By Gilad Atzmon

Zero Books 2011

Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights

By David Landy

Zed Books 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jews are obsessively concerned with attaining power and influence.

Jews are responsible for the hatred they attract.

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

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

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

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

A selection of Judah Passow’s portraits of Jewish Britain can be found in the issue 220 of the Jewish Quarterly.

No Place Like Home, an exhibition of Judah Passow’s photographs, opens at the Jewish Museum on February 1st. Information can be found here

www.judahpassow.com

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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Headline Review 2011

The List by Martin Fletcher

Thomas Dunne Books 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fabrice Humbert

Serpent’s Tail 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I used to like my celebrities alive. In fact, I liked them best when they were very, very old. As a star-struck child, I owned a celebrity map of Beverly Hills, and I used to draw my finger across the streets at bedtime, where their homes were marked with little stars. I imagined the security necessary to maintain their privacy. I pictured Actors’ Retirement Homes filled with superstars: George Burns striking up ‘Make ‘Em Laugh’ on a Steinway upright, while Lucille Ball and Gloria Swanson gassed on the sofa, pumped up with make-up. I was not so much concerned with their quality of life, just comforted by the fact that they were continuing.

This was circa 1984. Around the same time, I remember watching a one-off TV special entitled ‘A Night of 1000 stars’. The format was nothing more than a parade of celebrities of yester-year, across a stage. Some were wheeled, others used sticks, the rest were held upright by scantily-clad women. The tone of the show was one of celebration, but there was no getting away from the brutal truth. These actors were all still alive — sure — but for how much longer? Saddam pulled off a similar spectacle a few years later with some US servicemen.

Imagine my excitement when, in the mid-nineties, someone decided to put together a collection of surviving stars from Hollywood’s golden era for an evening of nostalgia at the London Palladium. The show was called ‘A Night of 100 Stars’ (900 must have died since the TV special). I was there for autographs, part of a crowd of expectant fans waiting for the big stars to exit through the stage door. “There goes Dorothy Lamour,” shouted one of the paparazzi, as a large box was carried through the door. “And that must be Jane Russell”, shouted a second, as another large box came through the entrance.

Perhaps this is why some celebrities become reclusive — they sense the unconscious wish of the fan and it disquiets them. The recluse is the bugbear of the autograph collector, but the non-signer elicits a special vitriol. Greta Garbo was one such spoilsport. Everyone knew where she lived, but no one ever got a reply to their autograph request. She never signed anything. You never even got a “Sorry, Ms. Garbo doesn’t sign” note from her secretary. Just a stony silence. Nada. As a result, her signature was worth £1000 during her lifetime. Basically, she was as good as dead.

I used to fantasise regularly about bumping into Garbo. The ice would break pretty quickly, and we’d talk about everything: her career, the pressures of fame, her need to be left alone. We’d get on so well, that when I’d produce a pile of 8” X 10” glossy portraits, she’d break the habit of a lifetime and sign every one for me, adding little inscriptions, such as “I vont to be alone”. We would chuckle together about her reclusiveness over a glass of wine.

Several years after Garbo died, I met a so-called ‘in-person specialist’ — a New Yorker who spends his days stalking celebrities for their autographs—and was amazed when he revealed that he’d actually met Garbo. “I can’t believe you met her,” I said, trying to hide my jealousy, “what did she say?” “Oh,” he replied, “basically, she just told me to get lost.”

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.

The complete version of this essay is available in the printed Jewish Quarterly. Please go here to subscribe.

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.

The full version of this essay is available in the printed Jewish Quarterly. Please go here to subscribe.



On a London street nowhere near the Jewish heartland, next to a restaurant specialising in pork and opposite a musical about a green monster, a ‘kind of Jewish deli with cocktails’, has bloomed. In a sense, E. Mishkin has been here a while: the distressed planks coating the walls were once floorboards, and the net curtains and squeezy ketchup bottles are as retro as the ‘On Air’ sign above the booth at the back. In another sense, though, he was never here at all. Ask about Mr Mishkin and you’ll get the story of Ezra, a Ukrainian Jew who fled the 1919 pogrom and opened a café in London where his fellow immigrants could get a taste of home. The pogrom is fact, but Ezra Mishkin, like this joint, is the creation of Russell Norman, owner of those famously Jewish restaurants Polpo, Spuntino, Da Polpo and Polpetto.

Norman wanted a name like the old East London cafés but his own isn’t up to the job: if he had been lurking in the Ukraine when the Cossacks galloped in, they would have swerved past him. So, why does a non-Jew known for hip Italian food open a Jewish deli serving Polish pork hotdogs? Is London en route to New York- style culinary integration? A deli has just opened in Marylebone; there’s even a Jewish pop-up restaurant. But both of those are kosher, in every sense. Mishkins is something else.

‘My starting point,’ Norman tells me over lunch, ‘is always: what do I want to eat?’ He couldn’t find a decent salt-beef sandwich in London, so he opened somewhere that would serve one. Simple. The times cry out for comfort food; and from another perspective (mine), how can secular London Jewry claim to be well integrated if nobody around us knows what a latke is? On the other hand, if Norman serves cholent with oxtail, should I be pleased Jews are at last influencing the thriving British gastronomic scene or worried that an ancient food tradition is drizzling away, one unctuous oxtaily drop at a time?

Eating Jewish food, says Norman, is like getting a big hug; opening a ‘kind of ’ Jewish deli, on the other hand, is probably like moving in with your mother-in-law. Everybody tells head chef Tom Oldroyd that his recipes are wrong: there are herbs in the matzo balls and duck fat in the schmaltz, and that’s before we get to the hot dog. Norman’s attitude to these faux pas is calm. His is not a ghetto mentality: as with northern Italy, he is taking only the bits of Jewish cuisine he likes. It occurs to me that only a very insecure culture would find this threatening. They did blind tastings, he says, and chose their favourite versions. Simple.

All this simplicity is making me uneasy. It’s so… gentile. I turn to the food. The pickled herring on beetroot is plump and subtle, garnished with good dill. Russell is eating a Severn & Wye lox beigel with house schmear. That’s sour cream, naturally. A lunch I won’t be paying for seems the wrong place to point out that it can also mean a bribe.

Mishkins’ menu is the culinary equivalent of Yiddish — a hotpotch that nicks what it needs from the surrounding culture while maintaining flimsy but important links to its roots. There is no reverence here. ‘It’s Jew-ish,’ says Russell. ‘The music is too loud, the lights too low. There may be people who are drunk, or possibly laughing.’ Portion sizes, however, would satisfy the fiercest traditionalist. Interestingly, Russell says that some of the dishes evolved from peasant food into something more delicate — in keeping with the doilies and willow-pattern dishes, perhaps. Or more appropriate to the well-fed West, where no one needs the strength to flee pogroms. This must count as progress. After all, the only people you can’t steal from are those who have nothing.

Nina Caplan

Chrismukkah in the Ghetto



The 7^th district is on fire. At first sight, you think it’s the city getting ready for Christmas. Everywhere, lights and trees are put up at uncharacteristic speed. But in the 7^th this year they’re celebrating the season of lights under a different name: Chrismukkah. To ‘achieve everyday miracles’ is what brings together 18 cultural venues in the heart of the former Jewish quarter, from the moment the firstcandle is lit on 20 December. Kristóf Molnár, 24 — black glasses, dreadlocks sits drinking coffee as he juggles his last year at university with organising the Quarter6Quarter7 festival, currently in its 3^rd year. “Ours will be the biggest celebration in the city,” he says, “a kind of culture clash.” With the Christian holiday falling in the middle of Hanukkah, Budapest’s progressive Jewish community is set on exploding cultural differences. “The idea is to give each other ‘culture’ as a present this year”, he says, “to ‘buy’ culture instead of going shopping at some big Plaza.”

Kristóf is passionate about his festival (he is one of only two organisers). “When I say the word ‘Jew’ in Hungarian (‘Zsidó’), I lower my voice,” he says. “It should not be that way.” With the Holocaust lingering large over debates about Jewish identity in Hungary (suppressed by decades of communism and gentile guilt), Kristóf feels the urge to “shake off this heavy past. We are ordinary people. Speaking for myself, I feel as much Hungarian as I feel Jewish. We want to bring the word ‘Jew’ back into question. Take the weight off.”

Quarter6Quarter7, taking its name from the inner parts of the two districts that comprised the Jewish ghetto, is mainly self-sponsored. All the venues — bookstores, cafés, eateries, and art galleries — arrange their own programs. Sirály (“Seagull”), a three-storey-café-library-podium on Király u., is hosting an event in support of the homeless, a Budapest community currently facing criminalisation. Klauzál 13 bookstore will host an open forum prompted by last month’s census (“the older generation, in particular, is afraid to declare its Jewish identity,” says Kristóf ). Set against the characteristic run-down beauty of the district’s main artery, Wesselényi u., the festival promises a seasonal feast of music, light, and night walks.

But for Budapest’s religious community it’s business as usual. On Vasváry Pál u., Chabad at the Pesti Yeshiva (the 1885 synagogue, tucked away in a quiet courtyard) await the return of their rabbis from a conference in New York. The owners of the Fröhlich cukrászda (classic kosher pastry shop) on Dob u. are too busy selling flödni at the ‘Judafest’, the Jewish food festival, to think about Hanukkah. And the cashier of the brightly lit kosher supermarket next door says he “knows nothing; I just ordered the latkes and put the candles up for sale.”

“It’s a festival accessible to everyone,” Kristóf says. “It’s the 21^st century. We want to show all the ways in which young Jews in Budapest are contributing to their communities.” But even he is unsure whether Hungary is ready for such an approach, noting, “We haven’t cleared our conscience.” With the fires of ’44 still glowing through the cracks, Kristóf is kindling new light. “I am looking forward to its aftermath,” he says. He’s right. Different times, different fires.

Ilse Josepha Maria Lazaroms

Writing necessarily reflected the experience of those passing through the phase of “liminality”; that is standing on the threshold of disparate experiences, attractions and borders. This perception of borderlands was especially though certainly not exclusively within the spectrum of the Jewish population. The Jews were living in changing and uncertain times and subject to pressures often pulling in opposite directions. They inherited a tradition to which they might well have sensed a dubious loyalty. The adherence to the ancestral faith was often shaken by the exposure to new sources of truth testing and to a welter of ideologies. They lived amongst the Czechs, often spoke their language and shared their concerns. But were they really authentic Czechs? Many on the outside cast doubt on this, even such a person as their great friend and advocate Thomas Masaryk (1850-1937), first president of the republic, and such uneasiness was also sometimes experienced by the Jews themselves. And what about the German attraction? The primary language of communication of the Jews of the region might well have been German, and it was indeed most frequently their primary language, particularly amongst city dwellers. It was also the language of world culture, leading into, as it was hoped, a greater general acceptance of their intrusion on the part of that world. But did this bare fact, born of reality, mean then that they were genuinely German? The ambivalence relating to the responses to both questions, the Czech and the German, indicated a greater uncertainty. The truth was that they straddled three identities, Jewish, Czech and German, all embracing ethnicity, nationality and religion. In addition to which, these optional identities were  not only delimited themselves, but also in process, and thus changing their own nature quite significantly.

So the expressed culture that emerged reflected this exciting but unstable situation. Literature of a specifically characteristic tone was produced by what was, in terms of population proportion, a very small clique. These individuals, centred in Prague, became known as the Prague Circle (der Prager Kreis), primarily recoginized as such and described by Max Brod (1884-1968). Brod is mainly thought of today as the promoter and biographer of Franz Kafka (1883-1924), but he was, in his own right, a leading light of the Prague intelligentsia, a prolific novelist, music critic and publicist. He was not only Kafka’s closest friend, but he also became his executor and promoter par excellence, without whom Kafka might not have been widely published, let alone known as one of the greatest and most distinctive narrative writers of the era. Brod was also the primary historian of the Prague Circle, which soubriquet he created, arguing that the group as he saw it could not be regarded as a “school” in any coherent sense.

Indeed there were so many strands and tendencies amongst these writers, ideologically and technically, that this in effect did not constitute a school. Not only were the sympathies divided as between Left and Right, between Czechism, Germanism, Zionism and Internationalism, but these all also morphed with the changing times and situation.  The Jews of Bohemia were indeed positioned on the border. That border was composed of an inherited but weakening Jewish background and allegiance, a location within a growing and increasingly militant nationalism springing up within the indigenous population. But  there was also an impinging German presence. Simultaneously there began to emerge too as a third option an insistence that the Jews also should plant a stake in a recognition of their own ethnicity and a forging of a Zionism of a special brand.  As for the outside world which the writer inhabited, the situation was not only dynamic and fluid, but also not so slowly but surely moving in the direction of catastrophe.

How some of these various tendencies were reflected can be seen, for example, in the contrast between the work of Max Brod himself and that of Franz Werfel (1890-1945), the older man originally cherishing and nurturing the younger. Brod moved from a position of idealised assimilationism towards a single minded Zionism, whereas Werfel, one of the most celebrated Expressionist poets in the world, shifted from his commitment to world peace and a kind of pacifistic Communism,, towards a tender but enormous sympathy for Catholic Christianity. He also developed a career as a highly successful novelist, dramatist and Holywood  script writer, whilst fleeing the threat of Nazi persecution. Kafka himself, whilst dabbling in efforts to familiarize himself with Yiddish and also to learn Hebrew, clearly felt himself alienated from practically everything, both from his Czech environment and from his bourgeois Jewish background. He was desperate to be able  to commit himself to one of the possibilities extended, but he felt unable so to do. Such was the case too in regard to his inability to get married, despite his engagements and loves. He sought a meaningful anchor in life, but he also eschewed all labels and loyalties. As he saw it, he could not even know himself and remain whole within that entity, let alone to belong to publicly declared movements and to associate himself with some generalised ideological tendency. He was locked into a position of someone trying, albeit unsuccessfully, to know himself. Because of that failure he could not achieve marriage (vivre dans le vrai, as his hero Flaubert named it), and, as we observe, he could not either bring any of his long narratives to completion (his three novels are all uncompleted). This seems to parallel his understanding of the Messiah, who may indeed “come”, but only when it is too late.

Bohemia was not usually the final destination of these writers. Many were those who migrated, just as there were others, such as Martin Buber (from Poland) and Joseph Roth (from Galicia), who moved to Prague for brief snatches. The local authors, like the international ones, wrote primarily in German, although thy often knew Czech well. But German was no longer the undisputed master of the roost in Czechoslovakia, as the country was moving from a situation of imperial province to independent State. It was not only the immediate environment that was being transformed though, but the entire world. And this applied too to the personal world of the writer and to its expression in letters.

So many of our writers’ activities were disrupted, shifted and disturbed by the turbulence of events, as well as by attractions of ideology. Leo Perutz (1884-1957) left Prague and  served as an officer in the great war, and was wounded. Then he emigrated to Haifa (Palestine/Israel) and functioned as a successful novelist in the German tongue. But Prague remained the backdrop of his magical settings. This was the case too of the Vienna born Gustav Meyrink (1868-1932), who moved to Prague in his youth, and became the author of the Golem legend in fiction. The blind author, Oskar Baum (1883-1941), regarded by Brod as a founder member of the Prague Circle, wrote two collections of stories set in Prague. Paul Lappin (1878-1945) was a translator from Czech, but he wrote creatively mainly in German and was totally possessed by the presence of Prague. The great modernist poet, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) was Prague born, and is seen by Brod as being on the fringed of the circle. Although he had departed the city early in life, he still regarded it as lodged deep in his heart. Many and various are the connections and associations of these authors, so disparate, but still drinking from this same well.

Where now do we locate this group? Perhaps, in our recognition of its differentiated nature, we should indeed not categorize it as a group at all, but rather as a historical phase and as a segment of cultural history. How was it that these writers, so meagre in number, managed to contribute so hugely to the cultural life of Europe? Here was the borderland position crying out for a voice in the contemporary world. This voice was, of necessity, the possession of all, but it also belonged to nothing totally. This stance constitutes its quintessential  character, and that is what it has transmitted to our own world. It appears to be so distant, as further radical transformations have taken place, and yet it is still close at hand. It both belongs to a vanished time and place, and yet is still present in so many guises.

Leon Yudkin is the author of The Prague Circle and Czech Jewry. Copies are available from the author, by contacting Yudk4@aol.com

The University of Sussex, which celebrates its fiftieth anniversary in autumn 2011, has always been a cosmopolitan institution. When I joined the staff as an assistant lecturer in German in autumn 1963 it was a surprise to discover how few of those teaching literature courses were of English origin. David Daiches was the son of an Edinburgh rabbi whose mother tongue was Yiddish, while other colleagues included Larry Lerner from South Africa, Gabriel Josipovici from Egypt, and Gamini Salgado from Ceylon.

Daiches was the most inspirational figure. Literature, he argued, explores the human condition, but under circumstances that are continuously changing – hence the importance of an interdisciplinary approach within clearly defined historical contexts. The most remarkable innovation was the Modern European Mind, a course originated by Daiches to which colleagues contributed across a plurality of subjects: literature, philosophy and the history of ideas, psychology and even theology. The course was to inspire successive generations of students for over forty years.

When I returned as a professor in 1992, after gaining further experience as a lecturer in Cambridge, my impression was that the original Sussex vision had stood the test of time. Students and staff were grouped in Schools, preserving an intimacy of scale amid rapid expansion, and the revitalized Modern European Mind, including topics like Literature & Psychoanalysis and Modernism in the Arts, was still proving exceptionally popular.

However, the approach to German literature through periods like the Age of Classicism struck me as pedestrian, so I drafted two fresh proposals: German-Jewish Culture and Politics, and Anglo-German Intellectual Relations. The Anglo-German project would have focused on the influential achievements of poets like Goethe and Heine and philosophers such as Hegel, Marx and Nietzsche. To encourage students to reflect on their own position, there would have been a module on the idea of the university, so influentially redefined by Wilhelm von Humboldt.

It was the Jewish option that appealed to colleagues whose judgment carried most weight, Gabriel Josipovici (who had spent his early years in hiding in Vichy France), Laci Löb (a Holocaust survivor from Hungary), and the Anglo-German political historian John Röhl. All three had indelible memories of their childhood in Nazi-occupied Europe, a factor that may have inhibited them from making the academic case themselves.

