Why, Let the Stricken Deer Go Weep

By Elena Shvarts
Translated by Sasha Dugdale

Queen:     If it be, why seems it so particular with thee?
Hamlet:     Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not seems.

Hamlet, Act One, Scene Two

I

In February 1942 the Leningrad Theatre Institute, or at least, what was left of it, was evacuated from besieged Leningrad to Pyatigorsk, together with the Philharmonic and Radlov’s Theatre Company. They had barely settled or begun recovering a little from their starvation, when the Germans began a sudden and unexpected offensive in the Caucasus and reached Pyatigorsk with unimaginable speed. The soldiers and the town’s administration all fled south to Tbilisi. Almost everyone in the Theatre Institute set off in their wake, the students walking, some hitching lifts on the last military lorries going in that direction. Initially my Mother and her friend had the luck to be offered a ride, but then the soldiers began harassing them, and finally, angered by their aloofness, they threw them back out onto the road. Read more

On the Track of Family History

There are some documents that, as a conscientious writer, I am glad to have read only after the publication of a novel, even though they are extremely interesting and contain potentially useful information. In the first part of this decade, when I was researching the first half of the twentieth- century for the history of the time and of my family, and reading the literature of the period, I did not know that my maternal grandmother had an uncle called Carl Ludwig Franck. Read more

The Smile on the Dog

JM: It’s a pleasure to be conducting this virtual Q&A – although I have a lurking suspicion that our friends at the Jewish Quarterly have cast me, the Everything is God guy, as Felix Fidley to your Cass Seltzer, a role which I am uniquely unqualified to play.  As the title of my book suggests, my own theology is closer to pantheism (or panentheism) than it is to the relatively primitive classical theism debunked in your (and Seltzer’s) appendix.  So I’d like to start there: Given the way you frame the book’s climactic debate on ‘Does God exist?’ do you agree with today’s neo-atheists that the ‘God’ in question, the ‘God’ that is most relevant to our contemporary moment, is really the old time religion God of providence and punishment?  Personally, I’ve always felt that Dawkins, Hitchens, et al, are setting up a straw man, that only fundamentalists believe as they describe.  Is your sense that the real ‘atheism versus religion’ debate today is indeed between old time religion and rational, scientific philosophy, with no significant role for panentheist Hasidim, Tielhard-style Christians, feminist theologians, or the myriad of other religionists with more contemporary theologies?

RG: It’s nice to make your virtual acquaintance, Jay, and I’ll try to answer your questions as best I can, while maintaining a novelist’s prerogative of ambiguity. Trained as I am as a philosopher, a field in which we battle against imprecision and ambiguity, I’m hyper-sensitive the deliberate application of ambiguity in literature.  A novelist has to create spaces into which the reader’s own point of view moves so that it can inhabit the work and make it into an experience of its own—one hopes pleasurable, though no novelist can secure this for every reader. That is the diceyness of the game. A novel is not an argument but rather a template for experience.  This difference between argumentation and literary experience is the subtext that runs through this novel, which takes as its backdrop the contemporary reactivated atheist/religion debate.  It’s one of the themes of the novel that the binary choices presented in the debate hardly exhaust the possibilities.  That’s why Cass says about the arguments and counter-arguments in his Appendix, which I reproduce at the back of my novel, that they don’t capture all that there is to the matter.  The Appendix is only the Appendix, and the text of the matter, our lived experience,  is something else. Read more

From Judaeophobia to Islamophobia

Many books have been written on anti-Semitism. The past decade has seen the publication, in today’s Europe, of a flood of writings on hostility to Arabs and Islam. And yet, very few researchers have located the Judaeophobia which appeared during the second half of the 19th century at the root of contemporary European nation-building. Similarly, very few research proposals have examined the role of Islamophobia in today’s effort to construct European unity. Of course, works have been published on the emergence of hostility to Islam, but the issue has not been investigated in depth, on the cultural level, for Europe as a whole. Read more

Brno

Why Brno? A place, many would say, distinguished only by its lack of distinction, set at the very heart of Europe but always in the shadow of its mighty neighbour Vienna or its more distant cousin, Prague. A capital of course, but only a regional capital, of South Moravia. The writer Jirí Kratochvil, a native of the place, makes it clear in his prose poem ‘How to Paint a Picture of Brno’: ‘Brno is a city on which there lies the curse of provincialism.’
And yet in a curious way — I’ve never lived there, and visited only a handful of times — Brno has occupied a large part of my life ever since the day, four years after the Iron Curtain came down, I first crept cautiously into the city. Read more

