stavans_contemplatenew what is jew writer

8/6/2019 Stavans_Contemplatenew What is Jew Writer

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My favorite Jewish book? The question comes to me

just at the right time. In the past few years I have been

reading and rereading a vast array of modern Jewish

works novels, story collections, poetry all with a

single purpose in mind: to understand for myself what

the modern Jewish tradition in literature is all about.

A Matter of Choice:

by Ilan Stavans

R e s p o n s eto a Questionnaire


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An unrivaled tradition, I should add, ambitious,

global, and larger than life a unique tradition in

every sense. No matter how much one dwells on other

literatures, they all seem stranded in a set of cultural

motifs, harmonized by a single vertical code, limited by

spatial and temporal commonalitiesin short, too

nationalistic. But not the Jewish one. This is because, as

Saul Bellow once argued, it is made up of discon-

nected accidents, of casual occurrences with no

apparent links to one another. Its writers appear in

different geographical settings, respond to different

stimuli, and use miscellaneous tongues to communi-

cate their Weltanschauung.

And yet, they are all part of one and the same chorus

of voices. How can this be? What brings them together?

Well, I am not quite sure: their hope in the hopeless-

ness of the universe, perhaps; their eternal status as

time-travelers; a natural compulsion to see them-

selves constantly reflected in a misty mirror; and

most important, the willingness to enter the hall of

memory.Yes, memoryand not history, for history is

a most un-Jewish concept. It restricts people to a here

and now. Certainly, Jews are constantly responding

their surrounding. How could they not? But their ult

mate goal is to live beyond it, to escape time, to ex

beyond constraints. That is why I love this idea

Jewish literature as a sequence of disconnected acc

dentsbecause it minimizes the value to history. T

be a Jewish writer in modern times, out of the ghet

and inside the world, is to help recover the pieces of

scattered ancient memory, to turn them into a va

repository of nostalgia and angst.

What truly brings Jewish writers together, thoug

is the reader himself. Think of it: What could possib

link stylists like Isaac Babel and Alberto Gerchunof

one an Odessa Jew oppressed by the Soviet regim

and killed by Stalins death squads in 1941, the oth

an Argentine known for his 1910 classic The Jewi

Gauchos? What, in turn, could connect them to

humorist like Sholem Aleichem or a mnemonist lik

Elie Wiesel? Only the readers will to create bridges,

establish imaginary bonds.

This is not to say, of course, that the questions

how to define a Jewish writer and what brings them

i terature, by def inition, is an act of rebel lion,

and what is the Jew if not the eternal rebel?

L


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all together are not troublesome. Should the writer

manifest his sense of belonging or should this belong-

ing be imposed on him? Is Joseph Brodsky a Jewish

writer? Kafka? How about Nadine Gordimer and J.D.

Salinger? I, for one, would argue in favor of as flexiblea definition as possible, but without failing to draw a

sharp line. Salinger and Norman Mailer tell me noth-

ing concretely about the Jewish experience, but Kafka

certainly does. And so do Gordimer and Jerzy

Kosinsky, not to mention Moacyr Scliar, Joseph Roth,

and Danilo Kis. In other words, this question of who is

and who is not a Jewish writer can only be handled

when one applies the famous law of reciprocity to

itthat is, when one leaves it for the reader to decide.

Only then can the chain of accidents acquire meaning.

So the reader, and not the writer, is the genuine

protagonist of this tradition. And when and where

does the tradition begin? At what point was the

Jewish writer caught up by modernity? Was it when

Solomon Maimon wrote his autobiography? Before

perhaps, with the memoir of Gluckel of Hameln? Or

was it when Abraham Mapu brought out, after much

penury, his first Hebrew novel? Or should one settle for

1864, when S. J. Abramovich (a.k.a. Mendele Mokher

Sefarim) decided to switch his linguistic mode from

Hebrew to Yiddish? What is unquestionable, it is clear,

is that the tradition is very much a result of Spinozas

earthly philosophy. It was born, so to speak, when

European Jews, by choice or by force, abandoned the

seclusion of ghetto life and, through the Haskalah,

inserted themselves into the path of Western progress.