The challenge was to explain how such a civilized nation as the Germans had succumbed to barbarism, charting the trajectory from the ideals of the Enlightenment to the atrocities of the Holocaust. To modify the crude perpetrator-victim model of German-Jewish relations, we would highlight the role of Jews as catalysts for European civilization. Their innovative achievements attracted envy, as I’d noted in a Jewish Quarterly article of autumn 1990:

Jewish entrepreneurs built the railroads, financed the coalmines, set up pilsner beer production, pioneered sugar-refining, developed the iron and steel industries, controlled the leading banks and newspapers, and were prominent in the leather goods, furniture, clothing and food-processing trades.

Tragically, I concluded, this provoked such resentment in both Germany and Austria that the Jews found themselves victimized for their success.

The purpose of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies, which has flourished at Sussex for almost twenty years, is to study the contribution of German-Jewish communities to modern civilisation and to train new generations to understand the causes of racial prejudice and the consequences of enforced migration. From its base within a dynamic modern university committed to interdisciplinary studies, the Centre makes a distinctive contribution to both historical and scholarship and multi-cultural education.

‘What was so important about Vienna?’ asked Max Kochmann, a refugee from Berlin, as the launch of the Centre was being planned. ‘Vienna’, I replied, ‘exemplified the contribution of German-speaking Jews to modern civilisation –  think of Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl, Arnold Schoenberg and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Many German speaking Jews came from highly educated backgrounds, and they brought with them as refugees from National Socialism their love of the arts and sciences, greatly enriching the cultural life of Britain.’

The aim of teaching and research, as defined in the Centre’s original mission statement, has been to reassess the concept of a ‘German-Jewish symbiosis’, that creative identification with German culture which was so characteristic of Jews in many parts of central Europe, including the territories of Austro-Hungarian Empire. A second main objective is to research the experiences and achievements of refugees and their families. Taking amount of the currents of anti-Semitism which culminated in National Socialism, the Centre has also developed a third group of projects relating to commemorations of the Shoah.

The founding of the Centre coincided with a surge of international interest in the Holocaust. The opening of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in April 1993 was followed by the release of Stephen Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List. Thus our timing could hardly have been more fortunate. When the ecologist Gordon Conway was appointed Sussex Vice-Chancellor, he asked the Chancellor Lord (Richard) Attenborough whether there was any programme at Sussex that he would like to support. The consequences were unexpected. In January 1995 the Higher Education Supplement announced that Steven Spielberg had pledged $100,000 of the revenues from Schindler’s List to the Centre for German-Jewish Studies.

At Attenborough’s suggestion, Spielberg was making the donation through his Righteous Persons Foundation, set up to support Holocaust research. Interviewed in Higher Education, I explained that the grant would help to research the experiences of refugees. Their testimony would complement the Sussex-based Mass Observation Archive, a unique collection documenting British attitudes during the Second World War. ‘Even those refugees who came to the UK as children are reaching retirement’, I explained. ‘It is time to put their memories on record.’

By the turn of the century the work of the Centre had gathered such momentum that Sussex awarded an honorary doctorate to Max Kochmann, chairman of our London Support Group, which regularly meets in the library of Belsize Square Synagogue. That synagogue, together with other institutions created by German-Jewish exiles like the Warburg Institute, the Freud Museum and the Association of Jewish Refugees, has featured prominently in the Centre’s research.

The eulogy to Max Kochmann delivered at the honorary degree ceremony in January 2000 acknowledged not only of his individual merits but those of the remarkable generation he represented. Those who fled from Nazism in the 1930s brought to Britain traditions of economic enterprise, cultural achievement and public service that have provided long-term benefits.

The Sussex ceremony was attended by Lord Attenborough, whose presence has been an inspiration for the innumerable graduands on whom he conferred degrees. On that same day, 27 January 2000, he inaugurated the Centre’s Archive in the University Library. After movingly recalling his family’s involvement with the refugees of the 1930s (they provided a home for two Jewish girls), he unveiled a plaque with the Centre’s logo, designed by Christopher Calderhead (Fig. 1). This features the Star of David encircled by a rose, symbolizing the ideal of cooperation between Jewish and Christian communities.

It was essential, Attenborough continued, highlighting our sense of mission, to teach the younger generation how the murder of Jews and other people deemed ‘unworthy of life’ could have occurred. The Sussex Archive would help to ensure that those events were never forgotten. These ideas were echoed in the vote of thanks by a Sussex student, who cited an exalted concept from Jewish liturgy: ‘shamor ve-zakhor’. Remembrance combined with remedial action is needed to reshape the future.

The Centre’s archive, which forms part of the university’s Special Collections, is developing in accordance with our three main themes. There is a particular interest in materials documenting histories of German-Jewish families since the Enlightenment, including diaries, letters, oral testimony, survival narratives and other biographical sources. This has enabled us to focus on the impact of National Socialism, using the methods of Life History to record the voices of the victims.

Our archival research was enhanced by a further momentous discovery. Not long after the founding of the Centre the phone rang in my office. ‘What has happened to the Daghani collection?’ asked an anxious voice. The Sussex archives, the Librarian had assured me, held no Jewish collections (the emphasis was on the Mass Observation Archive, the Kipling papers and the Bloomsbury Group). But on the line was a journalist from Hove, Mollie Brandl Bowen, insisting that only a few years earlier the university had acquired the work of a Holocaust survivor. Asked where this mysterious collection was located, the chair of the archives committee, Margaret McGowan, took several weeks to find the answer. Locked away in a storeroom in the Education Building we then discovered a treasure trove – the artistic and literary estate of Arnold Daghani.

This strengthened our sense of mission, for the artist was born in 1909 in an eastern frontier town of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a member of a German-speaking Jewish family. After enduring persecution, deportation and exile, Daghani had died in 1985 in Hove, where he and his wife Nanino had finally found sanctuary. The Trustees, his sister-in-law his Carola and her husband Miron Grindea, had the task of finding a home for the works that had been displayed at the artist’s apartment. When the collection was offered to the Israel Museum in February 1987, the offer was politely refused by the Mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek. But Miron and Carola found an ally closer to home: Norbert Lynton, Professor of the History of Art at Sussex. ‘As a refugee who has lost many relatives and some childhood friends in the Holocaust,’ Lynton later explained, ‘I could not but be sympathetic.’ When the Trustees offered Daghani’s estate to the university, Lynton ensured that the collection found a haven on the campus.

‘MAJOR ART COLLECTION COMES TO SUSSEX’ proclaimed the University Bulletin on 12 May 1987. But at Sussex, despite its interdisciplinary ethos, the collection fell between two schools. Professor Lynton took early retirement, and his colleagues in History of Art had other priorities. The gift, which was to form part of the University Art Collection, was not their departmental responsibility. For political historians, on the other hand, it was too subjective to be regarded as a reliable source, while it was too pictorial to be acceptable as part of the Manuscript Collection in the Library. Moreover, there was no funding to catalogue the collection, so for ten years it languished in storage, virtually forgotten.

With colleagues at the Centre I rescued key works from the dismal storeroom and raised funding to have them catalogued. A grant from the Ian Karten Trust enabled us to employ a young art historian, Deborah Schultz, to catalogue the collection and develop a strategy for conservation and analysis. Daghani’s estate included approximately 6000 artistic and commemorative works – the most significant collection of work by a Holocaust survivor at any British institution. Further items were added after Deborah and I visited Carola Grindea at her West London home. The wall of her music room was covered with paintings, while half the floor space was taken up by a grand piano. ‘Have a look under the piano,’ Carola said, and several hours later we were still marvelling at the treasures that lay there. I drove back to Sussex with Daghani’s monumental album 1942-1943 in the boot of the car, a unique compilation of commemorative paintings and writings.

To draw attention to the achievements of this idiosyncratic artist, the Centre published our initial findings in a research paper entitled Memories of Mikhailowka: Labour Camp Testimonies in the Arnold Daghani Archive. One of his albums concludes with an account of how more than a hundred and fifty Jews from the camp were executed by the Germans in December 1943, followed by a calligraphic portrait of a woman prisoner incorporating their names (Fig. 2). Daghani’s aim was to rescue the victims from oblivion and remind us that each of them had a human face.

Fulfilling Attenborough’s admonition to collect and evaluate the testimony of survivors required systematic collaboration. To balance my focus on culture and politics, the Centre recruited researchers with complementary skills. Our study of Racist Materials on the Internet was undertaken by Information Technology experts led by Stella Rock. A further project, funded by the British Academy, related to those who fled from Nazism as children on the Kindertransport. Together with the archivist Samira Teuteberg, our research fellow Andrea Hammel compiled a database of British archival materials relating to the refugee generation, exploring the international context in collaboration with Wolfgang Benz, Director of the Centre for Antisemitism Research at the Technical University in Berlin. An archive-based study of Refugee Experiences in London and New York was completed by Lori Gemeiner, while Iris Guske from Bavaria undertook oral history interviews for her project on the Kindertransport Experience: A Socio-Psychological Study.

Further educational projects were developed by Cathy Gelbin and Chana Moshenska with the support of the ANNE FRANK-Fonds. As Director of Educational Programmes, Chana arranged a remarkable series of speakers to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. In January 2002 we heard the testimony of two Auschwitz survivors, Trude Levi and Fred Knoller. Sensitive to the atmosphere of xenophobia resulting from the destruction of the World Trade Building in New York, we began the day with an inter-faith service on the theme of Remembrance and Hope. Our theme the following year, Survivors and Refugees 1933-2003, connected the experiences during the Nazi period of Janina Fischler-Martinho with the more recent ordeal of a refugee from Afghanistan, Abdul Lazlad, whose escape from the clutches of the Taliban gave a personal edge to his analysis of British Asylum Policy. During the following years we explored further topical themes, especially relating to genocide. In January 2008, after Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg had analysed the obstacles to inter-faith dialogue, we were warned by Mark Levene (of Southampton University’s Parkes Institute) that the competition for scarce resources caused by climate change could have apocalyptic consequences.

Strengthening international cooperation has been one of the priorities of my successors as Director of the Centre: first Dr Raphael Gross, who held the post jointly with the Directorship of the London Leo Baeck Institute; and more recently Professor Christian Wiese, author of a widely acclaimed study of the German-Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas. Professor Wiese’s appointment to the Martin Buber Chair in Jewish Thought at the University of Frankfurt am Main is a signal honour which is also bringing benefits to the Centre, for he has continued to act as Interim Director of the Centre. Meanwhile, a permanent post as Reader in Jewish History and Director of the Sussex Centre has been advertised and should shortly be filled. Our current research includes a three-year project on the Quakers as Rescuers during the Nazi Period supported by a generous gift from Dr Alfred Bader, channeled through the American Friends of the University of Sussex.

The above account is excerpted from the memoirs of Edward Timms, Taking up the Torch: English Institutions, German Dialectics and Multicultural Commitments (Sussex Academic Press, 2011) by kind permission of the publisher.

Written soon after the Soviet Army liberated eastern Ukraine from German occupation in mid-1943, the original manuscript of Vasily Grossman’s essay ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ was thought to have been lost after the Second World War. It first appeared in 1990 in the short-lived journal Vek, and is translated here into English for the first time. ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ is a powerful and historically significant essay: one of the earliest public statements about the mass murder of Jews in 1941 and 1942 during the Nazi occupation of Soviet Ukraine, it is also one of the first attempts in any language to systematically explain the ideological and material motives behind the genocide that Grossman calls the ‘greatest crime ever committed in history.’ ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ was initially rejected for publication in 1943 by the military newspaper Red Star (Krasnaia zvezda), where Grossman had earned a huge following from his reports of the Soviet Army’s harrowing defense and stunning victory at Stalingrad. The essay was then translated into Yiddish and published in the weekly paper of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Unity (Einikayt). It was published in two abridged sections and then discontinued. The Yiddish translation remained the only extant version of the essay after 1943, and was back-translated into Russian in 1985. In 1990, the original Russian manuscript (near three times the length of the back-translation) surfaced from Grossman’s estate and was published in Vek. The recovery of ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ in its original form allows us to trace the origins and development of Grossman’s historical, commemorative and literary writing about the ‘catastrophe’ (as the Shoah was known in Russian). Grossman expanded upon and modified many of the ideas in this essay in later writings, including ‘The Hell of Treblinka’ (used as documentary evidence of Nazi war crimes at the Nuremburg Trials in 1945), as well as his editorial work on the monumental anthology The Black Book, and his two greatest novels, For a Just Cause and Life and Fate. ‘Ukraine Without Jews’ also provides unique insight into Grossman’s initial reaction to the genocide as a Soviet Jew; in it he expresses both his pride in socialist principles and Soviet military power, and his desire to publicize and explain the exceptional nature of Jewish victimization at the hands of the Nazis, whose genocide had claimed the life of his own mother in the western Ukrainian city of his birth, Berdichev.

Polly Zavadivker

Ukraine Without Jews

When our forces enter the villages of Left-bank Ukraine under a volley of fire and the din of hand grenades, domestic geese rise up into the air. Flapping their enormous white wings, they circle above peasant huts, above lakes covered in water lilies, above fields and gardens.

There is something worrisome and strange in the heavy, arduous flight, and the sharp, alarming and sorrowful cries of these domestic birds. It is as if they are calling the soldiers of the Red Army to witness heartbreaking and frightening images of life, as if they are rejoicing at the arrival of our forces, simultaneously weeping with joy and lamenting, screaming of great losses, and of the tears and blood that have aged and salted the soil of Ukraine.

There is a long list of Ukrainian towns and villages where I found myself while working as a special correspondent for the paper Red Star. I was in Satrobel’sk, Svatov, Muntsisk, Tsapuika, Voroshilovgrad, Krasnodon, Ostro, Iasotin, Borispol, Baturin…I was in hundreds of villages, farms, settlements, and fishing outposts on the shores of the Desna and Dnieper, in steppe farms encircled by pastures, in solitary little tar houses existing in a constant shadow of huge pine forests, and in beautiful hamlets whose thatched roofs are hidden beneath canopies of fruit trees.

If one was to gather into a single place all of the stories and images that I witnessed during those days and months in Ukraine, it would amount to a horrifying book about colossal injustice: forced labor and secret beatings, children deported to Germany, burnt houses and looted warehouses, evictions onto squares and streets, pits where those suspected of having sympathy for or connections with partisans were shot, humiliations and mockery, vulgar cursing and bribes, drunken and erratic behavior, and the bestial depravity of reckless, criminal people in whose hands rested the fate, life, integrity and property of many millions of Ukrainian people for two long years. There is no home in a single Ukrainian town or village where you will not hear bitter and evil words about the Germans, no home where tears have not flowed during these past two years; no home where people do not curse German fascism; no home without an orphan or widow. These tears and curses flow like streams to an immense river of collective grief and fury; day and night, its troubles and pain roar beneath a Ukrainian sky that has been darkened by the smoke of raging fires.

There are also villages in Ukraine where one doesn’t hear any crying or see tear-filled eyes, villages that are ruled by silence and peace. I visited a village like this on two occasions—the first time on 26 September, and again on 17 October in 1943. This village, Kozary, lies on the ancient Kievan highway between Nezhiny and Kozelets.  I visited Kozary once during the day, and another time on a heavy autumn night. On both occasions silence and peace ruled over Kozary—the peace and silence of death.  The Germans burnt seven hundred and fifty homes here before Easter, and seven hundred and fifty families were burnt alive in these homes. No one, not a single child or old woman emerged from the flames. In this manner the Germans punished a village for having sheltered partisans.  Tall, dusty weeds had sprouted from the ashes. Wells were filled with sand and gardens were covered in wild grass.  A withered flower could be glimpsed among the weeds.  There is no one in Kozary with whom one can mourn, no one to talk to, no one to cry to. Silence and peace hang over dead bodies buried in homes that have been reduced to rubble and covered with weeds. This silence is more horrifying than tears and curses; it is a silence more terrifying than moans and piercing lamentation.

And it occurred to me that just as Kozary is silent, so too are the Jews in Ukraine silent. In Ukraine there are no Jews. Nowhere—not in Poltava, Kharkov, Kremenchug, Borispol, not in Iagotin. You will not see the black, tear-filled eyes of a little girl, you will not hear the sorrowful drawling voice of an old woman, you will not glimpse the swarthy face of a hungry child in a single city or a single one of hundreds of thousands of shtetls.

Stillness. Silence. A people has been murdered.  Murdered are elderly artisans, well-known masters of trades: tailors, hatmakers, shoemakers, tinsmiths, jewelers, housepainters, furriers, bookbinders; murdered are workers: porters, mechanics, electricians, carpenters, furnace workers, locksmiths; murdered are wagon drivers, tractor drivers, chauffeurs, cabinet makers; murdered are millers, bakers, pastry chefs, cooks; murdered are doctors, therapists, dentists, surgeons, gynecologists; murdered are experts in bacteriology and biochemistry, directors of university clinics, teachers of history, algebra, trigonometry; murdered are lecturers, department assistants, candidates and doctors of science; murdered are engineers, metallurgists, bridge builders, architects, ship builders; murdered are pavers, agronomists, field-crop growers, land surveyors; murdered are accountants, bookkeepers, store merchants, suppliers, managers, secretaries, night guards; murdered are teachers, dressmakers; murdered are grandmothers who could mend stockings and bake delicious bread, who could cook chicken soup and make strudel with walnuts and apples; and murdered are grandmothers who didn’t know how to do anything except love their children and grandchildren; murdered are women who were faithful to their husbands, and murdered are frivolous women; murdered are beautiful young women, serious students and happy schoolgirls; murdered are girls who were unattractive and foolish; murdered are hunchbacks; murdered are singers; murdered are blind people; murdered are deaf and mute people; murdered are violinists and pianists; murdered are threeyear-old and two-year-old children; murdered are eightyyear-old elders who had cataracts in their dimmed eyes, cold transparent fingers and quiet, rustling voices like parchment; murdered are crying newborns who were greedily sucking at their mothers’ breasts until their final moments. All are murdered, many hundreds of thousands, millions of people.

This is not the death of individuals at war who had weapons in their hands and had left behind their home, family, fields, songs, books, customs and folktales. This is the murder of a people, the murder of homes, entire families, books, faith, the murder of the tree of life; this is the death of roots, and not branches or leaves; it is the murder of a people’s body and soul, the murder of life that toiled for generations to create thousands of intelligent, talented artisans and intellectuals. This is the murder of a people’s morals, customs and anecdotes passed from fathers to sons; this is the murder of memories, sad songs, and epic tales of good and bad times; it is the destruction of family homes and of burial grounds. This is the death of a people who had lived beside Ukrainian people for centuries, laboring, sinning, performing acts of kindness, and dying alongside them on one and the same earth.