Postcards from the Edge

Hello, there,

After a long, weirdly warm Jerusalem winter spent in the presence of heavily armed soldiers and suspicious security guards — many Fridays a large white surveillance zeppelin hovered over town, staring down on noontime prayers at the al-Aqsa mosque and making a macabre mockery of the festive atmosphere that usually attends the launch of a hot-air balloon — I was eager to get away. Read more

Bad Karma

‘Fifteen shekels a month can guarantee your daughter one hundred thousand in the event of your death. Do you know what a difference one hundred thousand can make to a young orphan? It’s exactly the difference between life as a lawyer and as a receptionist in a dentist’s office.’

Since the accident, Oshri had been selling policies like crazy. It wasn’t clear whether this had to do with his slight limp or with the paralysis in his right arm, but people who’d sit through an appointment with him would take it all in, and buy everything he had to offer: life insurance, loss of earning power, complementary health insurance, you name it. At first Oshri kept recycling the one about the Yemenite who was run over by an ice cream truck the very day he bought his policy, on his way to pick up his daughter from kindergarten, or the one about the guy from the suburbs who’d laughed when Oshri had offered him health insurance and one month later called in tears, having just received a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Read more

This Thread of Life

DG: When I write I want to be invaded by the people I’m writing about. What does it mean to be another human being? What does it mean to be you or to explore this filament, this thread of life and light and warmth that goes through another human being? I can reach it only through writing.

PA: Having worked in film a bit over the years I feel that writing is akin to acting — there is a similar psychological process. An actor is trying to embody another human being, to become someone else. The actor has his or her body whereas the writer has his pen. If you can do it successfully I think there’s a conviction that a reader will automatically feel. It’s a mysterious process, one which connects to the idea of play, of being a child again. Read more

Dispossession, Discrimination, and Civil Disobedience in Sheikh Jarrah

The May 14th demonstration began as any other. Some 400 protestors convened in the small park in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah as they have done each Friday for months. The bus from Tel Aviv unloaded activists from the coastal city; the circle of drummers, the trade mark of the Sheikh Jarrah movement, began infusing the event with electrifying rhythm. A line was forming in front of the stand in the back where activists and visitors can stock up on ‘Free Sheikh Jarrah’ tee-shirts. Yet the atmosphere was more tense than usual. Read more

Zamoscz

More precisely than I
Remember the story he told
Of a garden that grew
By the fortress, he pictured
The little gentile hunchback girl.
A general’s daughter? Something like that. Read more

Walking the Past

I have spent many years of my professional life as a lawyer and human rights activist struggling to save Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank from being used to establish illegal Israeli settlements. But as the years passed more settlements were built and the landscape in the region where I lived was vanishing. Even after it was affirmed in a 2005 report sponsored by the Israeli government that 40 per cent of the settlements were established on land that Israel acknowledges as privately owned by Palestinians, nothing was done to remove them. To my great dismay, law and legality did not prove to be decisive weapons in our battle against Israeli colonialism. In 2008 I published Palestinian Walks, a book that described the vanishing landscape of Palestine through a series of six walks I took from 1979 to 2007. Read more

Elena Shvarts (1948-2010)

Elena Shvarts, the Russian poet, died earlier this year. As one of her translators I found myself summing up her life and works over and over again — a sad task, and one which feels somehow intrusive and limiting: the condensing of a life of poetry into three paragraphs, mostly for people who are not yet readers of her poems; an element of marketing, to win over the non-readers; a few anecdotes and beautiful phrases… Nothing of the bewilderment and disbelief we feel in bereavement, or even of the nature of bereavement which deceives us, tells us we should wait for more poems, convinces us it is impossible that the wise and eloquent voice is no longer at the end of the phone line in a St Petersburg flat. Read more

Bridging the Two Cultures

Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture

by Edward Skidelsky

Princeton University Press

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

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

Major Farran’s Hat; Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War Against Jewish Terrorism 1945-1948

