In Literary Research: Jesus and Uri-Tzvi Greenberg

From the review by Adele Reinhartz (University of Ottawa) of Neta Stahl's "Other and Brother: Jesus in the 20th-Century Jewish Literary Landscape" which, by the way, has the infamous graphic of a Uri Tzvi Greenberg poem on the cover:

"Infamous" in that an order for his arrest was issued in Warsaw causing him to flee to Berlin.

This is was Rheinhaltz writes:

Chapter 2, "Cut off from all of his Brothers, from his Blood," turns to the poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896-1981). Stahl argues that Greenberg uses the figure of Jesus to reflect his own biography and sense of self, including his experiences in the Austria-Hungarian army during World War I, the 1918 pogrom, immigration to Palestine 1923, and most important, the Holocaust. Greenberg's poetry reflects both alienation from and kinship with Jesus, who is both indifferent to and symbolic of the suffering of European Jewry. Greenberg's poetry incorporates Christian imagery not only verbally but also typographically, a point brilliantly illustrated in his poem "Uri Zvi in front of the Cross INRI" that is used to great effect on the cover of Stahl's book. In the poignant poem "God and his Gentiles," the Christian God descends from heaven, travels through Europe, laments the absence of his Jews, and is himself destined for slaughter due to his Jewish appearance. Whereas in other works the figure of Jesus is differentiated from his Christian interpretations, these poems suggest a bifurcation within the figure of Jesus himself, as both "Other" and "Brother."  This chapter provides several illustrations of Stahl's incisive and beautifully written analyses of poetry.

And from the source:

Uri Zvi Greenberg (1896–1981) was one of the most prominent figures in twentieth century Jewish poetry. In Greenberg's poetry perhaps more than in the work of any other modern Jewish writer, the figure of Jesus reflects his own personal, literary and ideological biography, and his sense of selfhood. Greenberg's characterization of Jesus is profoundly ambivalent. His poetry merges elements of rejection and aversion, rooted in traditional Judaism, with a depiction of Jesus as a character of great charm and mystery who rebels against the social and religious conventions of his time. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section focuses on the different literary devices Greenberg uses to express the tension between Jesus' human aspect, linked to his Jewish character, and his godly aspect, connected to his idolatrous representation within the Christian Church. The second section demonstrates how this tension becomes an actual division between two personas: the Christian Jesus is referenced by the Slavic name “Yezus,” while the “authentic” Jewish Jesus is called “Yeshu.” The third section discusses the tensions between Greenberg's divergent representations of Jesus as Exilic Jew, Zionist pioneer, and even national Messiah.

^

A Haaretz Poem: "Auschwitz Settlements"

At my Hebrew-language blog, I have posted an outrageous poem by Amir Or entitled "And The City Overturns", recalling Ninveh:

 וְנִינְוֵה נֶהְפָּכֶת

and Nineveh shall be overthrown

It is a cry from the extreme left-wing, on social issues, politics and whatever else fits his agenda. A placard of propaganda.

Amongst his objects of scorn and distaste, are



"...rats and men,
eyes that are cast down at roadblocks,
the dead, conquerors of the hill-country,
a picture-reflection of their homeland,
with its Auschwitz settlements, and Masada settlements,
the Holocaust that was, and that will be...
...the Kaddish of our graves and the Kadish of their grave.

And let us not say Amen, and let us not speak in their language,
And let us not go any more according to their method, their statutes, their crimes...".


Contemporary culture on the pages of Haaretz.

^

Theater of the Absurd Playwright

I think I mentioned this play previously (yes, here), but here's from Catherine Rampell's NYTimes review of "Pangs of Messiah":

For a Family of Israeli Settlers, Eviction Before Salvation

To whom does the West Bank belong?

...While the new production at the 14th Street Y is unlikely to change any minds — many of which, let’s be honest, were made up 2,000 years ago — it may at least affect some hearts.

The play follows the Bergers, a family of Zionist settlers facing eviction from the West Bank in 2014 as part of a fictional Israeli peace treaty with the Palestinians....