There are descriptions of Jews in the works of all of our great writers who have depicted life in Ukraine—Gogol, Chekhov, Korolenko, and Gorky. How could it be otherwise? Who among us born and raised in Ukraine did not from their earliest years absorb a living portrait of Jewish people in the cities, shtetls and villages of Ukraine?  Remember Sabbath days when elders walked with their prayer shawls beneath poplar trees on quiet spring nights; remember old men standing on corners carrying on sly and clever conversations among themselves; remember self-important shtetl shoemakers, sitting on rickety stools in front of the rickety doors of their shops; remember naive, humorous signs hanging above the locksmith, hat-maker and tailor shops; remember bearded wagon drivers showered in bags of wheat flour tied up in their aprons; remember old ladies in dresses offering you candies and apples; curly-haired, black-eyed children running in the dusty streets, their curls and eyes sparkling next to the pale hair and eyes of their Ukrainian counterparts and mingling like flowers generously scattered upon the rich, soft Ukrainian soil. Our grandfathers lived here; our mothers, and the mothers of our sons were born here.  So much sweat and so many tears have been shed here that no one could think to call the Jew a stranger, or say that he is alien to this land.

I travelled and walked this land from the northern Donets to the Dnieper, from Voroshilovgrad in the Donbass to Chernigov on the Desna; I have walked along the Dnieper and looked out at Kiev. And during all this time, I met one single Jew. This was Lieutenant Shloyme Shmilevich Kipershtein. He fell into German entrapment in September of 1941 near the city Iagotin. His wife Vasilina Grigorievna Sokur, a Christian, had tried to pass him off as a Moldavian. The Gestapo brought her in for interrogation several times and came to her home two different times suspecting that her husband was a Jew, but she insisted that her husband’s name was Stepan, and his family name Novak. I met him, spoke with him, spent an entire evening listening to his stories, and all of us—Kipershtein, his wife, his fellow Christian neighbors, and I marveled at the fact that Kipershtein is alive and has not been killed. I did not meet any other Jews in Ukraine. Acquaintances told me that they had seen one Jew in Kharkov and one in Kursk; the writer Ilya Ehrenburg told me that he had met a Jewish female partisan somewhere in southern Ukraine. But that is all.

Where is the Jewish people? Who will ask the twentieth century’s Cain that dreadful question: where are the Jewish people who once lived in Ukraine? Where are hundreds of thousands of elderly people and children? Where are millions of people who three years ago toiled and lived on this earth in peaceful friendship with Ukrainians?

The people have been murdered, trampled in the earth.  It is neither meaningful nor possible to list the names of every victim, for all of them are equally innocent and must be counted, regardless of whether they were famous and world-renown scholars, or whether they were unknown, barely literate women living in quiet shtetls far from any railroads. Why name some of the victims but remain silent about others? But it is impossible to list an entire people by name. There is no sense in, and no possibility of naming all the places where Jews were murdered in great numbers during the fall of 1941 and summer of 1942. These executions took place in every large and small city and in every shtetl. The only thing that must be said is that if there were 100 Jews living in a small town, then 100 Jews were slaughtered, nowhere a single person less. If 55,000 Jews lived in a city, then in that city 55,000 Jews were killed, and never a single person less. These massacres, we must understand, were carried out according to finely detailed lists, lists that did not overlook hundred-year old elders or newborn babies. These lists ensured the death of every last Jew in Ukraine.

I travelled and walked this land from the northern Donets to the Dnieper, from Voroshilovgrad in the Donbass to Chernigov on the Desna; I have walked along the Dnieper and looked out at Kiev. And during all this time, I met one single Jew.

We must remember that mass murder was carried out uniformly, according to strict and elaborate instructions in which provisions were made for how to murder a person who was too senile to walk, and one who hadn’t yet left his mother’s arms or taken his first steps. It was announced in hundreds of towns that Jews would be sent to ghettos and were required to gather fifteen kilograms of baggage; and in hundreds of towns, they were then led to the outskirts and murdered with the latest automatic weapons.  Even now, even a year or two after the event, people who happened to see these executions still weep and lose their ability to speak upon recounting the images of horror and madness to which they became witnesses.

It is impossible to recount the names of all the colonels, generals, majors, captains, and lieutenants in the German army who assisted the Gestapo by organizing the execution of a people. It is impossible to recount the names of all the soldiers, lance-corporals, senior lancecorporals, non-commissioned officers, security guards and policemen who carried out this murder.

How is this murder different from the hundreds and thousands of people that the Germans executed elsewhere in fascist-occupied Europe? There is a difference, and it lies in the fact that the fascists execute French, Dutch, Serbian, Ukrainian, Russian and Czech people for violating fascist rules and laws—hiding a switchblade or an old revolver, accidentally uttering an angry word, a young man refusing to abandon his elderly parents for a German labor camp, or offering a sip of water to a partisan. But the Germans execute the Jews only because of the fact that they are Jews. In their view, Jews have no right to be alive. To be a Jew is the greatest transgression, a crime that can be punished only by death. That is why all the Jews in Ukraine were murdered, and that is why they were killed in many countries in Europe. The majority of those killed were old women, the elderly, sick people and children. The reason for this is that able-bodied men, women and youth were able to retreat along with the Red Army and are now either fighting in its ranks or working on its behalf. Those who stayed behind in Ukraine did not have the strength to leave. It was these people—old people, sick people and children—whom the Germans killed in cold blood, annihilating all of them to a man.

As long as humanity has existed on earth, there has never been a murder of innocent and defenseless people as organized, massive, and as cruel as this one. This is the greatest crime ever committed in history, and history has known many crimes; it is written with blood. This is a matter of the murder of an entire people, the slaughter of millions of defenseless children, women and elders.  The Jews of Ukraine are no more.

Human consciousness is built in such an unfortunate, though perhaps also fortunate way that when people read or hear about a tragedy that has claimed millions of peoples’ lives, they are simply incapable of understanding the horrifying profundity of what took place. This limitation is a fortunate attribute of human consciousness because it protects people from moral suffering and insanity. This limit of human knowledge is equally terrible because it enables people to be lenient, superficial and morally passive.  But in this era, it seems to me, the life of individuals and entire peoples has been devalued, and the value of personal freedom has been trampled under the boot of Germanfascist dogma—and it is precisely now, as never before, that demands for moral purity and righteousness must be raised to unattainable heights, both with respect to our individual lives and to the State. It is not only Europe, but in fact all of humanity that stands on the threshold of extinction.  This immense earth has been transformed into a wasteland, thousands of its great cities have been blown up and burned down. The world war has taken millions of people who like animals live in pits and trenches, and flung them backwards to prehistoric times. H.G. Wells’ most dismal fantasies about imminent global catastrophe seem like harmless folktales in comparison to present-day reality.

This seething, amoral force came from National-Socialist Germany.

It was born from a sense of German racial exclusivity, from the deep and heartfelt conviction held by contemporary Germans that they are the chosen people; that their happiness, tranquility and security are the only sacred things on earth. This is an ideology of exclusivity, of suspicion and indifference to the suffering of other nations, and of sentimental pathos for one’s own people.  This consciousness is the scourge of present day humanity, and it was aroused in Germany. It has led her down a path of bloody crimes, and it shall bring her to the precipice of cruel defeat.

Do Hitler and the German fascist leaders all truly believe that Jews are Germany’s foremost enemies, or that their annihilation is necessary for Germany’s happiness? Of course not. These people consciously produced this bloody propaganda.

In our times, the equality of all people constitutes the highest moral principle of humanity.  Racism is the exact opposite of this principle.  People will ask me, ‘are the Germans a nation of murderers and criminals, then?’

No! For we believe in the great principle of equality of the world’s peoples. We know that the German people have not only produced Hitler, Goebbels, Goering and Rozenberg; not just the Hohenzollern and Krupp dynasties; not only Stennes and Guderian, Ley and Ribbentrop, Horst Wessel and Nietzsche. This is the same people who produced Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Feurbach, Marx, Engels, and the great martyr Liebnekht. It produced the enlightened wisdom and pure soul of August Bebel, and has borne thousands of proletarian fighters, hundreds of humane and modest social and scholarly activists, and many kind women and sincere old workers.  When the war is over, will we tell the German people, ‘You are murderers: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’?  Will we avenge the murder of a people by killing another?

No. Democracy’s victory will not only be a victory of weapons. There will be a true victory when the dark force of racism is finally reduced to ashes. Germans will understand that the idea of racial exceptionalism is a criminal and false one, and that their happiness and peace are not the only sacred things in the world. This victor will endure because of the mighty power of weapons, which will force the Germans to always know that all people are equally entitled to life on earth. The raised sword is answered with the language of the sword. This is the sacred logic and morality of contemporary war.  But today we are still at war, and Hitler’s obedient murderous gang, fascist Germany, is spilling innocent blood.

I had the chance to talk to dozens of German POWs.  Our conversations took place amidst the smoky ruins of devastated cities and villages. We talked about mass murder, about executions of Ukrainian and Russian populations, and about the complete destruction of the Jewish people, and I did not once detect in them a sense of humiliation, despair, or desire to disavow the disgraceful crimes associated with the name of Germany. With extraordinary naivet., all of them espoused the view that ‘crimes against humanity’ are not really crimes because their purpose is to benefit Germany. These soldiers could explain every act in terms of its instrumental value, and many of them said that the execution of the Jewish people had in fact turned out to be useless, and that mass murder and the burning of hundreds and thousands of villages had not brought Germany the advantages that had been expected from these measures. It is from this point of view that they judged the massive crimes committed by Germany.

Why did National-Socialist Germany become the executioner of the Jewish people? I want to raise this particular question not only because I myself am a Jew, and not only because those closest to me were victims of fascist bloodshed.

The treatment of Jews expressed contemporary fascist German ideology and tactics in their crudest and most complete and final form. The Germans did not commit such bestial, inhumane violence, lacking all traces of humanity, against any other people on earth. For fascism, hatred for the Jews became paramount; it was the fuel for its fire. Anti-Semitism became the universal weapon of fascism.

The significance of anti-Semitism lies in the fact that a war against Jewry is a formula suited to the war that Germany wanted to wage against the world. Given present circumstances, Jews do not have their own state, and are scattered across all parts of the world. One finds Jews among American capitalists, English social activists, Russian communists, and French anarcho-syndicalists.  This is very convenient for a state and people that have raised the black flag of war against all states and all peoples of the world. By selecting the Jews as victims of its demagogy, National-Socialism freed its hand against every nation and social class. It was able to declare war both on Marxism and the new structure of Russian society, and on plutocratic England, America and France; in a word, it was able to declare war against the world. This choice of victims constituted the first decision made by the criminal, jingoist National-Socialists.

Anti-Semitism has always been the banner, weapon and wool used by reactionaries to blindfold the masses.  It has always been an opiate in dark times when ruling minorities sought to deceive the masses, and deflect the righteous anger of the oppressed. National-Socialism came to power in Germany during a period when reaction had gripped every stratum and class within German society.  Reactionary politics won out in Germany after its defeat in the imperialist war of 1914. Blinded by national egoism, every strata of German society had invested different hopes in an eventual victory. But the war failed to resolve the conflicts of the modern capitalist world, and the Treaty of Versailles proved equally unable to resolve them. The solution to these conflicts lies in the great and sacred principles of brotherhood and equality of all peoples; it lies in the eradication of imperialistic conflict between states, the elimination of class structure in society, and in the creation of a collective means of production and a just distribution of goods.

But to its own misfortune, humanity did not have the strength to complete this task.

At that point, National-Socialism led onto the executioner’s block a universal and eternal, tried and true, defenseless and therefore desirable enemy: the Jew. With no law and no army to defend him, the Jew is an optimal target for the wrath of a weak underdog.

‘You fear proletarian revolution,’ the Nazis told Germany’s capitalists, ‘you fear communism, which is a hundred times more frightening to you than the Versailles Treaty. We too fear the proletarian revolution. Let us unite against the Jews. They are, after all, the eternal origin oftrouble and bloody rebellion; it is they who as orators and authors of revolutionary books inflame and agitate the masses; they who created the idea of class struggle and proletarian revolution!’

To the toiling German masses the Nazis said, ‘You suffer the consequences of the Versailles Treaty; you are hungry and out of work. The heavy burden of reparations has fallen on your weary backs. But just look at whose hands turn the wheel—it is the hands of Jewish tycoons, Jewish bankers, kings without crowns in America, France and England. Your enemies are our enemies; come, and let us fight together.’

Addressing the German intelligentsia, the Nazis said ‘You are humiliated, your ideals have been shattered. No one needs your talents or knowledge. You, salt of the earth, are doomed to become waiters and taxi drivers. Don’t you see the cold and merciless eyes of world Jewry gazing at you like a fog encircling Germany? Let us fight on behalf of our national honor and trampled earth, let us together extinguish the decaying world of Jewry.’

Having reached this dead end, Germany blindly followed National-Socialism. It was pushed onto this path by defeat and reaction. But not by these things alone, no.  Germany had been prepared for this path over the centuries by a culture of national and political egoism. Germany had never lost faith in the strength of its clenched fist to knock the world flat. It had always continued to believe in the sanctity of righteous war, and regarded the strategic plans of its military as its highest social ethic. And so, ten years ago Germany finally became wedded to National-Socialism. The explosive interaction of historical factors and a reactionary atmosphere became the second reason why National-Socialism felt compelled to choose the Jewish people as victims of its criminal demagogy.

And the final reason: fascism is profoundly opposed to the idea of equality among nations, of the brotherhood and unity of all peoples of the world. The foundational principle of fascism, after all, is a belief in the master German race.  Fascism therefore decided to construct a great ladder of forced labor of nations. It resolved to poison each nation against all others: to place the Dutch and Danes on the highest rungs of the ladder of punishment in order to show them that they are better off than the Norwegians and French; to poison the French with an awareness of the petty privileges they have over the Czechs and Greeks; to place the Serbs further down, and appease them with the fact that Ukrainians and Belorussians stand below them on the bottom rungs. And finally, fascism resolved to frighten this whole entire colony of peoples, its ladder of oppression, with the horrible abyss of non-existence it had prepared for the Jewish people.

But for fascism it was not enough to scare the Ukrainians with the destruction of the Jewish people, or to placate their fear with the notion that they had at least been granted existence on the ladder of forced labor. Fascism hoped for more than this; it hoped to infect Ukrainians with hatred for the Jews and to deceive them by spreading the idea that Jews were to blame for all the poverty, misfortune and burdens that had devastated Ukraine.  The principle to divide and conquer, and to poison enslaved and doomed nations with hatred for one another was the third factor that compelled Adolf Hitler to embark on a bloody provocation, and to lead millions of defenseless women, elderly people and children to the executioner’s block.

Do Hitler and the German fascist leaders all truly believe that Jews are Germany’s foremost enemies, or that their annihilation is necessary for Germany’s happiness?  Of course not. These people consciously produced this bloody propaganda. They are unprincipled by the very fact of their existence, and people without principles do not possess and are not capable of possessing any beliefs.  Their actions are guided solely by temporary circumstances and pragmatism. While I may disagree with President Roosevelt on several issues, I am absolutely certain that regardless of how much circumstances might change, Roosevelt’s principles would remain the same.  There is infinitely greater integrity, honesty and room for partnership in this persistence of values (even regarding matters where there are great differences of opinion), than there is in the conformism, deceit, and sudden shifts of sham ideology that constitutes the extremes of German National-Socialism.

At this point I wish to express some ideas about the inner essence of anti-Semitism.

Anti-Semitism exists in every country in the world and has existed throughout human history. It can be found even in contemporary democratic states. Its character changes in different times and places, of course.  Anti-Semitism in England and anti-Semitism in tsarist Russia are not the same thing. Its appearance depends on reactionary forces, such as deceitful attempts of ruling powers to explain and ameliorate social and ideological discontent. Anti-Semitism is a paradigmatic conflict with no solution. The period of post-revolutionary reaction in Russia between 1905 and 1911 has become known for bloody Jewish pogroms and charges of ritual murder. But the great Russian Revolution was a period of history that did not know anti-Semitism. Here I am speaking of state anti-Semitism, that is, of the willful incitement of anti-Semitism by a government apparatus.

In addition to state anti-Semitism, there is also so-called ‘ideological’ anti-Semitism. Ideological anti-Semitism is a phenomenon born of a physiological need to explain human and global problems by examining them in a looking glass rather a mirror. One finds ideological anti-Semites primarily among educated people. When the great Dostoevsky blamed the Jews for impoverishing the masses in Russia’s borderlands, he merely substituted the invisible and mysterious historical process that had produced bourgeois, feudal Russian society with the idea that Jewish commercial circles had supposedly invaded Russia.  Mid-nineteenth century Russia experienced an intense growth in capitalist relations. Petty buyers and sellers, small factory owners, and contractors began to appear everywhere, destroying the old means of production to benefit themselves, and ruining idyllic relations between feudal lords and their serfs.

Anti-Semitism became the universal weapon of fascism….A war against Jewry is a formula suited to the war that Germany wanted to wage against the world.

Dostoevsky saw the new relations, but he did not, or perhaps could not see the new qualities and types of Russian people—the plundering buyers, merciless leasers, and greedy factory owners—who accompanied them. He did not sense that Russian people had changed at all, and this meant that some other people who were not Russians had introduced the new qualities into life. These were the Jews: people who had no love for the system of Russian patriarchy, and no connection to the soil; people who were driven only by a hunger for profit, and who regarded the toiling masses with cold indifference. Dostoevsky saw these features in the Jewish merchant and developed a profound hatred for him. But the one thing he failed to understand was that by looking at the Jewish trader, Jewish leaser, and Jewish middle-man, he was only gazing at a mirror that showed him a magnified image of the new Russian bourgeoisie, frantically evolving in hundreds and thousands of Russian villages, provincial cities, capitals and far-flung hamlets.

This phenomenon has repeated itself throughout all of Jewish history. The medieval Spanish inquisition that burned Jews at the stake did not grasp the fact that it held up the Jews as a mirror of its own rigid intolerance, orthodoxy and backwards prejudice; that by burning Jews, it was contending with flaws that had grown up inside its own heart. When Russian reactionary thinkers perceived the Jews as the source of a revolutionary epidemic, they did not and perhaps could not know that they were seeing a reflection of a Russia that was unconsciously birthing a revolution in thousands of its factories, plants and mines, and in its universities and army barracks. Ideological anti-Semitism cannot and does not want to understand this.  One can put it this way: ‘Tell me what you blame on the Jews, and I will tell you what you are guilty of yourself.’