By David Cesarani

William Heinemann, March 2009, £20.00

On the evening of 6 May 1947 Alexander Rubowitz left his parents’ home in Jerusalem and never returned. Rubowitz was 16 at the time, and a member of LEHI (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), the smallest and most ardent underground organisation fighting against the British Mandate in Palestine. Commonly referred to by the British as ‘The Stern Gang’, LEHI specialised in acts of terrorism, usually in defiance of the Jewish Agency, which led the Zionist struggle for independence. It later transpired that Rubowitz had been abducted by British  officers, serving in the Special Air Service (SAS), which led the counter-terrorist offensive. One of them, Major Roy Farran, admitted that he killed Rubowitz in the course of his interrogation, by smashing a rock against his head. The body was never found.
Those were violent days in Palestine. Arabs, Jews and the British attacked each other with varying degrees of maliciousness, always supposedly for patriotic purposes. Hence the abduction and killing of Rubowitz are hardly worth more than a footnote in the history of those dramatic times. But both the young Zionist militant and his British assassin became mythological heroes, which gives their story special significance and lifts it above the chronology of routine violence. Read more

A Designated Man

By Moris Farhi

Telegram Books, March 2009, £12.99

In a lecture at Harvard in 1967, Jorge Luis Borges mourned the passing of the epic, a form he loved for its fusion of music and narration and its heroic breadth. In contrast to the myopic and introverted modern novel, it offered a ‘pattern for all men’ — something that we in the contemporary world hungered for just as much as the ancients.
In A Designated Man, set on the fictitious island of Skender, Moris Farhi gives us a darker, starker version of the same struggle we saw in his last novel, Young Turk; again, a multi-ethnic society is in distress. Though graced with fertile soil and a long, distinguished history, Skender is in the grip of what is known locally as the Law. First introduced several centuries earlier, and justified by a rigid concept of honour, it gives its men no choice but to surrender their lives to blood feuds.
The Law has been so successful that it now allows clans that have had all their male feudists wiped out to appoint women in their stead. Any woman who agrees must erase all trace of her femininity thereafter. Any one who resists the Law’s fundamentalist logic can expect a harsh response from Toma, the Law’s chief enforcer, who is responsible for the training and indoctrination of young feudists and also acts as agents for the faceless Gospodins, the mainland clan that has been slowly and quietly buying up the island, in the hope that Skender might one day become a Mediterranean equivalent of Diego Garcia, thereby making them a fortune. Read more

ONE MORE YEAR

By Sana Krasikov

Portobello Books, June 2009, £10.99

Anyone who expects a short story to be an impressionistic wash, a glimpsed moment that requires less than full concentration, should know that the eight stories in Sana Krasikov’s debut collection permit the reader no such idleness. On the contrary, One More Year demands commitment. Its narratives are intricately woven, populated by idiosyncratic characters, of whom many — the boyfriend’s mother, for instance, who lectures on the psychology of endurance after surviving a plane crash — are merely mentioned in passing. Each tale is alive with the minutiae of a fully-realised world and in each the author has amassed enough material to create at least one novel.
Like most of her characters, Krasikov is an émigré from Eastern Europe. Born in the Ukraine, she grew up in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia and moved to the United States when she was eight years old. In this acclaimed collection, for which she was awarded the 2009 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, she describes the immigrant experience from eight different angles, in unsentimental prose laced with bruised compassion. Her characters, whether striving to assimilate in the States or reacclimatise themselves to Russia, are adrift in equally inhospitable lands: ‘an entire world transposed, like an ink blot on a folded map, from one continent to another.’ Read more

Marti Friedlander

By Leonard Bell

Auckland University Press, October 2009, £34.50

‘A very good portrait is a paradox,’ says Leonard Bell, professor of Art History at Auckland University. He considers how revelation and mystery co-exist in the work of Marti Friedlander, and her motivation for each of the 185 photographs included in this handsome book, many now being published for the first time.
The daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, Marti was born in 1928 in London’s East End. Aged three, Marti and her sister Anne were put into an orphanage in Bethnal Green run by the London County Council. In 1933 she moved to the Jewish Orphanage in Norwood. You need to know this about Marti’s early life because it informs so much of her photography. Deeply steeped in Jewish sensibilities, yet always an outsider. Read more

Fiction as History (as Fiction)