...A gorgeous earthen set by Jane Stein, with tiny houses that appear to grow out of the furniture like barnacles, highlights the play’s fascination with the ties among land, home and living. And Edward Einhorn’s brisk direction initially crackles with life and energy, overcoming some of the stilted language in Anthony Berris’s translation. Our empathy and identification with the Bergers — a typical family, with typical hungers and thirsts, squabbles and chores — intensifies our discomfort with their increasing radicalization.

As the stakes rise, however, the play, presented by the Untitled Theater Company No. 61, becomes frustratingly polemical. Characters devolve into ideas that have somehow found human hosts. One of the most sympathetic figures — Shmuel’s daughter-in-law, Tirtzah (the feisty Yvonne Roen) — might as well be nicknamed the Voice of Reason.

But the play does make one striking creative choice. While art promoting nonviolence often encourages compassion for the enemy, “Pangs of the Messiah” never shows us any Palestinian grief. Palestinian characters are completely absent from this story, even though we hear newscasts coldly announcing their deaths. Instead Mr. Lerner emphasizes the more selfish reason Jewish people should have for promoting peace: that violence against Arabs will instigate more violence against — and worse, among — Jews.

So simple that even a theater reviewer catches the biased paradigm of presentation, of its one-dimensional effort to malign rather than inform.

Oh, “Pangs of the Messiah” continues through Nov. 20 at the Theater at the 14th Street Y, 344 East 14th Street, East Village; (212) 352-3101,

Saul Bellow on Jewishness

...a Jewish writer could not afford to be unaware of his detractors. He had to thicken his skin without coarsening himself when he heard from a poet he much admired that America had become the land of the wop and the kike; or from an even more famous literary figure that his fellow Jews were the master criminals who had imposed their usura on long-suffering gentiles, that they had plunged the world into war, and that the goyim were cattle driven to the slaughterhouse by Yids. It was the opinion of the leading poet of my own generation that in a Christian society the number of unbelieving Jews must be restricted.

For a Jew, the proper attitude to adopt was the Nietzschean spernere se sperni, to despise being despised.

However disagreeable the phenomenon may seem at moments of sensitivity it is seldom more than trivial. The dislike of Jews was a ready way for WASP literati to identify themselves with the great tradition. Besides, it is something like a hereditary option for non-Jews to exercise at a certain moment when they discover that they have a born right to decide whether they are for the Jews or against them. (Jews have no such right.)

Source

Phillip Roth and Jewishness

Phillip Roth on Phillip Roth:-

His next discovery was that he could put his uncensored language, experiences and fantasies on paper, just as he had recounted them to his shrink. The result was “Portnoy’s Complaint,” which in 1969 became an overnight sensation, and a scandal.

Mr. Roth had already had experience with causing a furor. His first published short story, which came out in The New Yorker in 1958, had also been a lightning rod. Unlike “Portnoy’s Complaint,” it wasn’t about sex and masturbation; it was — in his own words — about “some Jewish guys in the Army,” which was enough to stir the anxieties of many Jewish readers who called The New Yorker to cancel their subscriptions.

“I was suddenly being assailed as an anti-Semite, this thing that I had detested all my life, and a self-hating Jew,” he recalls in the film. “I didn’t even know what it meant.” The labels both angered him, and motivated him; in “Goodbye, Columbus,” published in 1959, he included the portrait of a middle-aged adulterer and a young girl who bought a diaphragm, both of them Jewish. Again he was attacked.
“I maintained then as I do now that there were Jewish girls who bought diaphragms, and there are Jewish husbands who are adulterers,” he says.

The point was that Mr. Roth drew heavily on his Jewish background, neighborhood, upbringing and family, with detonating consequences. At the start of the film, he quotes the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz: “When a writer is born into a family, it is finished.”

Mr. Roth vigorously resists the clichés that he feels continue to dog him. “I’m not crazy about being described as a Jewish American writer,” he says in the film. “I don’t write Jewish, I write American. Most of my work takes place here. I am an American.”

I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s so there is now way I didn't read Roth.