For my own sake, I have chosen 1806-1810 as the

birth date. Those are the years when Rabbi Nachman,

a Bratzlaver Hasid and a blood relative of Israel Baal

Shem-Tov, began telling oral stories to his disciples, all

dealing with faith and cosmic redemption. One pupil,

Nathan Sternhartz of Nemirov, later transcribed them in

Sippure Ha-Maasiyot shel Rabbi Nachman mi-Bratzlav.

True, Rabbi Nachmans stories are typical Hasidic

responsa, but they envision character and plot in mod-

ern fashion, both from a purely religious viewpointand from an aesthetic one. His odyssey is enchanting.

A pariah in constant tension with the god-fearing

establishment, he traveled to Palestine in 1789-1790,

then to Kamenets Podolski and Shargorod. Finally,

after the deaths of his wife and son, he returned to

Bratzlav, where he was hailed as a zaddik. This itinerary

took place just as the French Revolution was settling its

social and economic scores and almost half a century

after Moses Mendelssohn, the German-Jewish philoso-

pher, published, in 1767, his major work Phdon, thus

settling the tone for the Haskalah. In other words,

while Rabbi Nachman and his followers were traveling

inward in a voyage to the heart of their faith and to the

core of the story as a literary genre, the enlightened

Jews were moving in the opposite directionoutward,

away from orthodox religion and into normality,

toward a realm where literature would help resolve

their dilemma. This double path, inward and out-

ward, simply proves how Jewish literature is both a key

to existential enigmas and a ticket to modernity. What

better birth date, then, than this ambivalent one almost

a hundred years ago?

A hundred years is but a speck of time. And yet,

Rabbi Nachman opened the door to an abundance of

masterpieces, first in the Old Continent and then in the

Middle East, Africa, and across the Atlantic. Yiddish,

his Yiddish, still remains the main language of the

Jewish canon, closely followed by English, Hebrew,

Russian, French, Czech, Polish, Spanish, and other

tongues. Perl and Aksenfeld, before Rabbi Nachman,

capitalized on the verbal stamina of Yiddish, but it was

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the responsibility of Sefarim and Sholem Aleichem and

Peretz to turn it into a flexible literary vehicle. All this

makes it look as if, once forbidden by divine will to

portray human figures, the Jewish writer was more

than ready to become an idolater. He entered the hallof Western literature with a vengeance. It could not

have been otherwise, of course: literature, by defini-

tion, is an act of rebellion, and what is the Jew if not the

eternal rebel?

But literature is also about usurping a foreign lan-

guage and turning it upside down, which explains, in

part, the Jewish writers polyglotism. To come alive,

one needs to infiltrate and conquer an alien verbal real-

ity, to make words ones own. Not by chance, I

believe, have almost all modern Jewish writers, from

Rabbi Nachman to George Steiner, from Moishe Leib

Halpern and Tchernichovsky to Isaac Bashevis Singer,

been multilingual. Theirs has been the need to multiply

themselves, to move in many directions and function

on many levels at once. This talent is often taken to the

limit. Many have devoted considerable time and

energy to translation, not only of other peoples work

but also of their own. Brodsky, for one, wrote in

Russian and English, translating himself back and

forth. Sefarim also adopted his own novels from

Yiddish to Hebrew and vice-versa. Isaac Babel was not

only fluent in Russian but knew Yiddish perfectly and

also French and Polish, among other tongues.

Gerchunoff knew Russian, Spanish, Yiddish, and

Hebrew. Saul Bellow and Cynthia Ozick are famous,

among other things, for their lucid translations from

Yiddish into English.

Language, it appears to me, is the most essential

feature in this tradition, for nothing strikes me more

ardently than the fashion in which verbal rhythm and

sounds, verbal magic, are displayed in all varieties of

modern Jewish literature. What is Tevye the Dairyma

if not about Tevyes magisterial puns and misunde

standings? And what is Babels Odessa Stories if n

about the astonishing beauty of a gleaming Russia

language? The same ought to be said of Albert CohenFrench musicality in Belle du Seigneur, Natal

Ginzburgs hypnotizing Italian in The Mother

Danilo Kiss Serbo-Croatian in A Tomb for Bor

Davidovich, Moacyr Scliars Brazilian Portuguese

The Centaur in the Garden, and Henry Roth

Yiddishized English in Call It Sleep. But languag

obviously, is not an empty vessel. To exist, it ought

be contained, occupied by matter, and Jewish write

use their language to deliver social commentary. Th

write about who they are, where they come from

and what they hope to become. Inevitably, their ouvr

even in Israel, is about the tension between integratio

and exclusion, between assimilation and rejectio

Total immersion awaits at one end of the roa

complete rejection at the other. And in between, th

deceitful abyss we call routine, which we fill with noth

ing but language.