What did the Nazis blame on the Jews?  They accused them of the seven deadly sins. The paradoxical, remarkable thing is that the portrait that the Nazis painted of Jews—their supposedly fanatical racism, thirst for global power, hunger to enslave and recklessly rule over humankind—was in fact a self-portrait. By endowing Jews with the traits, flaws and criminal intentions that were raging in their very own hearts, National-Socialism fatefully repeated what previous anti-Semites had done throughout the ages.

The Germans are now being expelled from Ukraine.  Every day the glorious, weary earth is being liberated, as if a flood of muddy, filthy German hatred is receding and in its wake, bread is once again beginning to rise, hunched black trees, bushes and forests are straightening themselves out, and the sun and wind are drying out soil that is soaked with blood and tears. People are speaking in normal voices again and looking at the world with open eyes. Millions of people have been freed from slavery.

Ukraine was one of the fascists’ most important prizes. Its discussions about Ukraine had begun as early as 1933. And now, it is in the process of losing—it has already lost—Ukraine. Fascism failed to understand (how could it possibly understand?) the strength of our people’s resistance, their great spirit and undying sense of human worth. Fascism did not understand the power of the Soviet system! A system that endured trials of adversity in the Revolution, Civil War and period of great construction.  Fascism misunderstood and underestimated the friendship of nations among the peoples of the Soviet Union, and crudely dismissed the Union as a ‘geographic concept.’ Fascism was incapable of fathoming that the Soviet Union is the noble, triumphant and courageous soul of liberated humanity.

Fascism did not gauge the strength of our Red Army; its powerful reserves, courage, technical power. It failed to see that this army is immortal, that its generals, soldiers, tanks, guns and planes are the creations of an immortal people. With its boorish, small and primitive mind fascism attempted to change the march of history. German fascism understood nothing and was mistaken in everything.

By endowing Jews with the traits, flaws and criminal intentions that were raging in their very own hearts, National-Socialism fatefully repeated what previous anti-Semites had done throughout the ages.

The Germans failed to deceive Ukraine because its people cannot be deceived. The senseless and horrifying murder of elders, women and children transformed Ukraine into a nightmare. In Ukrainian towns and villages, people speak with profound empathy for the victims, and with repulsive hatred for the butchers who committed a mass murder of Jews in the fall of 1941 and summer of 1942.

Khristia Chuniak, a forty year old peasant from the village Krasilovka, in the Brovary district of Kiev oblast, described to me how the Germans led a Jewish doctor named Feldman to be executed in Brovary. This Feldman was an old bachelor who had adopted two Christian boys and was loved by everyone. A group of weeping and lamenting peasants went to appeal to the German commanding officer so that he would spare Feldman’s life.  The women’s tears moved the commander, and he agreed.  This was in the fall of 1941. Feldman continued to live and work as a doctor in Brovary, and he was executed in the spring of 1943. Khristia Chuniak described how the old man had to dig his own grave; apparently he had to die alone, for by the spring of 1943 there were no longer any living Jews. As she came to the end of the story, she sobbed and openly wept. The sorrow-filled words of this simple story expressed with astonishing clarity Ukraine’s relationship to its murdered Jewry.

No one believed the fascist propaganda that Jews were preparing to enslave Ukraine and take over the world.  Ukrainians were familiar with Jews after generations of working, growing old and dying beside them on the same earth, and working people have always been free and estranged from anti-Semitism in all of its forms. Towns with large Jewish populations like Berdichev had never even known anti-Semitism. Ukrainians, Russians, Poles and Jews always lived and worked together in friendship in these towns.

And so a great people, simple and wise, figured out the eternal tragedy of the Jewish people, and understood something that many educated reactionaries could not: they understood the inner essence of anti-Semitism. The people knew that the Germans were themselves guilty of whatever crimes they had blamed on the Jews, that the concepts of world domination, bloody racism, suspicion, and hatred had been imported by the fascists themselves.  The people knew who had tormented, humiliated and robbed them; they understood why the Germans shouted day and night about the criminal Juden. Once they understood this, they bowed their heads in sympathy and grief for the executed Jews, and with silent contempt, they clenched their teeth and glared at the Nazis.

The people understood the inner essence of fascist anti-Semitism, and with their simple and wise vision, they saw through a mirror of lies and looked deep into the eyes of the butchers of modern humanity. This is how they defeated the goal of National-Socialism, a goal that led Germany to put an entire people on the executioner’s block, and commit a crime unprecedented in all of human history.

In gullies and deep ravines, in anti-tank ditches of sand and clay, under heavy black soil, and in swamps and pits, there lie hastily flung bodies of professors and workers, doctors and students, old people and children.

No sound of tears or moaning; no sight of faces drawn from suffering. Jews are silent with the dreadful silence of the village Kozary on the old highway to Kiev.  The wind carries sand onto enormous common graves.  Grass has grown on the fields of death. Tall poplar trees flutter above the earth, like dark flags folded in a sign of mourning.

Silence and peace.

Oh, if the murdered people could be revived for an instant, if the ground above Babi Iar in Kiev or Ostraia Mogila in Voroshilovgrad could be lifted, if a penetrating cry came forth from hundreds and thousands of lips covered in soil, then the Universe would shudder.

The Yiddish version ‘Ukraina on yidn’ appeared in Einikayt on 25 November 1943 and 2 December 1943; for the Russian back-translation from the Yiddish, see ‘Ukraina bez evreev,’ trans. Rokhl Baumvol’, in Vasilii Grossman, Na evreiski temi, ed. Shimon Markish ( Jerusalem: Biblioteka Aliya, 1985) vol.2:333-340. The complete Russian version of ‘Ukraina bez evreev’ on which the present translation is based may be found in VEK: Vestnik Evreiskoi Kultury, no. 4 (Riga, 1990): 1-8

Published with the kind permission of the Grossman Estate, courtesy of Andrew Nurnberg Associates Ltd

Palgrave Macmillan. 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The American Dream is one of upward mobility, but also sideways movement. The aspiration to greatness comes with a rhetoric of self-sufficiency that causes people to move along and start again, rather than navigating existing structures. Not only was the founding event of the United States a secession, but the most traumatic moment in American history — the Civil War — was also a failed attempt at the same thing. From Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Splendid Isolation’ to the libertarian Tea Party movement, the United States has tended to view government involvement as an intrusion and to laud those who start afresh over those who try to improve what already exists.

The frontier myth romanticises the West as the place where American ideals of equality, democracy and innovation are forged. Despite 82% of the population already living in cities by 2008, the metaphors of individual freedom are still predominantly rural. The most iconic of these is the cowboy — beholden to no law but that of natural justice — who can ride off into the plains carrying nothing but his six-shooter. If you don’t like the current system, just “get out of Dodge” (a phrase made popular by Gunsmoke, the legendary television show about the settlement of the West) and start again.

This individualistic Western mythology has had little hold on Jews. For Jews in America, as in Europe, 20th century life was predominantly urban and communal. From generation to generation Jews dealt with their own existing structures, whether scriptural, legal or political. While some have, of course, rejected the community, growing up Jewish has inculcated a pervasive sense of struggle with self-governance, whether through Talmudic pilpul, fights for civil rights or communal wrangling. The urban concentrations of a community whose traditional skills were best employed in the cities and the tribal nature of a community that is both historically close-knit and closely-knit to its history has meant that completely abandoning the past and moving on is less of a simple option for American Jews. It is no coincidence that the great renewal legislation of American history—Roosevelt’s New Deal — had profound Jewish support.

Dealing with renewal rather than replacement is not an exclusively Jewish preserve. However, the systems of Jewish life have provided a stepping stone for those who want to study this. Jews have been central in questioning and revising structures of thought and society, from Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud in Europe to the founders of literary, linguistic and social science in America. And, as has been often noted, even the recent theorists of foreign policy neo-conservativism were Jewish — trying to reform the world through belief in American hegemony. Most visibly, perhaps, in the world of contemporary commentary, Jewish intellectuals prominently provide insight into the systems governing respectively economics, social construction and politics. From Paul Krugman on his Nobel-powered pulpit at the New York Times to Malcolm Gladwell propagating virally from The New Yorker to the vastly influential Jon Stewart at the intersection of satire and news on Comedy Central, systemic analysis is still coming from the people who brought you Noam Chomsky and Milton Friedman.

But the American dream has always been an unwieldy admixture of the personal and the theoretical, bypassing the implementation. From the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty to the inspirational story of Barack Obama, the country leaps from an ideal to a biography without dwelling on the systems or institutions that might allow ideals to unfold into reality. Partly this is true because of the rapidly evolving nature of the nation, partly because of the increasingly vested interests in the status quo and partly because of the influence of the media. Hollywood, as its paradigm, purveys a relentlessly optimistic set of American possibilities.

The palpable atmosphere of possibility in the United States of America — the world’s first ideologically established nation — comes from this sense that if atfirst you don’t succeed, you can give up and try something different. From this impetus comes, on the one hand, America’s proclivity to waste time, space, energy and people but, on the other hand, profound freedom to create. In David Simon’s The Wire, which Jacob Weisberg of Slate called “the best television show ever,” there is no such freedom or energy: only compromise, concession, constraint and, eventually, capitulation.

Based on Simon’s experience as an embedded reporter with the Baltimore homicide unit, The Wire was an urban drama set in Baltimore that unfolded over 60 hours of television in five seasons between 2002 and 2007. The first season was based around a homicide squad that gets permission to use a phone tap — the eponymous wire — for surveillance of a drug gang they have reason to believe is responsible for a number of murders. But rather than just playing out like another cop show, The Wire evinced a deep sympathy for the social structures that created the drug dealers and their world. From the very start it showed the policemen suffering the consequences of their actions and, from season to season, it changed focus from the black underclass to neglected union workers at the docks, teachers, politicians and journalists all making their own desperate attempts to deal with the eroding social fabric.

The Wire is profoundly televisual. Weisberg praises the show though for its ability “to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature.” Such literary comparisons have been widely made — The Wire is frequently painted as Dickensian by critics, but it is closer to Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine in its profound humanity, breadth of scope and realistic cast of characters whose centrality varies in any given story. Ultimately though, the comparison with literature is flawed. In Dickensian fashion, Simon’s writing is rich in social critique but television, unlike literature, has no recourse to the interiority that is the sine qua non of the literary. We never know what the characters are thinking, only what they are doing, over and over again.

Films are often too short to allow for the types of examination that systemic scrutiny demands. Although occasional cinematic epics like Abel Gance’s 1927 Napoleon, Mankiewicz’s 1963 Cleopatra or Lanzmann’s 1985 Shoah are able to bring several hours of inspection of both people and systems, that breadth of scope is a rare exception. A season of 13 programmes has a series of rhythms and micro-rhythms, repetitions and variations that is simply not attainable in a single long-form film. These remarkable films echo down the decades but, unlike The Wire, their profundity is inexorable (a gradual unfolding) rather than incessant (a continual series of variations on a theme). The Wire has been compared to a movie because of its high production values and unremittingly intense dialogue. The comparison, though intended as a compliment, is misguided. Each of the five seasons is not a 13-hour movie, but a television series, with the driving cycles and repetitions that implies, meaning that each interaction is loaded with the weight of previous encounters. Each repetition and reevaluation is like the cyclical reading and reinterpretation of the Torah and, more universally, like the repetition of the working week.

Taking its cue from its niche on the subscriber network HBO, The Wire is deliberately dense, layered and occasionally just plain difficult. Itself a product of the new television world of the 1990s, the cable network HBO did not rely on fickle advertisers but on subscribers. The Wire took full advantage of the creative freedom to push the boundaries of verisimilitude both in characterisation and dialogue. It became famous for its constant (and, by all accounts, realistic) use of the word ‘fuck’. The script of an epiphanic five minute scene where detectives Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) and William ‘Bunk’ Moreland (Wendell Pierce) revisit a murder scene is entirely, and brilliantly, made of up f-word cognates.

The show has redefined the limits of televisual form and evolved a whole new language of television. Through short episode-long cameos and long multiple-season story arcs, Simon and his co-writers have created an encyclopaedic dramatis personae of nuanced, fully realised characters including black and white dockers, union leaders, lawyers, politicians, drug runners and disadvantaged 6th graders. The complex, lifelong relationship between the childhood friends who run the Barksdale drug gang in the first three seasons is no less lovingly explored for their status as murderers. Perhaps the show’s greatest achievement is giving the African-American underclass a fair voice and a realistic context.

According to Simon: “All the things that have been depicted in The Wire over the past five years — the crime, the corruption — actually happened in Baltimore.” But, as with his book Homicide, the depth of sympathy that Simon is able to elicit from his audience, is the key part of a fiction that makes you not only believe in it, but care about the situation. For example, straight-speaking Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen) is a would-be reformist politician who sees with some clarity what needs to be done, but vested interests are against him and, as he observes in the fourth season, voting is deeply racial: “I still wake up white in a city that ain’t.” Carcetti wants to make a difference but the price of power is compromise and the cost of compromise is the cutting edge of reform. Despite their intentions and backgrounds, there is, in the end, little difference, between the almost comically corrupt black politician, Senator R. Clayton ‘Clay’ Davis (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.) and the newbie Italian American one. Both have learned to play the system and yet both are, in their own ways, its victims.

But, like Woody Allen’s early films about New York, the central character of The Wire is the city of Baltimore itself. Concrete power and unrealistic hope are the twin powers corrupting the city and, by extension, America. In thrall to an untrammeled local and global capitalism, the local community is victim to those in power and failsto hold either individuals or institutions responsible. At the heart of this failure lies the cursed American hope, which deludes and distracts in equal measure, suggests Simon. The advanced technology, after which the show is named, and which promises so much proves useless to the students in the under-privileged schools. Instead it is incorporated into the plans of the drug gangs on the streets, into the smugglers’ cover-ups at the automated docks, and misused in the new world of web-journalism.

By following legitimate and illegal institutions in parallel, Simon critiqued not only the democratic product, but the democratic process as it is lived in 21st century America. Teachers, lawyers, policemen and city bureaucrats are subject to the same systemic dehumanisations and temptations as drug runners and drug sellers. The difference between their motivations is tiny. That they do not end up in the same trouble is as much the result of their initial privilege as it is a result of their resolution. In its portrayal of good intentions gone bad — not least in the heart-rending depiction of Bubbles (Andre Royo) the perpetually reforming drug-addict, caretaker and part-time informant — it savages the banal, yet fatally distracting hope that lies at the heart of the American dream.

Even when concerned with something other than simple escapist entertainment, Hollywood has found it difficult to liberate itself from the personal. Whether highlighting the impact of General Motors’ factory closings in Roger and Me (1989), Reagan-era AIDS policies in Philadelphia (1993) or energy company cover-ups in Erin Brockovich (2000), health insurance in John Q (2002) or a hundred others, the critique is narrow and anecdotal. Only rarely does the corporate movie set-up address the systems that affect the success of the protagonist. In contrast, The Wire focuses explicitly on systems and institutions, from drug policing, unions, politics, education to the media in each of the series respectively. As Simon himself has pointed out:

“We are not selling hope, or audience gratification, or cheap victories with this show. The Wire is making an argument about what institutions — bureaucracies, criminal enterprises, the cultures of addiction, raw capitalism even — do to individuals.”

With movie-lite budgets, movie production values and poetic license, The Wire provides perhaps the most profound dramatic insight into the tragedy of America’s structural problems yet seen. The most damning revelation is, however, that well-intentioned people can hardly make a difference. By awarding a 2010 MacArthur Genius Award to Simon, the MacArthur Foundation added their imprimatur of approval to this dramatic insight. But, the brilliant, well-intentioned team behind The Wire seem, as they would surely have suspected, to have made no difference.

How do I know? Was it Google’s new social network, Google Plus — the first time the internet’s left me feeling I can’t quite keep up? I, the early adopter who mocks Apple’s latest products by typing ‘Sent from my iPad 5’ at the bottom of my emails. Or was it when I saw the latest picture of Sinead O’Connor, once the absolute symbol for me of beauty and rebellion? I’d have married her like a shot in the 80s, if only to hear my worried parents ask: “O’Connor? That’s a Sephardi name, right?” But now time has taken its toll (and its surcharge. And VAT. And from the look of her, several stealth taxes as well). Sinead looks like a frazzled mum who’s forgotten to pick up her youngest from dance class because she was so busy trying to gether eldest to tidy her room and stop writing fan mail to the Pope (ah, how each generation finds its own way to rebel).

Still, it was neither of these things that pushed me over the edge. I even coped with the realisation that the ever-increasing barbarian hordes of nasal hair massing at the borders of my nostrils to mock the Pax Romana imposed with difficulty by my nasal scissors now included a considerable number of grey hairs. Yes, I was still young. That’s why over the summer you could have found me dad-dancing at a festival. Never mind that the ground could have auditioned for the part of the Somme circa 1917, here was proof I still had it! I was at a festival! I was a Jew who does camping — something that’s not been popular with our people since the flight from Egypt (if I remember rightly the headliner that year was The Golden Calf ). Even working out that I’d danced to Blondie’s Atomic, first released in 1979, across five different decades didn’t faze me. I was dancing at a festival ergo I was young.

And that’s when I fell victim to hubris (which is like a real bris only more painful). I started telling a story about a previous festival experience: how I’d attempted to avoid using the toilet cubicles, visually the closest we can come to knowing what it was like to stare at the face of Medusa, by taking a couple of imodiums (or is it ‘imodia’?). This binds you up nicely for the long weekend so as a bloke you only need use the far less traumatic urinals. Unfortunately, on this occasion I forgot I’d taken my two imodia and took two more later that day. I didn’t visit a cubicle for 10 days, by which time the only way anything would ever come out would be by caesarean.

It was as I told that story that I heard the click of the generation counter moving on. I was talking about my bowels. What’s more I was asking other people about their ‘movements’, and I didn’t mean whether they were off to see Suede at the Sunshine Arena. I had become my parents, my grandparents even. That elderly Jewish obsession with one’s inner workings that I had up till then so readily mocked was now my inheritance. Maybe my Aunt Esther, who made me think as a boy that the Yiddish for ‘hello’ was ‘are-you-regular?’, had first clocked her obsession at the Plotsk music festival in 1929— the year the organisers caused such controversy by passing over the Tschernowitz Klezmer Band as headliners in favour of Yiddish rapper superstar Jaycob-Z.

Still, I’ve now accepted this change. I know that if you want the more enjoyable inheritances of aging — wisdom, self-knowledge, a growing fondness for Classic FM — you have to accept the downsides and embrace the aging process, warts and all. Because believe me, you will get warts.

So tell me, are you regular?