In an article in the Times, Anthony Beevor calls The Kindly Ones ‘a great work of literary fiction, to which readers and scholars will turn for decades to come’. The review is eminently quotable, of course, but alert readers will have to ask: Really? Scholars?
Told from a point of view both sensationalist and horrifying — that of an SS officer who is an accomplice to all the worst excesses of the war — The Kindly Ones is nevertheless a well-written book. It offers a high style that could easily be a pastiche of Thomas Mann, but goes further than Mann ever did in examining individual guilt in the communal crime of war by describing with chilling meticulousness the criminal acts themselves. Dozens, if not hundreds, of deaths, many gruesome, are given individual attention. The tone is even, the pace stately and measured, the details stomach-turning. From the Commissar Order and the siege of Stalingrad to the Final Solution, tens of pages at a time are dedicated to reproducing conversations in which seemingly intelligent men argue the tertiary particulars of mass murder and enact the most sordid crimes. The writing is in the best taste, it could be argued, and the content the worst.
Some reviewers have argued that because of the book’s opening (‘Oh, my human brothers’), this is a story about how any one could become a Nazi, but the book’s narrator, Maximilian Aue, is a monster, and has been one since long before the war. Forever scarred by the disappearance of his father and his childhood incest with his twin, he begins a make-believe relationship with his sister in which he eats her excrement and has sex with her in a torture chamber. When he is not inhabiting this fantasy, he is an unrepentant murderer who kills not just Jews and other ‘enemies of the Reich’, but both his mother and his best friend for no apparent reason — hardly an everyman. Read more

City of David

The appropriateness of Messianic hopes in an era pronounced as violent and bleak can seem to touch the nadir of madness or near the course to insanity. Nevertheless, it is precisely at these times that the appeal to the Messianic seems more intense, real and credible.
Michael Heller in his new collection of poetry, Eschaton writes: ‘Impossible for me to write of other topics, mathematics and language or / mathematics and Zion’ (Letter and Dream of Walter Benjamin). He takes heart in a new hope of ‘after-selves’ or the co-ordinate — ‘reliev[ing,] the self-awareness of non-self’ — which he alludes to in A Terror of Tonality.
Throughout a collection which immerses itself  in the devastation of September 11th and in the ruined landscapes of Sarajevo and Somalia — to name just a few of the massacre sites included — the word that occasions mention most frequently is ‘surcease’, a word that suggests overarching disaster but that also foreshadows some relief.
The Age of The Poet considers both the decline of the poet but also of the age in which he breeds. There sounds one possible note of relief: ‘but for surcease, for stillness / for not thinking.’ ‘Not thinking,’ can mean two things in Heller’s symbology: the relief from ‘garrulousness’ (Finding the Mode), and the reliable possibility of metaphysical end-points — ‘Wasn’t this how looking out was to become looking in, one’s ghosts no / longer blocking reflection?’(In the Studio).
What bespeaks the heartfelt nature of this collection is only apparent in its deliberate organisation. By placing the most epiphanic material  in the first two sections of  the book, the effect is one of high to low tension rather than ascending arc. The descent into the nether-reaches of sepulchral thanatos and eschaton are tinged still in this framework with embraces and remembrances of those ‘small ceremonies of life,’ left behind; ultimately I think affirming life and the will to live, while facing harbingers of death. In the midst of devastation, Heller exhorts an unorthodox vision; of life the way it would be after the facts of history, of a rejoining spirit of play after death and catastrophes: Read more

The Novel of Nonel and Vovel

When Nonel and Vovel made work about the Middle East in 2000 they were asked: who are your audiences? When they make work about the Middle East in 2009 the common question is: do you do it because it is trendy?

The first thought crossing one’s mind after putting down The Novel of Nonel and Vovel (following an exhilarated sigh of disappointment that the roller coaster ride is over) is indeed a morosely existential one: who is going to read this book? Who is going to be inspired by it for action that makes a difference in solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
The above quote appears in the ‘art & politics’ chapter of this inter-disciplinary multi-tasking, workaholic, split-personality-disorder-diagnosed Middle-East-conflict-in-space graphic novel in which every chapter is illustrated by a different artist, bracketed by questionnaires, essays, photographs, games and even a crossword puzzle. The climactic chapter is the only one written by someone other than the two artists behind this project, Oreet Ashery and Larissa Sansour. But when their superhero alter-egos Nonel and Vovel are getting ready to save the day and solve the conflict that transcends our planet’s borders (no spoilers!) the storyline is interrupted by a conversation between Ashery and Sansour in cameo appearance, illustrated into the sci-fi sequence sitting on a bench in London’s South Bank, discussing the problem of handing over the most dramatic chapter to a guest writer (Soren Lind).   Read more