Clearly, I have taken a detour. Asked what m

favorite Jewish book is, I wondered as I wandered,

use an image of Langston Hughes. My excuse is simpl

I really do not have a favorite Jewish book. My litera

taste is expansive, not exclusive. I have similar troub

responding to an often-asked question: If left strande

on a desert island, what half a dozen books would yo

take with you? Well, I am not sure I would have th

concentration to read. Reading for me is very much

social act. It is intimate and personal, for sure, ofte

done in the silence of the night. But as I read, I alwa

react to what the writer is plotting for me. I envisio

his universe and wonder what it says about him an

about me and about life in general. My reaction to th


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reading depends on my mood, on the events of the

previous day, on recent intellectual interests, on ideas

bubbling in my mind at random, and what not. In

other words, reading is not a monologue. Not for me,

at least. The book I read triggers all sorts of responses.A certain page might infuriate me and the next might

inspire me.

This chain of reactions, perhaps, is where my

answer to the question lies. I do not have a favorite

Jewish book, but I do have favorite passages from

Jewish books. To the point that I have often envisioned

a Book of Books, a kind of Bible for today. It is an idea

I got from Walter Benjamin and that I adore: to com-

pose an anthology of my favorite segments, long and

short all disconnected from one another, organized

accidentally, without a rational sequence, much in the

way Jewish literature manifests itself to me. I probably

will never be asked to assemble it. Still, I already have a

partial list of the possible entries: Kafkas segment from

The Castleabout a forbidden door; Isaac Babels Story

of My Dovecoat; Inside My Dirty Head The

Holocaust, by Scliar; the concluding chapter ofCall It

Sleep; Rabbi Nachmans The Rabbis Son; The Kiss,

by Lamed Shapiro; the scene in Operation Shylock in

which Philip Roth talks by phone to Philip Roth, his

Doppelgnger, for the first time; the chapter Hodel

from Tevye the Dairyman, as well as Sholem Aleichems

stories The Yom Kippur Scandal and Dreyfus in

Kasrilevka; several of Bashevis Singers stories,

especially The Cafeteria; If Not Higher, by I.L.

Peretz; three poems I memorized as a child by Bialik;

the section of I.J. Singers The Family Carnovsky in

which Jegor Carnovsky is ridiculed by Professor

Kirchenmeier in the Goethe Gymnasium, in Berlin;

Family Ties, by Clarice Lispector; The Whole Loaf

by S.J. Agnon; scattered paragraphs of Irving Howes

Collected Essays: 1950-1990; Unpacking My Library:

A Talk About Book Collecting, by Walter Benjamin;

chapter 3, part 3, of Elias Canettis Auto-da-F; Isaiah

Spiegels The Ghetto Dog; Simon Magus, by Danilo

Kis and perhaps his whole novella Garden, Ashes;Todesfuge, by Paul Celan; a couple of passing lines

from Anne Franks diary; Dan Jacobsons The Zulu

and the Seide.

All in all, a book of choices and accidents, a testa-

ment, a symphonic artifact at once ahistorical and

translingual but with mordant social commentary. My

favorite Jewish book keeps empty pages for future

entries. It is made up of other peoples quotes and

anecdotes, a book by others. I find it delightful that not

having written a single word of it, I am, in some mys-

terious way, its sole author. This is as it should be, for

readers are what the modern Jewish literary tradition is

really about. Readers making books, readers making

writers, readers collecting memory.

ILAN STAVANS is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and

Latino Culture at Amherst College, a chair he has occupied since

1993. He is the author ofDictionary Days and an earlier memoir, On

Borrowed Words. Fluent in several languages, Professor Stavans is

currently at work on a Spanglish translation ofDon Quijote.

Praised for its warmth, passion and erudition, his critical writing is

gathered in four volumes, including The Inveterate Dreamer, from

which this essay was taken. It is reprinted with generous permission.

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