The Big Cheese

The wild, top-hat-and-jeans-clad compére jumped onto the stage to announce the 20 semi-finalists of the second annual New York Cheesemonger Invitational. The crowd roared approval at those über-mongers who could detect age, nationality, name and bloom. For this, the third of four rounds, each contestant was to cut two 1/4 pound chunks of cheese and wrap each in cheese paper in under a minute. To mad applause, the first woman cheesemonger took to the stage. The clock began to tick. She estimated and sliced cheese amounts, posed triumphantly for the audience when her scale read 0.27lbs and began to wrap vigorously.

Billed as a Fight Club meets Dancing with the Stars showdown between 40 international cheesemongers and a buffet of local cheeses, the event was sold out weeks in advance. Despite the flash flood and subway re-routing, the semi-refrigerated warehouse in Long Island City drew 700 glasses-toting, ironic t-shirt wearing,thirty- something hipsters, who stood nibbling golden nuggets off paper plates, nonchalantly bobbing their heads to Detroit techno. At the entrance were stands with ‘Raw Milk Rockstar’ t-shirts, home-grown sodas, and Raclette ‘smores’ — towers of Graham crackers topped with ginger chocolate chunks and drenched in tangy swiss. Past the central giant stage where the competitive cheesing took place were three tables, each a mini Mount Sinai of fromage. On one, a pot of bubbling cheese was being spooned like champagne. And on the other two, plates of goudas, chévres, blues and rinds. Not to mention, baskets of crackers, pastes, crudites; a minyan of accoutrements.

The wrapping round eliminated all except ten finalist cheesemongers, who were put to the ultimate ‘Plate the Slate’ test, where they had 15 minutes to match a cheese with two other ingredients. The winner was Steve Jones, owner of The Cheese Bar in Portland, Oregon, who was crowned the Big Cheese for his pairing of Austrian semi-soft with bacon caramel popcorn. Traif, but to the international panel of judges, tremendous on the eyes and palate. Paol Price of Vermont and Anna Saxelby of New York trailed closely in second and third places, each winning cash prizes and a slice of cheese fame.

Live competitive cheesemongering seems to be the next step for NYC’s foodie obsessives. What better whey forward than with this form of culture?

Judy Batalion

Sushi in Ramallah

The salmon and avocado maki were spanking fresh, the miso soup darkly savoury with its traditional soft tofu and seaweed garnish. Even the tempura hand rolls came faultlessly presented in a lacquered temaki stand. Apart from the fact that we couldn’t accompany our meals with a chilled Asahi beer or two — no alcohol served at this venue — all seemed as it should be at Soho Sushi and Seafood, Palestine’s first and only sushi restaurant. My dinner companion, an Israeli journalist, complained rather grumpily that we were paying Tel Aviv prices for a far inferior meal. I thought this a little unfair. On his side of the Green Line, sushi is a yuppie staple, on sale everywhere from supermarkets to petrol station takeaways. In Ramallah we were a military occupation away from the closest wasabi supplier. Inside, a couple of family groups and the odd international sit amid Japanese-style artwork on the walls, jazz gently bouncing off the lacquer-panelled ceiling and courses arriving in quick succession on oversized, mottled-glass plates. The chefs — trained by a Japanese sushi expert from Tel Aviv — are in an open plan preparation area, its counter piled with fillets of fresh fish imported at huge expense from Israel. As one local tells me with an ironic smile: “Ramallah is the Tel Aviv of Palestine”. It’s certainly changed from the dark days of the second intifada, but Western luxury treats are not a reliable index of wider progress: there’s a sushi restaurant in Kabul and that’s still one of the poorest countries in the world. But along with the usual surfeit of aid workers and journalists Ramallah is increasingly attracting a new and aspirational Palestinian elite. To reach Soho Sushi and Seafood — part of the four-star Caesar Hotel in the upscale neighbourhood of Al-masyoun, the heart of the city’s building boom — I pick my way through a series of building sites, along streets lined with billboards advertising Palestinian banks and telecom companies. Inside, I’m handed an English language menu without having to ask, by a sweet-faced young waitress modishly dressed in black like the rest of the serving staff and chefs. I pick through a vast array of inside-out rolls, tempura and soup noodles, and wash it all down with jasmine tea. The whole effect is decidedly Oriental. But the fact that diners can smoke in between bites of sashimi is a reminder we’re in the Middle East. The peace process remains as moribund as ever. The Palestinian unilateral declaration of independence at the UN, expected later this month, may have just about as much impact on the lives of people here as does this temporary availability of yakitori. Because, in any case, the Ramallah sushi venture was rather short-lived. When I enquire again, ahead of another trip to the region, Ifind out that Soho closed a few months after it opened, having failed to reach its sales target. Now it’s gone back to the tried-and-tested format of Mediterranean-Oriental cuisine. Its manager, Eyad Nimer, is sanguine about the experiment. “I personally love sushi,” he says. “But here, nobody was really interested. It’s not just that it was expensive — to be honest, a lot of people tried it and said ‘yuck, what’s that, it’s nasty, I don’t know what it is’”. “The West Bank doesn’t have a beach,” he explains. “In Palestine, people prefer to eat their fish cooked.”

Daniella Peled

The Messiah of Vilnius

Wyman Brent’s non-Jewishness is a little confusing. This is only partially due to the bright orange yarmulke he occasionally wears; it’s more that he has dedicated a good part of his life towards the Vilnius Jewish Library, of which he is conceiver, founder, fundraiser, book-solicitor, administrator, and, naturally, librarian. The library, after more than eight years of dreaming and planning and setbacks is, amazingly, due to open this November. Brent, 48, originally of Lynchburg, Virginia, is rail-thin and has dark shoulder-length hair left completely un-styled; he looks vaguely monasticfrom the neck down. He speaks easily and softly, never interrupting and with a gentle pride.The library is the product of sheer persistence, serendipity and a complete disregard for the economics involved: he estimates that he’s spent $50,000 to date on the project. “I am simply someone who is very stubborn”, he says. “And I have absolutely no money now.” After three potential locations fell through Brent happened upon some Lithuanian machers and with their help he’s secured the support of the Lithuanian government — which means a rent-free spot and $ 300,000 for renovations. That spot is a second floor walk-up in a courtyard on Gediminas Avenue, a main thoroughfare in downtown Vilnius. It will initially house about 5000 items including books, DVDs, CDs, art, and random memorabilia (like autographed baseballs). He has plans for 100,000 books, though thecurrent space has a capacity of, at shelf-bending maximum, 20,000. “The government will simply have to find me a bigger place,” he said, with a naïve (but thus far vindicated) confidence. Fittingly, it’s through books that Brent discovered both Lithuania and Jewish culture. First there was The Hills of Vilnius by Alfonsas Bieliauskas, which he found while in Russia in the early 90s. And in 2004, while living in San Diego and selling books online, Brent acquired one of the books in Harry Kemelman’s ‘Rabbi Small’ series (Friday the Rabbi Slept Late, Wednesday the Rabbi Got Wet etc). He never read it but his roommate, who wasn’t Jewish either, did and quickly developed a rabid Jew-philia. She went to Tijuana, Mexico, interviewed the rabbi and community members, and wrote an article for The Jerusalem Post. (This roommate recently converted to Judaism, something Brent has little interest in.) Then Brent had an epiphany. “It was like a light bulb went off, like in the cartoon”, Brent says. “I love reading, I love Jewish culture, and I love Lithuania — I will open a Jewish library in Vilnius!” Brent immediately began collecting books, bought fancy stationery and sent letters to 36 Jewish institutions in San Diego. He got no replies but acknowledges that this is not surprising: he was a non-Jew with no relevant expertise (or even a college degree) who wanted to start a Jewish library — in Lithuania. Eventually persistence paid off and The Forward sent a reporter to interview him. News of the library spread and books began coming in. Yad Vashem has donated. The Yiddish Library in Amherst is preparing to send 1000 books. Cornell University, Jodi Picoult, and Leonard Nimoy (aka Spock, from the original Star Trek) have all sent books Brent’s way. Sir Martin Gilbert has promised an autographed copy of each of the 79 books he has written or edited. Brent proudly calls Gilbert a friend. Lithuania has a Jewish population of approximately three thousand; whatever Jewish culture there is tends to be produced by and for non-Jews. The yearly Klezmer festival features mostly non-Jewish musicians. A Fiddler on the Roof production, the largest musical in Lithuania’s history, is in the works and there is not a single Jew in the cast or crew. The Vilnius Jewish Library’s ‘Jewish’ criterion is a loose one: any book/film/music created by Jews, featuring Jews, about Jews, has or alludes to a Jewish theme, or in some way just seems Jewish is a candidate. “If it’s not blatantly antisemitic, the library probably has a place for it,” Brent said. (He has yet to turn down a donation.) The film catalogue runs from Two Days in Paris (starring Adam Goldberg) to Zack and Miri Make a Porno (with Seth Rogen). All the Star Wars movies are in (Harrison Ford’s maternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants). Brent sees a natural order to this. “Of course we’ll have Schindler’s List,” he said. “And last time I checked, Steven Spielberg is Jewish. So why not Jaws? Why not Jurassic Park? People will say, ‘Jurassic Park scared the hell out of me — maybe these Jews aren’t so bad!’” Brent clearly likes Jews. And it was a Jew —albeit a dead one — who was his matchmaker of sorts. Two years ago, Brent ordered a documentary about Al Jolson from a small, student-run company in Kiel, Germany. Brent was immediately intrigued by the director’s photo and it proceeded from there: next month, that director and Brent are getting married. He shrugs off the mazel tovs. “It’s the only payment I’ve ever received from the library,” he said. “So thank you, Al Jolson!”

Menchem Kaiser

Manhattan in Berlin

Tell them to fuck off”— scrawled beside a towering photograph of the downtown New York composer and musician John Zorn twisting around his saxophone, this is the welcoming statement to the Berlin Jewish Museum’s exhibition Radical Jewish Culture. One enters the gallery and is enveloped in the sounds of downtown New York circa 1995. Clarinets and saxophones squeal; guitars and accordions clash. Projected onto a wall are credits for the looped audio playlist. The music ranges from tradition Klezmer to John Zorn’s Masada, Frank London and the Klezmatics, Anthony Coleman’s Selfhaters, and David Krakauer’s Klezmer Madness (with their rendition of Michael Alpert’s Yiddish song Chernobyl). The lyrics are printed on the wall in German and English (not Yiddish). Like the high school bedroom of an eccentric Jewish jazzhead, the walls are covered with LPs from cantor Yossele Rosenblatt to the Art Ensemble of Chicago, from the Klezmer Conservatory Band to Sydney Bechet; there are time-faded posters promoting Jewish avant-garde jazz concerts at the now-defunct clubs Knitting Factory and Tonic, important NY venues for the downtown scene. It’s like a fan’s scrapbook, packed with videos, music listening-stations, interviews, CD cases, sketches, diary pages, scribbled musical notation, set lists, and other, often context-less, artefacts of this obscure but influential sub-set of a sub-scene of a sub-culture. The first half of the exhibition asks the questions: “What is Jewish? Radical? Culture?” The second half attempts to answer these questions by exploring the brand dubbed ‘Radical Jewish Culture’, a term created by Zorn for the 1992 Munich Art Project and rejected by some of the artists it represented: guitarist Marc Ribot wanted to call it “Loud and Pushy Music”. The brand went on to promote hundreds of albums on Zorn’s Tzadik label from artists of such diverse eclecticism that it begs the question: what does ‘Jewish’ actually mean? In a small room, footage of a live performance of John Zorn’s aggressive opus and inaugural 1995 Tzadik album, Kristallnacht is screened on continuous loop. The piece combines free jazz elements with traditional Klezmer modes and electronic samples of Hitler speeches and breaking glass, manipulated to migraine inducing high frequencies. With ears ringing, one can come out of the video booth and read a quote from Lenny Bruce (falsely dated 1981 —he died in 1966): “Dig… if you live in New York or any other big city you are Jewish. It doesn’t matter if you are Catholic. If you live in New York you are Jewish. If you live in Butte, Montana, you are going to be goyish even if you are Jewish.” As poet Gregory Corso once said about the Beats, “three writers do not a generation make.” Likewise, a few musicians on one label do not a whole culture make. Only cursory attention is given to the broader Jewish, specifically Yiddish, music scenes in America and Europe to which Tzadik is both heir and foil. But the exhibition, though imperfect, represents part of a wider movement to recast Jewish culture as a radically open question. Displayed on a wall is a quote by French- Jewish writer Edmond Jabès, also included in the album notes to Kristallnacht: “It is indeed the impossibility of being an ‘untroubled Jew’, a Jew at peace anchored in his certainties, that has made me the kind of Jew I think I am. This may seem paradoxical but it is precisely in that break — in that non-belonging in search of its belonging — that I am without a doubt most Jewish. The Jew doesn’t just ask questions: he has himself become a question.” Before leaving the gallery and re-reading Zorn’s command to “tell them to fuck off”, a quote by the door from poet Paul Celan offers a somewhat more challenging and mysterious directive: “Thunder your shibboleth here into your alien homeland.” This may be the most Jewish way of telling them to fuck off

Daniel Kahn

It’s the other national anthem, saying,
If you want to hear -
It says, “Bullshit!”…
It says: Listen
To the tune that keeps sounding
In the distance, on the outside,
Coming through the ground…
We’re the other national anthem, folks,
The ones that can’t get in
To the ball park.
(Assassins)

Sandy Wilson, composer and lyricist, famously declared that Stephen Sondheim “destroyed the American musical almost singlehandedly. He’s turned it into a semi-operatic disquisition rather than an entertainment.” A brief survey of Sondheim’s catalogue, from the first concept musical Company (1970) with its lean view of marriage and flattened chronology, to Assassins (1990), a prickly but sympathetic account of eight American hit men (and women), suggests the composer and lyricist has indeed enacted a radical break with the unabashed good cheer of Oklahoma!’s “O what a beautiful mornin’’. More serious still, to challenge the form of that most American of theatrical celebrations—the Broadway musical—is apparently to challenge America itself. Yet a closer look at the so-called 1940s Golden Age of the musical comedy reveals Broadway’s tangled relationship with the American dream and a complex project of Jewish assimilation through the on-stage depiction of ‘outsiders’. Sondheim has been reticent about his heritage in interviews and commentaries on his work, but has noted an affinity with the outsider, stating “it’s obviously something I feel, belonging to two minorities”(being Jewish and gay). While Sondheim’s works often depict fragmented worlds that seem a far cry from the American creed, peopled as they are by the incompatible, dispossessed or unruly, his musicals do not perhaps disconnect with the musical’s Golden Age as much as Wilson feared: the Broadway “disquisition”on the outsider has been around for longer than might be expected. Just as the American musical of the 1940s began to redraw the boundaries of social inclusion, so Sondheim scores an alternative national anthem, for “the ones that can’t get in to the ball park.”

Sondheim had a formidable training. Oscar Hammerstein II became part-mentor, part-father to the ten-year old Sondheim, steering his young charge through a lively apprenticeship in musical theatre and remaining a close associate throughout Sondheim’s career. On graduating, Sondheim pursued a more classical musical education , studying with the infamous Milton Babbitt, composer of rigorous and complex serial and electronic music but also, as Sondheim later declared, an unlikely but “frustrated show composer”. Together they unpicked the Broadway canon, often spending the first part of composition classes absorbed in structural analysis of a Jerome Kern song. When Sondheim asked for guidance in moving towards atonal music, Babbitt reportedly told his student “you haven’t exhausted tonal resources for yourself yet, so I’m not going to teach you atonal.” From here, Sondheim identifies that “I am his maverick, his one student who went into the popular arts with all his serious artillery.”

Sondheim’s “popular art” has nonetheless challenged audiences and critics alike, and his works have tended to be chameleon and acidic in their theme and realisation. Cutting his teeth as a lyricist on Bernstein’s genre-bending West Side Story (1957), Sondheim went on to create the so-called “concept musical” in 1970 with Company, a new approach to musical theatre driven not by plot development, but by the exploration of theme. Company was followed by a string of acclaimed but provocative works exploring topics from America’s cultural incursion into East Asia (Pacific Overtures, 1976), to revenge tragedy (Sweeney Todd, 1979); pointillism and the artistic process (Sunday in the Park with George, 1984) to the deconstructed fairy tale (Into the Woods, 1987). His work repeatedly confronts the power of the institution— be it marriage, justice, government or the happy ending— examining its grip on those individuals who are excluded, by choice or circumstance. It is a stance that has seen the composer branded a Broadway revisionist, allied, by certain commentators, with an earlier European school of politicised musical satire. Sondheim however firmly disassociates himself from the link (and what might be considered a certain cachet in the alliance):

“I’m not a Brecht/Weill fan and that’s really all there is to it. I’m an apostate: I like Weill’s music when he came to America better than I do his stuff before…. when he was not writing with Brecht, when he was writing for Broadway.”

Indeed, Sondheim’s readiness to explore social exclusion is something he traces back not to Weimar cabaret but to the Broadway canon. In an oft-cited New York Times interview, Sondheim recalls a first teenage encounter with Roger and Hammerstein’s Carousel (1945): “I remember how everyone goes off to the clam bake at the end of Act One and Jigger just follows, and he was the only one walking on stage as the curtain came down. I was sobbing.” Sondheim goes on to explain why Carousel remains his one of his favourite musicals, “because it’s about a loner [Billy Bigelow] who’s misunderstood”. With a customary lack of sentimentality, later in the interview Sondheim dismisses his own remarks as “psychobabble”, but they make a striking statement and address the central subtext of much of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s output. It is perhaps only by looking more closely at the social history of the earlier Broadway musical, notably its part in Jewish assimilation in mid-twentieth-century America, that Sondheim’s contested role as Broadway torch bearer or incendiary grows clearer.

The Broadway musical comedy of the 1920s-50s has long been recognised as a Jewish-American creation (the popular scholarly roll call citing Jewish composers and lyricists Gershwin, Berlin, Kern, Hart and so on), yet the distinct part played by the Broadway musical in shaping American sensibilities amid the marginalisation of Jews has been less widely acknowledged. As musicologist Andrea Most summarises in her work on Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical (2004), the story of Jewish acculturation in America and the development of the American musical are inextricable. As such, Broadway musicals not only secured a new entry point for Jews into American cultural life, but effectively set about reconstituting America’s understanding of itself. Rather than an entirely passive and circumscribing form of assimilation which flattened difference, Most proposes instead that “the Hollywood studio and the Broadway theater became sets on which Jews described their own vision of an idealized America and subtly wrote themselves into that scenario as accepted members of the white American community.”