Loving Us Too Much

A polemical book can be one of quality. A strongly argued text can be solidly grounded in reliable evidence. So I wonder whether Will Skidelsky, chairman of the judging panel for the 2009 Jewish Quarterly Wingate literary prize, thought he had such a book in his hands when he described one of the six contenders, Dennis MacShane’s Globalizing Hatred: The New Antisemitism, as an ‘impassioned polemic about the resurgence of anti-Semitism as a global force’? MacShane, a Labour Member of Parliament and a former junior minister, is a talented popularizer of political issues.
A similar description could be applied to a new book by experienced think-tanker Robin Shepherd, who used to run the European programme at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London and is now Director of International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society. His work, A State Beyond the Pale: Europe’s Problem with Israel, also strongly argued, seeks to explain why Israel is accorded disproportionate attention by Europe’s opinion formers. Read more

The Snow Globe

I.

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

The Great Debate: The Latke’s Role in the Renaissance, 1991 Debate

When Dear Abby was asked the question ‘Why do Jews always answer a question with a question?’ she replied, ‘How should they answer?’ And when I am asked do I give precedence to the latke or the hamantash? I must reply,despite being absolutely sure of the answer, ‘How should the university answer?’ This is not because I believe that the état c’est moi, whatever you may think. In fact, as president of the University of Chicago, it is my duty never to think.
Let me remind this audience of the stated policy of the university as formulated in the Kalven Committee Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action, published and endorsed by the Council of the University Senate in 1967: ‘[There is] a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day, or modifying its corporate activities to foster social or political values, however compelling and appealing theymay be.’ Given my fidelity to the idea of the university and the obligation it imposes for a colorless neutrality, therefore, let me say in the most courageously forthright and outspoken terms that both the latke and the hamantash are simply wonderful.We welcome them to our diverse, pluralistic, and tolerant community of scholars, as we have for a hundred years and as we will for the century to come. Read more

The Great Debate: The Hamantash in Shakespeare, 1965 debate

Who was William Shakespeare?
This question has defied the best scholarly minds for three andone-half centuries. Some critics have said his poems and plays were really written by the seventeenth Earl of Loxford.Others say that the true author was Francis (you’ll pardon the expression) Bacon.Nonsense! Shakespeare alone, or somebody else with that name, is the true author. That this man of lowly origins — a humble hamantash baker by trade — could have written immortal verse comes as a surprise to some. But not to me. For a careful search of his sonnets and plays clearly reveals the man and the powerful source of his creativity.
The first clue to the mystery is to be found in Shakespeare’s central play, The Merchant of Venice. In act 5, the young hero Lorenzo says to the beautiful Jessica: ‘How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon
this bank! Here we will sit and let the sounds of music creep into our ears.’
Here is a statement that appears to be poetic, clear, and straightforward. But how can it be both poetic on the one hand and clear and straightforward on the other? Modern literary criticism and centuries of Shakespearean scholarship teach us this is impossible. So we must look more closely. Read more

Borges and the Jews part III: Deutsches Requiem

Who shall tell me if you, Israel, are to be found in the lost labyrinth of the secular rivers that is my blood?
—J.L.B., ‘To Israel’

The consensus among Borges’ biographers and critics is that he was deeply apolitical and remained disengaged with local, national, and international affairs throughout his life. It is true that Borges was, especially in his adolescence, a dilettante à la Oscar Wilde minus the ornamental outspokenness. But to certain events he offered political comment, often heavy with sarcasm, of great force. A partial yet enlightening record of his opinions can be found in Selected Non-fiction, edited by Eliot Weinberger. Of the entire selection, only a small portion address the events in Europe; still, they are significant in that they allow a glimpse of Borges’ beliefs and the trenchant style with which he debunked ugly stereotypes. Borges denounced Hitler almost from the start, decrying the arrival of Nazism as a catastrophe for German culture. In ‘A Pedagogy of Hatred,’ he attacks the publication, in Germany of the children’s book Trau keinem Fuchs auf gruener Heid und keinem Jud bei seinem Eid [Don’t Trust Any Fox from a Heath or Any Jew on his Oath]. Here is Suzanne Jill Levine’s translation included in Selected Non-Fiction: Read more

