you may have been thinking: what’s this walking got to do with Hollywood or Los Angeles at all?

It was the architectural historian Reyner Banham, who, in his seminal 1971 study Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, defined those ecologies as ‘Surfurbia’, ‘Foothills’, ‘The Plains of Id’ and ‘Autopia’. Banham certainly ceded great significance to the car in his consideration of the built environment of Los Angeles, noting — for example — that ‘in (some) areas… the banks and cuttings of the freeways are often the only topographical features of note in the townscape.’ Banham also posited that the relationship between the Angelenos and the freeway system involved ‘a deep-seated mystique’, and pondered whether or not the horror stories routinely told concerning freeway driving were not intended ‘to prevent the profanation of their most sacred ritual by the uninitiated’.

However, when it came to what he termed ‘the common misconception that everything in Los Angeles is caused by the automobile as a way of life’, he was blunt: ‘If there has to be a mechanistic interpretation, then it must be that the automobile and the architecture alike are the products of the Pacific Electric Railroad as a way of life.’ I don’t have the space here to take you through the elegant circumambulations of Banham’s thesis on the built environment of Los Angeles, but let it suffice — for my argument — to give his punch line: ‘The houses and the automobiles are equal figments of the great dream, the dream of the urban homestead, the dream of the good life outside the squalors of the European type of city… Los Angeles cradles and embodies the most potent current version of the great bourgeois vision of the good life in a tamed countryside.’

Except for post-Marxist theorists of Los Angeles — for whom Mike Davis’s City of Quartz is Das Kapital — Banham’s dialectic would seem to be a truth universally acknowledged, with this proviso: if the thesis is a unitary, cubic instantiation of this ‘vision’, then, in the absence of any but the bare minimum of strategic planning — the antithesis — synthesis is effected by two modes of seeing, both of them screens. I would argue there is no real difference between Autopia and the utopia of Hollywood: they are both framed within a screen, they are both the means to the same end, a non-locatable vision of the good life, as experienced by the voyeur, who is static but presented with the illusion of control, either through his or her choice of what movie to see, or which freeway to take.

Of course Los Angeles antedated Hollywood by a long way, and even by the 1900s there were novelistic accounts of its peculiar human ecology, its domestic architecture of rampant individualism, its polymorphous hucksters and perverse boosterism. The film historian David Thomson, in his book The Whole Equation, theorises that perhaps the movies arrived in Hollywood too late. This is a mere trope, of course. The truth is that the Eastern European Jews arrived at exactly the right time to take part in the second great creative syncretism of American culture, the first being the collision between the traditional English ballad form and the eight-bar blues, which resulted in rock ‘n’ roll.

The Hollywood Jews found the expansion of the Los Angeles aqueduct, a colossal land-and-resource grab, orchestrated by the Chandler-Otis dynasty centred in downtown LA, whose chief propagandist, Charles Fletcher Lummis, walked all the way to southern California from Ohio in 1884. Colonel Otis, the then owner of the LA Times, was so impressed by this 143-day odyssey that he made Lummis the City Editor. Lummis went on to found a literary salon, the ‘Arroyo Set’, which synergised the virtues of open-air living and revivalist domestic architecture, in much the same way their contemporaries, the pre-Raphaelites, jammed together guild socialism and the neo-gothic.

But why — I hear you think — the preoccupation with the novel, specifically with novels about Hollywood? Surely with this extreme plethora of visual representation to choose from, prose fiction is the least effective means of understanding the psychogeography of Los Angeles? Lummis walked to Los Angeles — he therefore knew exactly where it was. His was an eotechnic grasp on the tyranny of distance; all subsequent Hollywood imagineers came by rail, or train, or road. And, as Rousseau observed, we think at walking pace, while we conceive of prosody in terms of metric feet. When writers describe Autopia their prose becomes necessarily filmic, like this from Joan Didion’s 1970 Hollywood novel, Play It as It Lays: ‘She drove the San Diego to the Harbor, the Harbor up to the Hollywood, the Hollywood to the Golden State, the Santa Monica, the Santa Ana, the Pasadena, the Ventura. She drove it as a riverman runs a river, every day more attuned to its currents, its deceptions, and, just as a riverman feels the pull of the rapids in the lull between sleeping and waking, so Maria lay at night in the still of Beverly Hills and saw the great signs roar overhead at seventy miles an hour.’

Would it be stretching an analogy too far into a methodology if I were to suggest that the only way to discover the psycho-spatial relation between Los Angeles and Hollywood was to re-enact that great syncretism with my own person? I had walked to New York in partial emulation of my maternal grandfather, Isaac, son of the Rabbi Yehuda Zalkind, whose bald account of his emigration to the new world in the 1890s was scrawled in the back of his prayer book thus: ‘I left Romshishiak Falk Havana on September 11, 1888. I came to America November 26, 1888 on Wednesday.’ A bald progression of places: Romshishiak — Falk — Havana.

When I say walked, I had, in point of fact, walked from my house in Stockwell, south London, to Heathrow, then flown to JFK, then walked into Manhattan through East New York and Brooklyn. Nevertheless, such was the primacy of muscle fatigue over mental conception, and so much of a jump-cut is intercontinental jet flight, that when I arrived I felt as if the two landmasses were one.

Like the Hollywood moguls, mine would be a quest in search of the movies; however, while they hurried to attend its birth, I would be in search of the deathbed of cinema. By covering every inch of ground between my home and Heathrow, then eschewing wheeled transport for the entire duration of my week in Los Angeles, I would be able to throw off the banjaxed topography of the cut, pan, zoom, track, close-up and wide-angle, whether of camera lens or car windscreen. I would be able to encounter Baldwin Hills, Crenshaw, West Adams, South Central, Downtown, Echo Park, Wilshire Boulevard, Melrose, in 360-degree surround sight, sound, touch and smell, arriving in Hollywood footsore but possessed of an insight not privileged to anyone since Charles Foster Lummis presented himself to Colonel Otis.

And then I would press on, into the Hollywood Hills, along Mullholland Drive, down Laurel Canyon, along Sunset Boulevard, through Beverly Hills, past Hillcrest Country Club down to Culver City and the MGM Studios. And on to Santa Monica, and thence Venice, before traversing the Boleno wetlands, until eventually I regained the airport. In all, a 120-mile circumambulation of the Los Angeles basin, taking in all of Banham’s four ecologies, and ritualistically emptying out the Sargossa of Hollywood’s dreams as only a wandering demi-Jew could.

And I did. What was it like? Well, you’ll have to wait for the main feature to find out, when my account of the walk is published in book form next year. This has only been the trailer.

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Will Self is the author of seven novels (the most recent of which The Butt is published in paperback in May), five collections of short stories, and three novellas. He has contributed extensively to a plethora of publications over the years, and four collections of his journalism have been published. He lives in London with his wife, the journalist Deborah Orr

They were right.
There was nothing to see.
And I was right too.
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