The first Rodgers and Hammerstein hit Oklahoma! (1943) is a primary example of this re-imagining of American communality (albeit within limited parameters). Amid the musical’s new emotional and dramatic punch, Most suggests Oklahoma! sought to redefine the myth of the American West as an inclusive and shared homeland, notably through the musical’s depiction of Persian merchant, Ali Hakim. Popular and playful Hakim is welcomed into the rural community while standing as a thinly-disguised analogue of a Jewish immigrant, allied to the writers themselves: indeed, on the invitation to a first-anniversary party for the show, Hammerstein billed himself as “Mister Ali Hakimstein”. Musicologist Raymond Knapp’s account of Oklahoma! focuses less on Jewish assimilation in favour of outsider acceptance more generally, suggesting that Rodgers and Hammerstein depict the villain of piece, Judd Fry, with unlikely compassion. Judd is shown to share the same needs and desires as the community: “he is frugal and a hard-worker; he feels entitled, like all aspiring Americans, to what he feels he has earned” (including a parodic but affecting heroic operatic solo number). For Most, however, the nominal “Jewish” acceptance of Hakim into the community is predicated on his very contrast to Judd. The show effects this through a dual definition of otherness, with one determined by a transient, manageable ethnicity and the other by a threatening and necessarily-excluded racial difference. Where Hakim’s ethnic otherness is painted as acceptable through the merchant’s peaceful commercial interests Judd is allied with the stereotype of a purportedly threatening African American, lurking predatorily at the smokehouse (whereby smoked skin translates to black skin). The anxiety of difference is absorbed by the ominous Judd, leaving Hakim as safely but distinctively other.

Broadway’s interest in outsiders and the subtext of Jewish assimilation, where Jews may still display distinct ethnic markers while gaining admittance to mainstream America, is still striking. Indeed, the deployment of the “colour line” as an enabler in the acceptance of Jewish otherness chimes with historian Eric Goldstein’s account of changing incarnations of American Jewish identity across the twentieth century. Amid a forced racial paradigm that allowed only for categories of white and black in the first part of the century, the American Jewish community faced a conundrum. Goldstein describes how white Americans “often tried to suppress the troubling image of the Jew as they suppressed the distinctiveness of other groups—either by comparing them to blacks or predicting their speedy assimilation into white society.” Yet Goldstein notes how outsider status came to stand as an intrinsic, triumphant element of being Jewish, noting that “Jews from [Central and Eastern Europe] had come to see ‘apartness’ as one of the most salient aspects of Jewish identity.” Under Roosevelt’s New Deal, it was a position that became more tenable. As economic recovery took shape during the 1940s, Jews began to dissolve as a symbol of social anxiety and were welcomed as distinct, productive members of an apparently inclusive nation, as mirrored (and prefigured) in the Broadway musical. In turn, the Jewish American community steadily grew empowered to voice protest at the treatment of African Americans.

The attention and sympathy Sondheim offers society’s outsiders in his works both draws on and disrupts the Broadway legacy. In contrast to the racial agenda of 1940s Broadway, Sondheim’s ‘outsider’ definition is resolutely inclusive, while the notion that musical theatre performance idea that musical theatre can project an utopian community is subverted, if not fully revoked. Sondheim’s works create new kinds of communities, comprised only of ‘outsiders’. In turn, these musicals conjure new possibilities of belonging, both among those characters portrayed and on occasion, for the audience itself. It is the thoroughly modern message of multicultural society: we are all outsiders now.

This idea underpins much of Sondheim’s work. Just as Marta’s ‘city of strangers’ in ‘Another hundred people’ (Company) explores the difficulty of connecting in urban life, where ‘they meet at parties through the friend of friends/Who they never know’—the number also presents the possibility that the lost may ‘find each other in the crowded streets/And the guarded parks… [and] walk together past the postered walls/With the crude remarks.’ It is a vulnerable form of coming together, taking place amid a hostile urban landscape and outside the easy but false communality of the cocktail party. In Sweeney Todd, the musical chorus is re-imagined not as a single voice of commentary on the action but as a group of isolated and fractious individuals, scored with separate characters, lines, and action, nonetheless fused in Fleet Street’s bloody drama. Sondheim’s deployment of musical form is particularly effective in conveying this shared isolation. The angular ‘Bobby’ motif—part doorbell, part alarm-call—that darts through the cast at the opening of Company suggests something jarring and off-centre, but its repetition marks the intersection of the show’s dysfunctional community and comes almost to bind them. The waltzes that thread through A little Night Music (1973) not only evoke a mixture of nostalgia and suffocating etiquette, but connect the show’s otherwise isolated inhabitants: each are excluded from the union they wish for and so trapped in a variation of the same dance. It is a process mirrored in the very idea of the concept musical.

Central to the development of the concept musical, and Sondheim’s rendering of distance and collectivity, is the manipulation of time. While Sondheim is rightly famed as a master of character development, a number of his musicals nonetheless disrupt the work’s internal flow of time as a means of exploring of its theme. For Merrily We Roll Along (1981), the tale of a pushy and once successful Hollywood songwriter and his corroding friendships, the narrative is relayed entirely in reverse, while Follies (1971) dramatises a reunion between two decaying married couples, each party consumed by the memory of their younger self, and the musical closes with an “out of time” vaudeville finale, each of the cast lost to a glittering but ghoulish vision of the past. Both works seek to expose the falsity of nostalgia and the dangers of being driven by past hopes (and the consequences of refusing to confront the choices of the present). The cruel disruption of time within these musicals has a powerful effect on audiences too: the promise of closure and the pleasure of the musical finale is subverted. Sondheim, these musicals affirm, rejects the happy ending, in life and theatre. Yet, amid this fractured flow of time in many of his works (or its notional absence in Company), the works often reinforce a sense of wholeness through other theatrical means. As Joanne Gordon notes, Sondheim “develops a new lyric, musical and theatrical language for each work” and in doing so, he draws together worlds of crumbling chronology into unified and immersive musical experiences.

The new musical languages that Gordon describes are often an exploration of existing musical styles. As far as conjuring an array of other voices can be termed a signature, the slick pastiche has become Sondheim’s hallmark, prompting questions about his own sense of musical identity. While confident to outline his stylistic approach to text (see Sondheim’s collection of lyrics in Finishing the Hat (2010) which includes bold commentary on his own work and an often acerbic account of others’), speaking in 1997 Sondheim hesitates to describe his musical voice:

“I don’t know how I would describe myself because I’m so eclectic. People say they hear my style… I’m not sure—musically. I know there are certain chords I use over and over and over again… I write in a lot of styles, because I’m often imitating a milieu or something like that. And yet, people I respect say they can tell something of mine; and people I don’t respect say it. But I’m not sure I would recognise it… I recognise when they’re doing a takeoff of my music by using lots of wrong notes, and thick chords, and that sort of thing—I recognise what they’re parodying. But I’m not sure that I would recognise a piece of mine that I hadn’t heard before.”

These so-called “thick chords”—of layered sevenths, ninths and elevenths (“I like seventh chords. I live on seventh chords. Ravel gave us that gift”)—alongside chopped up, irregular rhythmic patterns and frequent hiccups in the pulse often mark Sondheim’s work as Sondheim. Yet for all the recognisably crowded harmonies of a work such as Passion (1994), there is Bounce (2003), governed by what Sondheim describes as simple, tonal key relationships and conventional 32- bar song structures. In this sense, Sondheim is a master of disguise, outside even his own tentative definitions of style. This rather ambiguous sense of musical belonging emerges later on as a source of tension. In Mark Horowitz’s 1997 interviews with the composer, Sondheim makes a surprisingly impassioned plea against the “anxiety of influence” and towards the recognition of his own musical voice:

“It was always very clear in [Leonard Bernstein’s] music where his influences are… You can hear the Copland. But you can hear Lenny! … I don’t care if you can hear strains of the other people. He has a voice. And that’s what you listen for in music, is a voice. Even if you hear where it is from. I’m eclectic the way Lenny was eclectic. But I’ve a voice. I’ve a voice.”

It is an odd assertion in the context of Sondheim’s diffidence. However, the composer is clear and confident on one element that makes his music tick: the notion of surprise, his principal advice for other music theatre composers being “don’t tell me something I already know. Let me hear a voice, and be surprised.” Indeed, Sondheim’s pastiche work is perhaps most distinctly Sondheim-like when it startles expectations, notably when it jolts the implied musical meaning of the source itself. His chameleon-like use of pastiche is largely ironic and subversive. He toys with the audience’s familiarity with an idiom by placing it alongside something jarring in character or theme: the music invites recognition which is then rapidly unsettled. The jolted audience is forced to grasp the new alignment and its often troubling message.

This shifting of signification happens throughout Sondheim’s work but perhaps nowhere more sharply than Assassins. The musical plays on a shared recognition of various American idioms—the cakewalk, hoedown, 1940s love ballad—and quotes canonic works of American patriotism, including the Presidential march “Hail to the Chief” and various Sousa marches. However, these triumphant musics become the medium to explore the motivations of America’s most notorious assassins. Following a vaudeville-like structure, the killers troop through American idioms in increasingly sinister settings: following his attempt on Roosevelt’s life, Giuseppe Zangara sings a Sousa-inspired number from the electric chair; while Charles G. Guiteau performs a cakewalk from the hangman’s scaffold (shortly after shooting President Garfield). Sondheim draws on the wholesome soundtrack of the American dream to speak up for the excluded, creating “another national anthem”, and implicates the audience in the action as he does so. As musicologist Jim Lovenheimer suggests in his study of Sondheim’s outsiders, the composer “leaves the audience with the act of assassination as a collective cultural memory that uncomfortably lingers.” In a final punch, the show’s finale sees the assassins turning their guns on the audience as a whole, completing the show’s ambiguous and disturbing attempt to create one community and alienate another. The preface to the show’s book includes an intriguing account of a couple leaving the original off-Broadway run: the man asked, “‘I liked it but who are you supposed to feel for?’ She replied, her eyes filled with tears, ‘Us. You’re supposed to feel for us.’”

Sondheim’s definition of “us” is some way from the cheerful collectivity of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s catalogue, where the chorus speaks as one and (almost) everyone is welcome. Sondheim’s work serves a new kind of agenda. It conveys an anti-assimilatory message but one that endorses the idea of community all the same. In a sense, Sondheim’s “us” is grounded in paradox, where the only true collectivity we can achieve in the modern world is predicated on a shared experience of being alone. It is a harsh message but ultimately affirming. Indeed, commenting on his lyrics for the finale of Company, Sondheim notes “what starts as a complaint becomes a prayer”: the show does not compromise its message that the human condition is a lonely one, but enables an alternative collectivity through this very acknowledgment: “I’ll always be there/As frightened as you/To help us survive/Being alive.”

Annotated, book-marked, stickered, full of expostulatory scribbles, pencilled to-do lists on end-papers and exultant under linings these books are years of my life, of reading and re-reading. And of buying. For several years the mid-morning post to the studio was made up of cardboard packages of books, necessary books, bought in the middle of the night from Abebooks. I tick here for priority dispatch, look away from the total price because I am in despair, I am buying another copy of X because I need it now, need to find the list of donors to the rebuilding of the Burgtheatre in Vienna. I spend my advance buying books at night.

And now I’m finished and my office in the studio is a complete mess. I am making an installation of porcelain pots in lead-lined boxes for an exhibition, my firstinaproperLondongallery. It iscalled From Zero, a phrase I have stolen from an essay by Malevich and so there are books on Constructivism coming in and photos of his black canvases taped up on the walls. We have the photographer coming, and the people from the gallery, and collectors, and the novelist who is going to write the essay for the catalogue. I need some clarity, some space away from all these files of notes. So I struggle to put this strange archive into a shape—folders on restitution, anti-semitism in Paris 1880-1890, Levantine shipping—and then I struggle to put it away, out-of-sight, I won’t need it again as I am resuming my life. I am artist again. ‘We share many things’, goes the first letter. And the second. And ‘I’ve read your book’, some say, ‘and am astonished to find that my great-grandfather lived next-door’, ‘that your great-uncle worked in Y’, ‘that in Odessa my family knew Z’.‘We are distant cousins’ ,says a card in a shaky hand.‘Though my story is slightly different’, reads an email,‘I want to ask you…’

I have my grandmother’s recipe-book, a brooch, a single spoon. I have nothing. I don’t know my story. I need to tell you.

And there are letters re page 214. I think you’ll find that you have misspelled the title of Rilke’s poems.

So what can I do? I get up earlier and earlier to try and answer my correspondence. I sit behind a table in a bookshop and sign my book. I stand and talk about the book, about how I researched the story, about attempting to describe the shape of a diaspora, the journey into a series of silences about who my family was, where they came from. And all the time, muffled in England, clearer in America, there are the questions: So are you Jewish? Do you feel Jewish?

I start making another installation of porcelain. It is going to be behind glass: a vitrine of two hundred white and celadon-blue pots. Nine larger vessels in the middle and the rest arrayed around them.The structure of the shelves is based on a page of scripture, the words embedded in commentary. I call it Word for Word. This is my first time behind glass. We push the glazed front onto the cabinet with a sound of a gentle exhalation.The pots are caught and stilled: they rest. There is a feeling utterly unlike anything I have done before. And when I look at when it is finished and hanging in the gallery I realise that is only half the piece. I need to make another cabinet to hang next to it. This time the glass is opaque.The vessels seem out of reach. The cabinets are like two pages of a book: they need each other.

You try and tell a story because you think it is your story. You try and pack up a library.

Edmund de Waal’s porcelain is shown in many museum collections round the world and he has recently made installations for the V&A and Tate Britain. He was apprenticed as a potter, studied in Japan and read English at Cambridge. He is Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster and lives in London with his family.

Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, two great Jewish intellectuals of the early twentieth century and lifelong friends, took opposing sides on one of the great Jewish debates of modernity: was it possible to create a perfect community in an imperfect world, or did the world have to be changed first?

Scholem believed in the utopian collective—a partial redemption in the here and now—while Benjamin saw any solution other than global revolution as usurping the prerogative of the Messiah. In 1923, Scholem emigrated to Palestine to help build a utopian community. A series of letters between the two men, covering religion, politics, Marx and Kafka, illustrate the passion of the debate between Communism and Zionism, the two philosophical positions warring for the heart of the interwar, vulnerably assimilated, European Jew.

At the heart of their discussion lies the failure of the Enlightenment to assimilate Europe’s Jewish population. France,the home of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, had been rocked by the Dreyfus affair, and the full extent of Jewish vulnerability was exposed and felt everywhere. Scholem, a scholar of Jewish mysticism, responded to this failure by turning to theology, attempting to root utopia in the revival of the mystical tradition. Benjamin, on the other hand, rejected Zionism and progressive politics, believing that a superior, Communist, universality could emerge from the Jewish position in Europe.

Neither man was typical of their political tribe. Scholem’s ‘Cultural Zionism’ placed him apart from mainstream Zionists, who wanted to found a powerful Jewish nation state excluding the Arab population of Palestine. In a letter to Benjamin reporting on the 1931 Zionist Congress, Scholem describes his Zionism as a ‘religious-mystical quest for a regeneration of Judaism.’ He also warns of parallels between the attacks upon him—a ‘deracinated intellectual’—by the mainstream Zionists who deplored his ‘Diaspora mentality’ and those attacks upon Jewish intellectuals by the German far-right.

He rejected a future for the Jews that was not based upon reviving an authentic experience carried by the fundamental texts of Judaism. Underpinning his utopian collective was this command from Exodus: ‘You shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation.These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites’. Not only did it dissolve the distinction between priest and non-priest, unifying the sacred with the profane, but it made each person equal. For Scholem, this particular type of Zionism represented the fulfillment of Jewish theology. Even before he emigrated to Palestine, he argued, in his 1918 text ‘On the Bolshevik Revolution’, that there could not be a revolution for the Jews, as this would be tantamount to building the messianic kingdom without the Torah. Founding a Jewish collective in Palestine along these lines should synthesise theory and practice. In 1933, when Benjamin contemplated emigrating to Palestine, Scholem warned him that only if he were able to ‘feel completely at one with this land and the cause of Judaism’ would his emigration to Jerusalem be a success. For Benjamin however, Judaism, as the experience of marginality and the failure of assimilation, denoted the impossibility of feeling completely at one with anything, including Judaism itself. The contra- dictions between theory and practice, the individual and community, politics and theology, were, for Benjamin, testament to the unredeemed state of the world and the necessity of Revolution. Rather than Palestine in 1933 he chose Paris, embracing the very experience of marginality and exile that had prompted Scholem to emigrate.

Was it possible to create a perfect community in an imperfect world, or did the world have to be changed first?

In Benjamin’s work, after his Marxist turn in the mid 1920s, there could be no immediate return to the teachings of Torah. His figure of the ‘angel of history’ represents a critique of Scholem’s understanding of Judaism, particu- larly, his notion that ‘all that befalls the world is only an expression of this primal and fundamental galut (exile)’ Of the angel, Benjamin writes: ‘his face is turned towards the past.Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.’ Communism, he believed, had the power to raise the dead through the force accumulated through past political action (even when that action had failed):

It is not in the form of the spoils that fall to the victor that [refined and spiritual things] make their presence felt in the class struggle.They manifest themselves in this struggle [of the oppressed] as courage, humour and fortitude.They have retroactive force and will constantly call into question every victory past and present of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward the sun which is rising in the sky of history.

With his commitment to political action, Benjamin takes his place in a canon of Jewish Messianism that asserts humanity’s role in achieving redemption. He translates this into Marxist terms:

Not man, or men but the struggling oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden.

Benjamin’s ‘Jewish interpretation’ of Marx enacts a short-circuit between partiality (the agent of redemption is the working class not humanity as a whole) and a stronger universality (the inclusion not only of present and future generations among the redeemed but also the past generations of the downtrodden).

Both Benjamin and Scholem take as their starting point the inauthenticity and vulnerability of assimilated European Jews, but for Benjamin, the response of Zionism, even the variety advocated by Scholem, was a betrayal of what was essential to Judaism. The sharpest description of this Zionist tendency comes from Benjamin’s friend Ernst Bloch: Zionism was a denial of the Jews’ ‘power of being chosen as the agents of redemption’ and entailed the assimilation of Jews, previously a internationalist, group, into the system of balkanised nation states. Even in Scholem’s ‘cultural Zionism’, the attempt to found healthy socialist communities of the previously excluded represented a refusal of the link between Jewish marginality and universality in favour of partiality and fixed national identity in which all contradictions were resolved.