Fish And Fowl

I’ve only been served fish and fowl on the same plate twice. Both times were in the USA, the second was at the J Street inaugural conference Gala dinner in Washington DC this October. J Street is a new Washington lobbying group intent on ‘changing the face of pro-Israel advocacy in the US’. It wants an open debate on Israel, on the same plate as the Israel Right or Wrong lobby, epitomised by AIPAC. As Republican Senator Boustany put it, ‘there must be room for a more open and vigorous debate on the Mid-East conflict.’ For fifty years, AIPAC has monopolised the pro-Israel field. Its legendary influence brooks no criticism of Israel.
Jeremy Ben Ami, J Street’s Executive Director never mentions AIPAC publicly. ‘They can welcome us in; this is a language and a dialogue they are not used to. It will ensure the long-term survival of their institutions and it will mean that the community is a broad tent, strong and vibrant. The other choice is they say “you’re not welcome” and then we’ll either create our own home, or a lot of these people are going to walk away. Everybody loses.’ Read more

Victims Are Not Sacrifices

The unspoken sub-text for Uri Hadar’s elegant, emotive and disturbing piece is Primo Levi’s 1982 comment, in the wake of the Sabra and Shatilla massacres, that ‘Everybody is somebody’s Jew. And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.’ For many Jews, reading this through the lens of their idealisation of Levi as the most principled writer about the Holocaust, the resonance was unbearable. For those who could think about it and not simply discard Levi as a lost soul, too damaged by the Nazis to know his own mind, the question was, ‘What have we done?’ After Sabra and Shatilla, the relative innocence of those of us who had grown up with heroic tales of Zionism was shattered, and questions of responsibility, of guilt, even of reparation were raised. Over time, this set of questions has been obscured or repressed, then uncovered, then repressed again, in a dynamic that in many ways reveals the potency of Uri’s assertion that what is being enacted is an unconscious transmission of victimhood, in which one people is being made to stand in for another. This assaults a self-image of Jews as ethical, and a religious image of Jews and Judaism as a supposed ‘light to the nations’. As Uri suggests, the ‘need to conceive of oneself as good and just’ results in a terrible twisting of reality in the face of events. Read more

Burning Memories: Sacrifice and the Historical Unconscious

In winter 2009 I accidentally came across a eulogy that I wrote in 1970 for my then best friend, Zvika, who was killed by Egyptian fire at the Suez Canal. I received the news of his death at midnight and hitchhiked through the night to reach the funeral from my army base near Eilat. I sat to write my farewell to him in his family home in the Kibbutz where we grew up. One of the lines in my eulogy said: ‘For many years Zvika and his mother represented the Shoah for me. On hearing the word, I immediately visualized them singing ‘Brothers, the shtetl is burning’, a song that always sent shivers down my spine. Its dramatic melody, coupled with its violent images and terrible helplessness, moved, upset and alerted me to a mysterious danger. Both the text and the melody were written by Mordechai Gebirtig, a Galician poet who was killed by the Nazis in 1942.  Gebirtig’s poem, known as ‘The shtetl is burning’ was written in 1938 about a pogrom that took place two years earlier in a small Polish town. It describes the total destruction by fire of the town. The refrain says ‘And you stand by lame, without offering help, without trying to extinguish the burning fire, the fire of the city’. When I started reading what I wrote so many years ago, I did not remember this image of Zvika and his mother singing, and the song of the burning shtetl had all but escaped my memory. Yet, reading my eulogy triggered an avalanche of memories. Read more

Trading Up

‘There is no Palestinian Mandela,’ writes Ari Shavit in Ha’aretz. Journalists and commentators of all stripes have long bemoaned the absence of such a leader to take the Palestinians peacefully towards independence. But while a unifying leader is lacking, policies to build domestic and international trade may be the more decisive factor in achieving de facto statehood. In the West Bank, an entrepreneurial, well-educated private sector is eager to work and grow. Small businesses in Nablus and Ramallah bustle for profits, selling everything from olives and lemons to mobiles phones and marble. They want economic freedom, and may be about to move a step closer to their goal. Read more

Trauma: An Essay on Jewish Guilt

You can’t escape the question of identity. In 1995 various authors contributed essays to a book called The Jew in the Text, Modernity and the Construction of Identity. Prefacing the collection, the editors explain:

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.¹ Read more

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