For Benjamin, Judaism denoted the impossibility of feeling completely at one with anything, including Judaism itself

Both Benjamin and Scholem’s politics were defeated. Scholem’s anarchic cultural Zionism was marginalised by mainstream Zionism, which adopted the reactionary policy towards the Arabs that he always feared, and created Israel as a nation state like all others. Benjamin killed himself fleeing the Nazis, who, in turn, extinguished the possibilities of European Jewish Communism. However, there remains something to salvage politically from Benjamin’s rejection of Zionism: how the refusal of fixed identities and the easy resolution of contradictions cannot be undertaken in the name of a complacent liberal cosmopolitanism, but instead always carry a link between marginality and the universal. The contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou’s link of foreignness to universality in the absolute defence of immigrants repeats this:‘let foreigners teach us at least to become foreign to ourselves, to project ourselves sufficiently out of ourselves to no longer be captive to this long Western and white history that has come to an end, and from which nothing more can be expected than sterility and war’.

Tom Gann is a political activist and former Labour Parliamentary Candidate. He blogs on politics as part of the Labour Partisan collective at labourpartisan.blogspot.com

Yale University Press, 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a newspaper editorial celebrating the tenth anniversary of Tel Aviv’s most beloved satiric cabaret, Hametateh, poet Leah Goldberg begins by quoting the following saying: ‘The wounds which a lover inflicts are full of loyalty.’ She then explains: ‘this phrase applies perfectly to our self- directed satire which is created here, inside our country.’ Goldberg, a lyricist and comedic sketch writer for Hametateh, writes:

‘As Jews, we know… just how much a desire to harm is an essential part of all the criticism coming at us from the outside.And perhaps this is precisely why we need to criticise ourselves, to drum up laughter which comes from the inside, and which emerges from a love for our people, written in our own language and executed in our own style.’

Avigdor Ha’meiri and Arthur Koestler, two penniless arrivals from Hungary, decided that ‘Tel Aviv is a city without humour, particularly political humour and social commentary. It is clear that we must quickly alter this situation.’ Both Koestler and Ha’meiri were both strongly influenced by the satiric cabarets of their birth city, Budapest. When they decided to found a cabaret in Palestine they soon rallied several Hungarian actors around them to the cause.

In forming Tel Aviv’s first cabaret, Ha’Meiri and Koestler chose the name Ha’kumkum, from a Yiddish saying, ‘Don’t speak nonsense into the kettle.’ Ironically, the choice of name itself seems to indicate a permission to speak nonsense, and thus to disguise the Kumkum’s particular brand of aggression and judgment within humour and play.

The choice of Tel Aviv rather than Jerusalem as the site of the Kumkum was an obvious one. Tel Aviv had already become a cultural centre, boasting Palestine’s first opera house, ballet and museum. The British presence was also much less obtrusive in the ‘first modern Hebrew city’. The British governmental offices were in Jerusalem and, though British soldiers could still be spotted walking the streets of Tel Aviv, they were usually there as tourists rather than as law enforcers. Cabarettists felt free to create biting political satire, without fearing undue disruption from the British censor. Moreover, the majority of Tel Aviv’simmigrant population were European and somewhat familiar with satiric cabaret. Tel Aviv’s cabarets, alongside a number of other performance genres, might never have succeeded without the 4th and 5th aliyahs, or mass immigrations to the Jewish settlement of Palestine; the 4th aliyah brought huge numbers of young eastern Europeans to Tel Aviv (such as Ha’Meiri), while the 5th brought German Jews to the city, together with their hard capital, affinity for Weimar cabaret and hunger for sophisticated nightlife.

Through its satiric cabarets, tel aviv offered the yishuv an outlet for its socially unacceptable emotions

In 1929, actors from Ha’Kumkum split from Ha’Meiri’s original troop and founded the Ha’metateh, which ran until 1952 and became the most popular ‘Teatron Ammami’ or folk theatre in Jewish Palestine. Usishkin, a highly respected Zionist leader, was said to have claimed,‘If I want to know what is going on in populist Israel, I simply go to the Metateh.’The songs of the Metateh were among the most well known of the period, and (after the founding of the first Israeli radio station, Kol Yisrael, in 1936) were played on the radio constantly. Many of them subsequently became part of the canon of Shirey EretzYisrael—the songs of the early State of Israel.

Subjects for satire included corruption in the munici- pality and tension between various ethnic groups in the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in Palestine): for example the song Shir Hateymaniyot which Natan Alterman wrote in 1934 for the Metateh, based on a traditional Yemenite Shabbat song. In Alterman’s re-imagining of the song, a cleaner complains to the audience of her experiences scrubbing the floors of Tel Aviv’s municipality and interacting with the governmental officers who work there. At the opening of the song, she proclaims: ‘A fire burns in my eyes; in my body there’s a trembling. Don’t hate me because I am dark!’ with the Hebrew text echoing the Song of Songs.

Alterman’s cleaner goes on to sing about her scrubbing techniques and the constantly expanding city of Tel Aviv, all the time with a cleaning brush in her hand.While this caricature may have offended some, the female protagonist regales us with her attitudes in a loud, empowered, voice. Moreover, the song functioned as part of the larger cultural meeting taking place in theYishuv between various ethnic groups, a meeting in which the satiric songs of cabaret played an essential part.

Alterman was not the only cabaret writer who employed existent songs such as the Teymaniyot melody to new ends; composers such as Ha’meira, Wilensky, Ha’Roosi and others all did the same.This musical grafting technique is inherently satiric, creating a gap between the original song and the newly penned one, thus commenting on both the old version and the new. In the case of Shir Ha’teymaniyot, Alterman makes use of the traditionalYemenite melody to denote a new kind of Yemenite woman;she sings the same old religious melodies, but instead of singing them around the Shabbat table, she sings of Tel Aviv.

Songs targeting the British were encouraged—such as Tzik Tzik Boom/Zeh Lo Tov (It’s Not Good)—as well as songs which mocked the capitalist values of Tel Aviv. Titina, a 1932 satiric song by Chaim Chefer, is based on a Charlie Chaplin melody that the famous comedian performed in City Lights. In Chayim Chefer’s reimagining of the melody, a pioneer couple—Titina and Ephraim—are trying to find a home for themselves inside British Palestine. Ephraim is content to stay on the kibbutz, digging ditches and draining swamps, but Titina has other plans in mind. As a result of her constant nagging, the couple eventually set up shop in Tel Aviv, where they quickly make large amounts of money and surrender to a life of carefree, capitalist decadence. Of course, the Tel Aviv audience enjoying this mockery-in-song were, for the most part, people just like Titina and Ephraim. By laughing at these characters, they were also laughing at themselves.

Attending a cabaret became an ideological act, proving that the Hebrew language was perfect not only for political speeches but also for topical satire

Ha’kumkum and Ha’metateh’s satiric performances had clear boundaries in terms of subject matter. British censorship forbade the portrayal of Arab characters on stage and Jewish cultural constraints were equally strict; I challenge you to find a single cabaret song from 1930’s Tel Aviv which questions Zionism, or a song which upholds Yiddish or German as the real language of the Jewish state, or one which promotes life outside the Yishuv. I have also not encountered a single yearning or nostalgic song for a home left behind in Paris,Vilna, or Berlin. Such songs simply don’t exist in this repertoire, although they form an important part of the Yiddish Theater of the Lower East Side.

Moreover, the cabarets were limited by the injunction that they only perform in Hebrew. In some of the satiric songs and sketches there are snippets of Yiddish or German, as well as English—particularly when a British officer appears in a song. But aside from these interruptions, all sketch and song material was performed exclusively in Hebrew. Attending a cabaret became a kind of ideological act, proving that the Hebrew language was perfect not only for political speeches but also for topical satire.The challenge to write and perform exclusively in Hebrew tested the talents and ideological fervour of many a cabaret artist, most of whom arrived in the Yishuv with virtually no Hebrew. Even Ha’Meiri, who was well versed in Hebrew before arriving in Tel Aviv, could be found at times scribbling in Hungarian in the margins of a song or sketch. Sometimes he wrote new lines in his mother tongue, which would later be translated into Hebrew.

Though satiric cabaret material became hugely popular and much loved by the mid-thirties, it did have dissenters, particularly at the start. A 1976 article from the newspaper Al Ha’mishmar reflects back on the times, and writes: ‘Already in 1928 the Kumkum…was performing programs which angered critics and the establishment in general.’ By the heyday of the Metateh, however, the act of creating satire in the Yishuv had been assimilated into the mainstream, turning the act of satiric performance into an essential expression of Israeli identity. As Leah Goldberg reminds us: ‘This is the first time that the Jewish capacity for irony, which became a fixture of the exile, returns to its roots, healthy, deeply planted in the ground.’

Musing on the function of satire, scholar Friedrich Max writes:‘That satire is an attack is probably the least debatable claim that one can make about it. In such attacks we have on public display some of the least socially acceptable emotions: anger, indignation, frustration, right- eousness, hatred, and malice.’Through its satiric cabarets, Tel Aviv offered the Yishuv an outlet for its own socially unacceptable emotions: disillusionment, frustration, anxiety, and rage. Through the satiric expression of these emotions, presented on stage, Tel Aviv’s cabarets guided audiences, ultimately, towards a love of nation, language, and land.

Rebecca Joy Fletcher is New York City based playwright, actress, and cantor; she is also a scholar and perform of international Jewish cabaret. Recent achievements include: the hit one woman show Cities of Light, which has been touring cabaret venues and synagogues across the US, as well as venues in London, Paris, and Warsaw. Next fall the Piven Theatre in Chicago premiers the theatrical run of Cities. Rebecca guest lectures and teaches at universities around the world and serves as a Vice President of the Association for Jewish Theater. For the on-sight, archival research she’s done into Tel Aviv’s cabarets Rebecca is indebted to the assistance of the Confidence Foundation. www.RebeccaJoyFletcher.com

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.

‘Security. A word that these days seems simultaneously both to conceal so much and to reveal so much.’ – John Berger

A man is told that he will die from a fall. Such is the terror this generates in him that he decides never to leave his home again. But confining himself to his house doesn’t remove the fear.A sense of security is not so easily gained, for fear has its own authority. He could, after all, fall down the stairs—he lives in a mansion and there are many flights of stairs. So he decides,‘for safety’s sake’, to confine himself to the ground floor. But soon he realises that the floors downstairs are polished: couldn’t he easily slip and break his neck? The dining-room, however, is fully carpeted, so he decides to live only in that room. Ordering his staff to serve his meals there, he never leaves the room. Yet still he feels unsafe: he thinks,‘I could still stumble and fall, hit my head and die’. So he orders an armchair to be placed in the middle of the room, away from all sharp objects and hard surfaces and—in a moment of triumphant certitude —insists that his servants tie him down into the chair. A sense of security descends. No danger now of a fall, he thinks. The loss of his freedoms is nothing compared to the relief that his fear can never come true. But when he hears the rustling above him, and feels grains of plaster on his skin, he looks up and sees the ancient crystal chandelier over his chair unmoor itself from its casing and begin to fall towards him…

I read this story as a child and it has never let me go. Today, Iassociate it with the quest for ‘security’: the efforts of individuals, groups and nations attempting to design projects that will guarantee their security.The recurring fantasy of total control over one’s fate was mocked millennia ago within the Biblical myth of the Tower of Babel.Yet we still try to design a solution to what is essentially a psychological and existential dilemma: that none of us knows how or when we will die. The story reminds us that viewing the world through the prism of our fears restricts us in damaging ways. It also reminds us that the stories we are told—and tell ourselves—can shape our fears, as well as contain them and that this world-view can unwittingly catalyse the very thing we fear. The world may be a dangerous place, but more often than we are aware it is we who make it dangerous.Although we know there are people ‘out there’ who hate us, it can be hard to bear the reality that ‘security’—what it is, what we need in order to achieve it, where it comes from, and what we feel threatens it—is an internal experience. Implicitly, this story invites us to construct more life-enhancing stories than those ghosted by our fears.

I recently had a conversation with a young Jewish woman who was preparing a Channukah pageant for local children at the provincial Arts Centre where she works. She’d been approached by a woman in a hijab and a conversation had ensued. The woman said she’d just arrived in the UK from the Middle East with her child and was exploring the neighbourhood.The Centre’s publicity had caught her eye and she was wondering if the event was open to everyone. Something about this conversation felt ‘troubling’: the visiting woman seemed ‘glassy-eyed’ and had a ‘vacant’ look; she seemed rather needy and during a follow-up conversation the next day she hadn’t seemed satisfied by the resources offered to her that were available in the area. The woman telling me this story started to wonder if this woman was hiding something: why should a Muslim woman be interested in the details for a Channukah event? Perhaps she was a suicide bomber and this open event, where anyone was welcome, would make a perfect target. Perhaps, she thought, she should cancel the event, just in case.

She called the CST—the Jewish community’s self- appointed ‘Community Security Trust’—to report her suspicions and seek advice, which was duly provided. Although she felt they were ‘measured and reassuring’ in their response, she nevertheless decided, on reflection, to cancel the event. She regretted the lost opportunity for children of all faiths and none to come together, dress up and celebrate, but once her anxiety had been triggered she couldn’t rid herself of her ‘gut feelings’.

This story—and it is not a parable—filled me with an immense sadness. I knew that this enlightened young woman had a sound understanding of how we uncon- sciously project onto others disowned feelings from within ourselves, and then feel ourselves threatened by those very feelings. If even she had succumbed to collective Jewish unease about Muslims, what hope was there for our collective well-being in the UK, when the community is led by those with a less psychologically-informed and more outwardly belligerent approach to questions about security?
Who will reflect on the ways in which our own unconscious aggression, our own explosive rage, is projected—so that we feel we live in a hugely insecure world that is liable to blow up in our face, metaphorically or literally, at any moment? Who or what can we trust, we say, if we can’t trust our ‘gut feelings’? Our deep fear of annihilation may be generated in the earliest stages of our lives and can re-awaken when catalysed by a current situation; or it can be projected forward as a picture of our future.

Here the personal and the collective merge. As a community, have we any sense of the historically-deter- mined unconscious hostility we hold within us that is continually being projected that we are then obliged to protect ourselves from? And what terrifying crimes do we unconsciously imagine we have committed that would need to be punished by all those aggressors ‘out there’ waiting to attack us?

We are driving ourselves mad because of a spurious fantasy: that there is something called ‘security’ that we can achieve and possess.

The stories we tell ourselves—about the persecutory world ‘out there’ and the undying hatred of our enemies— provide a sort of comfort: they offer a coherent narrative for our lives. By constantly reaching for and repeating the same familiar story—the story of our insecurity—we unconsciously fabricate for ourselves a kind of security. It is, of course, a pseudo-security, but its advantage—it offers ersatz ‘meaning’—can outweigh (and help us avoid) the painful psychological task of facing up to the innate vulnerability that is intrinsic to being human.
We are driving ourselves mad because of a spurious fantasy: that there is something called ‘security’ that we can achieve and possess. But feelings of ‘insecurity’ are psychological, spiritual, existential – such feelings can’t be eliminated by more of this chimera we name ‘security’.

Today, bitachon is used in modern Hebrew to mean ‘security’ in a military/political context. It’s travelled a long way from its original meaning in Biblical Hebrew: ‘trust in what we cannot see’. The prophet Isaiah demanded trust in the unseen and intangible—‘God’—rather than in human power alone. Of course since the Shoah such trust has been exposed as hopelessly naïve, even dangerously deluded. In our post-Shoah world, where bitachon has become secularised, Jews put their trust in what they can see, and in the power of their own hands. Who dares to disagree with this pragmatism? Who would disavow this realpolitik? Even the religious settlers on the West Bank with HaShem in their hearts have an Uzi in their hands.

So is that to be the last word on ‘security’? Is that what a 3000 year-old tradition of Jewish struggle to articulate a moral vision comes down to? ‘Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition’? Perhaps Isaiah’s understanding needs re-visioning. Perhaps to experience ‘security’ we need a renewed faith in aspects of ourselves that we Jews used to attribute to the Holy One of Israel: a capacity for compassion and reverence towards other human beings, a capacity to discern forms of idolatry that offer false security, a capacity to transmute anger into a passion for justice, and an enduring capacity for truth-telling that holds the impossible tension between love of the Jewish people and a responsibility to the ‘other’, the stranger, the outsider, who may never love us but whose well-being is still our concern.

Rabbi Howard Cooper is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice, the Director of Spiritual Development at Finchley Reform Synagogue, and an author. His latest book is The Alphabet of Paradise: An A-Z of Spirituality for Everyday Life. He blogs at www.howardcoopersblog.blogspot.com

© 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.

Translated by Jessica Cohen

More than half a kilometer lies behind you and still you show no physical signs, your pulse holds steady at a moderate rate, you sweat only lightly, and although you are wearing heavy army boots instead of your running shoes, and the cold and hunger will doubtless take their toll further down the road, you will probably keep running like this, without stopping even for a moment, and your footsteps will be audible on the asphalt throughout the night from here all the way to the lights of Jerusalem, and you can listen to them with the relief of knowing they are your own feet, and the familiar tranquility of running—or rather, the familiar oblivion of running—will ease the burden of the next few hours, the fear of what lies hidden in the villages on either side of the road, and the damp, sticky coolness of the wind, and the burn of the smoldering red ember in your gut, and you know how the precise rhythm of your steps will translate into syllables and words and melodies, you know this from the hundreds of races and meets and runs, and although the conditions tonight are especially harsh, harsher than ever before perhaps, still your victory is assured, because tonight you will conquer the urge to run, or at least, with the sharp knife of night air that rips through your lungs, you will dismember the viperous tuber that has impelled you to run for over three years now, and all you must do is stick to the confident, manly beat of five and slide yourself, head and rifle, down into the stupefying motion of shin and thigh, using the centrifugal force to drown the needle-thoughts and the pin-thoughts and the rhythmic beat of the ember, so that the sight of her merciful-blue eyes or the memory of her fingers singeing your skin only ten minutes ago might surface in the watery expanse of your mind and float away, and you will grip the road with your feet again and again, propelling your body ahead with a broad but measured step, and maintain your breath to the beat of five so that you will not stop even for one moment on this long road that winds among Arab villages and tiny green plots and grapevines, and onward through the village of Sho’efat that sleeps with its eyes open, and you will run further down the narrow, pitted road to Jerusalem, which will blink at you in bewilderment with its nocturnal amber stoplights, and silently you will glide along the treeless boulevards of stone, and you will weave through the city like its walls aglow in the dark until you find the riverbed that leads to the sea, and even if you go less than half the way, it does not matter because tonight you are both the runner and the finish line, and the results are predetermined, yet still you will keep running as hard as your lungs allow, and in the past few minutes you have covered over one and a half kilometers, and at first, when you had just left the boy’s home, you moved in total blindness, staggering on your dizzy, disobedient feet, but then they found their natural rhythm and supported your body from below, and you were carried along like an animated being shedding perfect tears of glass, on your strong muscles that rescued you efficiently from the core of anguish that needed three people to bear it, and awakened your lungs to the rhythm and your blood to the beat, and it was they who led you confidently past the headquarters’ huts and the roll-call yard and the mess-hall, and from there, skipping quietly and mechanically over the slack rope at the camp’s entrance, to the main road that leads to Jerusalem, and it will take several minutes to accustom yourself to the idea that it is your body that is now exposed to the night winds and the odors of gasoline and burnt rubber that waft up from the road rushing beneath your shoes, and to the faint whispers coming from the villages that huddle as you pass them by, but this thought is obstructive and weakening and you will banish it from your heart and continue to run along the yellow line on the side of the road and fix your gaze on the drops of yellow that dance through the damned tears until you no longer know whether they are the village lights or only the stripe refracted in your tears, and in fact it is of no importance so long as you can flood them with rhythmic barrages of the blueness of the boy’s cousin’s eyes when she looked at you, and that was what sequestered you from his room only moments ago, wading through the turbid nightmare that erupted inside your head, fleeing, seduced like a moth by the lights, sacrificed with every step on the altar of the keen magnet that patiently waits behind you and inside you always. Foot road shin breath pause, air inhaled and compressed, one two three four five, breathe, everything is under control, including the usual stab of pain, run, launch words into the air and fly on them, or even just meaningless fragments of syllables, like the ones Yoash emitted in his final attempt to trap you, or perhaps the boy’s secret words that had no fixed meaning, and the more you keep speaking into yourself the more the foreign voices from outside will die down, the bitter bray of a donkey or the distant engine of a car, and you will be able to hear her voice better, even the loathsome giggles she emitted at first, so long as you understand her eyes, even if the cost is the rhythmic pain of the ember that has glowed in your innards for the past three and a half years, whose pale radiance you sometimes imagine you can see through the layers of flesh and skin, from that spot where it began to whisper many years ago, though only your mother’s X-ray eyes noticed, for she told you explicitly when she turned off the engine outside Yoash’s house and looked at you in the rearview mirror that even though she and Yoash believed this was merely a temporary crisis, it was still best to try and make good use of this unpleasant situation because, after all, we are thinking-people, and we must vigorously confront any obstacle or confusion we encounter and remove its sting by profoundly, and sometimes painfully, scrutinising the facts and the deeds, and it is possible, and please bear in mind that she does not say these things decisively, that your developmental pace up to now, all your accomplishments and successes throughout your fifteen years, have come too fast, perhaps, and have posed a certain danger to your true inner rhythm, to your personality structure, and she has guessed these difficult things, she has known them, she has preserved them in her mind for many years without wanting to utter them, but then this temporary, foolish crisis came along,

The familiar tranquility of running—or rather, the familiar oblivion of running—will ease the burden of the next few hours, the fear of what lies hidden in the villages on either side of the road

and with it the time to say these things, and she will tell you one more thing now, because this evening she sees you are willing to listen, which might be a sign of things to come, so she will tell you that life, son, is a long-distance run, and you have perhaps not paced yourself correctly, and so you have stumbled a little, and how fortunate that you have parents who love you and care for you and understand you, who are willing to give you any assistance, and if you let us help you, we will, and so now get out of the car and go into Yoash’s house and do not cheat him and turn off the light he leaves on for you, because I will be sitting here in this car just like I have done every Sunday and Thursday for the past year, week after week, from now until nine this evening, one whole hour, and I will wait for you to come back and I will watch the house, and I do not want to see the lights go off as soon as you go in, not only because it is unfair to Yoash, who believes there is a light on in the room, but because the light will force you to think, son, to be alert and vigilant, and that is also part of the profound scrutiny which I spoke of, and now go, I will wait. She is sleeping now, my mother. Every night at exactly midnight she covers her typewriter. Then she stretches, and from my room I hear a short sigh of pleasure. Now will come the rhythmic breaths.Ten sit-ups to strengthen her aching back. A few seconds of relaxation. Here come the dull clicking sounds. Sitting in her study, she cracks the joints of every finger. Father calls it ‘driving the nails in the day’s coffin,’ but she says it’s just the daily maintenance of her work tools. Everything that happens from then on is predictable too, and for that reason transfixes me: the hum of the electric toothbrush, the deep gargling of water in her throat, the decisive nose-blowing, the final rituals of the night. At twelve-thirty she is asleep, utterly indifferent to the staccato echoes of her routines still oscillating between the walls of the house.

All your accomplishments and successes throughout your fifteen years, have come too
fast, perhaps, and have posed a certain danger to your true inner rhythm, to your personality structure

Years ago a radio interviewer asked her if she wrote in the wee hours of the night,‘which are so felicitous for contemplations.’ Mother told him nights were for sleeping. In my room I would count by my heartbeats the time that passed from the moment they wished each other good night until I heard the sounds of her gentle snoring. Then Father would turn the light off and roll over in bed. A few hours later, on my way to the bathroom, I would look at them. Two pale beans in their pods on either side of the bed. I could have gone in and slept between them and they would never have sensed me. Me and another child. But always, as I stood there in wonderment, my mother would suddenly growl at me in the dark to go back to my bed at once. She always saw me, and I was never surprised—she had said more than once, after all, and often promised: Mother will see you wherever you are, son.
Now you must pretend, you must imagine, that this is a race—let’s say, the race for the Chief of Staff cup that will be held in a week, or next month’s inter-command track and field event, and in any case the silence around you is extremely sharp, the roar of the crowd and the chatter of the politicos and the grating songs over the loudspeakers all fade away after the third or fourth lap, replaced by the blood drumming in your ears, and the delicate pearls of thought shine their light, the events observed from their insides, the embered whispers, and all that time your feet drum a regular beat, and on the fifth step, where the inhalation ends, there will always be one breathless second, and again the five exhalation steps, and now too, in the lucid quiet around you, there is no one to surmise that this is not one of your public runs, that the low, tangled bushes are not coaches squatting by the side of the track, that the pale rocks are not referees or slightly bemused overweight clerks, and how fortunate that thus far, and it’s already been more than fifteen minutes, not a single car has driven past to violate the darkness, and you can keep running in peace, engulfing the night with your transparent web, like you used to do when you had only just learned of the serenity that comes with running, and together with your father you would spin around your childhood neighbourhood, make its streets gallop beneath your shoes, envelop it in the thin mesh of fibres you secreted from your brain, and after you had left him, tired and chuckling and defeated, at the doorway to your house, you would assail the side streets and the alleyways again like a silent bat, traverse the yards and the men and the women and the children, suffocate in the dense bubbles of their dreams and their strenuous groans, and not for a single moment did you wonder why you did this over and over again or what the meaning of this new pleasure was, except that every night, at an almost fixed time, you were once again unable to tolerate the tapping of the typewriter and the drumming of your father’s fingers on his lap while he listened to his choral LPs on headphones, and you had to get out immediately, you had to run even before you had finished tying the shoelaces of your sneakers properly, to conquer your secret routes again, and this thing that you were unable to explain to your mother when she wondered, and wondered again, and said that although she did not discount healthful athletic activity in and of itself, for some reason your new physical enjoyment, your physical addiction, if she were being accurate, seemed to her the furthest thing possible from healthful, and while she did not wish to judge in matters she did not understand, she had to tell you that there was a certain brutishness in the pleasure you derived from moving your feet, but, as she said, perhaps she simply did not understand it, and if you could ever manage to explain yourself clearly without stuttering, you might convince her, because, after all, you know she always admits her mistakes.
Here comes the first car, floating silently round a distant bend, its headlights striking the sky and the hills, and you must slow down a little and be prepared to slip onto the side of the road, where you will freeze like a stone or a rusty piece of iron junk, but for now, as long as it is distant, as long as it is silent, it’s best to keep running because the night is short and the work is plentiful, and the light of day, this you know already, will destroy you with its evil rays, its warmth will dissolve your nocturnal powers and thwart your painful sallies from the misty night into the inner darkness, where you are still allowed to maintain that which exists and the reddish ember does not trouble you with unfamiliar burns, because in the past three and a half years you have kicked it onto hundreds of asphalt strips and race tracks and sandy beaches, and you have dulled its sting along the imaginary elliptical line you ran around in stadia and huge sports arenas, and you have diluted its pungency in your classmates’ seething whirlwinds of joy, and the proud cheers of unfamiliar soldiers from your camp, and the slaps on the back from fellow athletes, so that you can now deceive yourself, you can believe that within you there lies a darkness almost like the one that teemed between your father’s hands when he allowed you to peek excitedly, or like the kind in the boy’s closet, where he took you so that you could teach him the double-mirror game, and even as your glazed reflections danced in front of you, turning you both into an intangible vision, even then you did not ask him what was troubling him, and in fact you never asked him a thing, because you knew very well how injurious the tone of the question would be, having spent the last three and a half years in a furious and exhausting effort to defend yourself against the stinging questions they dug into you, and even now you cannot rid yourself of those impenetrable tunes, which you gratingly repeat to yourself to the beat of five every time you run, what’s happening to you, what’s gotten into you, where did we go wrong, who is to blame, and over and over again those words, that slashing motion, alighting from the lower depths of guile and reaching upwards, where they ram into your refusal, stubbornly gather the shards of their fall and glide upwards again, this time carrying demanding hostility, you are to blame, only you, you hide, you lie, and for a deceptive blink of an eye they let you be, the kind and merciful people, and consult with one another, and they are so impertinent that they do not hide their intentions from you, they genially explain their methods and approaches, all with the friendliest and lightest of

It’s best to keep running because the night is short and the work is plentiful, and the light of day, this you know already, will destroy you with its evil rays, its warmth will dissolve your nocturnal powers

attitudes, as though you were their partner, fighting on the same side, because what do they want, after all, they do not wish to harm you, or to hurt you, God forbid, their only desire is to help you, to lance the distress you harbour and allow it to trickle out so that you can go back to being as you were, and again and again they sigh involuntarily when they remember the child you were, such a talented boy, who won over the hearts of adults and children with his special wit, his sense of humour, which was not at all childish, and with his wondrously quick mind, but that is not what we are discussing now, not at all, and that, they tell you audaciously, is something we will surely come to as we continue our interesting conversations with you, and at this stage we are willing to settle for the bare minimum: that you talk to us, that you give some clue about what happened to you or what it is that you fear so much, and in fact, that you stop walking among us like a bitter and burdensome riddle. But pay attention, the yellow headlights are emerging around the bend too quickly, throw yourself to the side, be careful, you almost hit the rock, nicely done, and now keep running, do not stop even for a moment and do not look back, carry me, feet, one two three four five inhalation, one two three four five, like a silent glowing owl the Mercedes cut through the night, and in the illumined chamber you saw a fat Arab man with a cigar in his mouth and next to him a woman, not young, perhaps a little tipsy, who laughed inaudibly, and now the single molecule of light has melted into the mountains like a hovering firefly, leaving in its wake the odour of burnt gasoline and cigar smoke and women’s perfume.

Excerpt from Runner (title story from the collection Runner, 1983)

David Grossman was born in Jerusalem on January 25, 1954 and studied philosophy and theatre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is one of the leading Israeli writers of his generation, and the author of numerous pieces of fiction, nonfiction and children’s literature. His work has been translated into 25 languages around the world.

Anyone like to buy Schindler’s list? I don’t mean a DVD of the film: I mean Schindler’s list. It’s available for $1.2 million on a U.S. website, apparently ‘the opportunity of a lifetime’. But what kind of person would take such an opportunity? The dedicated collector of Holocaustiana? Someone seeking that elusive dinner party ice-breaker? Or a different kind of collector altogether, the military history kind? There are other more sinister things on the market too: Dr. Mengele’s diary, anyone?

As a Jewish manuscript dealer, there can be those awkward moments when autograph collecting merges effortlessly into Neo-Nazism. When that Floridian collector turned out to have a moat around his house, guns and fourteen signed portraits of Hitler on his wall, for instance. Oh, and that time when a young German dealer added to his display a schoolbook penned by the nine-year-old Heinrich Himmler. It’s hard to know how to respond at such moments—produce a Magen David and twiddle it nervously, smile at the embarrassing whiff of anti-Semitism and hope that it will all go away, or just call the police?

Stalin wrote some solid poetry, and Gaddafi is a lovely novelist

It can happen off duty as well. Just the other day at a picnic, after I’d revealed my profession to a group of strangers, one of them asked, without an ounce of irony, ‘So, do you get much Hitler, then?’ I laughed awkwardly, as if he and I were on the inside of a joke, and offered a sort of apology: ‘Well, no, not really. I don’t tend to do Nazis.’ They murdered my family, I should have added, which sort of puts me off selling their autographs.Though, as you bring it up, I’m as obsessed with Nazis as the next man. But then, I’m Jewish. What’s your excuse?

Some time ago, I confess, I did have a brief period of doing Nazis. A signed copy of Mein Kampf came up in auction and I had an overwhelming urge to buy it. I fought with myself, wondered whether my desire for a Hitler autograph meant that I was an anti-Semite. And then I got tired of the discussion and asserted my Third Generation right to buy Nazi memorabilia. So, I bought it. And it was mine. Mein Kampf arrived, I installed it on my bookshelf, and I found that I kept on picking it up and touching it, tracing my finger over the handwriting, showing it to friends.I still wasn’t sure if I was a traumatised victim identifying with and appeasing the aggressor or just another despicable Hitler fanatic. As serendipity would have it, I owned one of Sigmund Freud’s walking sticks at the same time, which I kept under my bed. I remember handling both objects simultaneously, creating a sort of Freud-Hitler axis of good and evil. I trusted Freud to represent my interests and explain away my Hitler obsession. Or was I just using Freud as cover for my own Nazism? It was hard to tell.

Anyway, the point is that I don’t do Nazis anymore, though Hitler still remains a fascination, something of a guilty pleasure.I guess it’s not surprising,when every other book in my childhood home had Hitler or Holocaust in the title. Plus, my father fanatically collects postcards of synagogues that were destroyed by the Nazis. I have dreams about Hitler sometimes, including a recent one where he and I met at a dinner dance, finding ourselves both tragically without partners. I tell myself that it’s OK to dream about the man who killed my family, that it’s my entitlement. But what possible excuse can a non-Jew have for a Hitler fixation? Shouldn’t they stick to poets or Presidents or ice-skating champions? Something less, well, Jewish?

One of the paradoxes of collecting is the attention the collector pays to the unique blend of items he assembles, whilst simultaneously denying absolutely that the collection says anything at all about him personally, about his issues. I can say from experience that this is because the collector feels himself to be accumulating items not for himself, but for mankind.The collector is so mind-bogglingly un-self-aware,that it never crosses his mind that his collection of, say, autographed photographs of actresses who died very young in tragic circumstances, just might suggest that he has an unhealthily keen interest in the deaths of glamorous young women, which perhaps stems from a repressed desire to kill his own disappointing mother, whose absence from his early years resulted in his spending much of his childhood sat on the sofa beside an au pair, watching Marilyn Monroe movies. No, the collector is oblivious to the cause and effect, and anyway doesn’t want to dwell on his childhood.As far as he is concerned, he is doing what any other rational human being would do if they only had the bright idea, the eye for rarity, and the desire to preserve ‘culture’.

Armed with this kind of insight into the mind of the collector, it’s understandable that I would feel queasy to see another sale of Hitler’s paintings come up for auction in Shropshire last month. Now, I’m not against dictators dabbling in the arts per se—Stalin wrote some solid poetry, and Gaddafi is a lovely novelist—but this is something different. This auction house has been conducting regular Hitler Art sales for several years now, including an auction in 2009 that featured a supposed self-portrait by Hitler, who was shown sitting on a bridge in soulful self-contemplation. There has been much media speculation about the authenticity of the Hitler paintings that keep showing up (they are probably all fakes), but that doesn’t seem to stem the flow. As the auctioneer explained, ‘there is a tremendous fascination in Hitler these days and this sale will provide bidders with a rare opportunity of obtaining a work by Hitler at a time long before he started his campaigns of mass murder and world domination’. Well, I’m glad the auctioneer reminds us that the paintings all date from before all the Holocaust stuff, because otherwise we might be tempted to lump the early, kindly Hitler together with the later meaner Hitler, which seems unfair. Indeed, the auctioneer makes the point that the pictures are ‘all peaceful subjects, without exception, no military, no violent subjects’. It does make you sort of start wondering whether there is real credence to the argument that Adolf Hitler was, primarily, a struggling oil painter.

Oh, and did you know that one of the pictures in the collection—again, questions about authenticity—may have once hung in the offices of Sigmund Freud? (It seems I’m not the only one to summon Freud when cornered by his conscience.) Yes, they found Freud’s address penned on the reverse of a dodgy painting of a church, and it all adds up: Hitler was a struggling artist in Vienna at exactly the same time as Freud was in private practise there. So, Freud must have met the young Hitler, and found him personable enough to buy one of his paintings and hang it on his wall! And presumably Freud must also have recognised some talent in the young Hitler, some possibility of future greatness you’d think, for isn’t future greatness the currency of the art collector?

I have come to realise that collecting itself is a form of revisionism. You focus on a particular person, or period of history, and you necessarily draw attention away from the larger context. You distort historical events, because you have to bend history in order to see your reflection in it, at least the reflection you want to see. It’s ultimately about repair. I shouldn’t be against it, especially as I rely on the psychopathology of the collector to make a living. But it’s not always healthy. Someone once came to my table at a New York autograph fair, wearing a sharp suit and bow-tie, and announced, smugly, that he was looking for unsuccessful Presidential candidates. Sorry, nothing at all, I said. What I should really have done is throw a blanket over him, make him a cup of hot cocoa, and give him some of the love he missed out on as a child, during those months when his parents’ marriage was on the rocks and he was sent away to boarding school and failed all his exams and cried himself to sleep every night. You’ll always be a success in my eyes, I should have told him, but I can’t help thinking that maybe collecting isn’t for you.

Adam Andrusier studied music at Cambridge, where he performed piano recitals and a concerto. He has since formed his own company, selling rare autographs and manuscripts. He has written two novels.