^

It's Bloomsday

THE CITIZEN: (Choked with emotion, brushes aside a tear in his emerald muffler) May the good God bless him!

(The rams' horns sound for silence. The standard of Zion is hoisted.)

BLOOM: (Uncloaks impressively, revealing obesity, unrolls a paper and reads solemnly) Aleph Beth Ghimel Daleth Hagadah Tephilim Kosher Yom Kippur Hanukah Roschaschana Beni Brith Bar Mitzvah Mazzoth Askenazim Meshuggah Talith.

(An official translation is read by Jimmy Henry, assistant town clerk.

Ulysess
James Joyce
Babes and Sucklings

Received:

Joyce metaphors point the way to greater empathy with Israel

13 June 2011

In his book The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce lets us taste his enduring bitterness over his childhood experience of being caned by a teacher who, without giving him a chance to defend himself or allowing for the possibility that he was tripped on the cinder path by a classmate, has blamed him for the mere fact that his spectacles are broken.

Israel would appreciate it if its critics in Ireland would assume the position of the fairer and more balanced educator, also described so lovingly by Joyce, the one who hears both sides, who listens before he canes, who might also have demanded accountability from those who constantly "trip" us all in the Middle East on the cinder paths to peace.

I think that my people and my nation have been caned enough in front of the Irish public and deserve at least that some attention be paid to their genuine security concerns. I say this in view of the prospect that Israel will return to the pre-1967 geographical contours that give her only a 9-mile 'waist' – the width of the country from the Mediterranean sea to the borders of a new Palestinian state!

One can imagine the ease with which a powerful force like that of Iran could sever such a narrow state, and how difficult it would be, even for an army with Israel's military capability, to defend against it. That is the nightmare scenario facing Israel if an agreement cannot be reached with the Palestinians, through bilateral direct negotiations, that will guarantee its security not only from dark forces such as the terroristic Hamas and Hizbullah but from external powers that constantly incite war against it. The latter are currently doing their utmost to manipulate the positive revolutions of the 'Arab Spring' to make them new fronts of militant Islamism (an ideology that has nothing to do with moderate Islam, a kin religion to Judaism and Christianity) in the areas neighbouring Israel.

No country can defend a 9-mile central strip, one that moreover contains its only international airport, without having a stable demilitarized neighbor!

Israel has lost more than 24,000 of its people in the last 7 decades to wars and terror, yet it is willing to forgive and forget, and understands – as indeed the founding fathers understood already in 1947 – that the only solution is to have a proud, independent Palestinian state existing beside it. But this state should be established through direct negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis – not through one-sided stunts such as next September's projected 'unilateral declaration of statehood' at the UN.

Open Joyce's Ulysses and witness the Jewish Leopold Bloom picking up Zionist brochures on the streets of Dublin 100 years ago and encountering some of the anti-Jewish sentiment that was the common lot of Jews across Europe then.

Indeed Ireland was far from the worst, but actually one of the best, in this regard: Bloom's Jewish brethren in other European countries in 1904 were experiencing much less tolerant environments, hearing the calls to "Leave Europe and go back to Zion!". (The Irish nationalist hero, Michael Davitt, travelled to the Russian Empire to see for himself and document one of many vicious anti-Semitic pogroms, the 1903 massacre at Chishinau.) Even then, Jews like Bloom could not know that something much worse was waiting around the corner.

Since long before the time of Leopold Bloom, Europe has sought to influence the course of Jewish national life. It is still seeking to do so. But it should do so now with great care and great responsibility and without asking Jews to put themselves in danger again, or demanding that Israel take risks with its own security that no European state would dream of taking.

RUTH ZAKH
Deputy Ambassador of Israel
Dublin 4.

^

A Quiz

From where have I quoted these lines?

They are from Clarel by Herman Melville.

I found them here.

Clarel? It was suggested to me by this article.

In brief:

Melville’s long poem Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land (1876) was the last full-length book he published. Until the mid-twentieth century even the most partisan of Melville’s advocates hesitated to endure a four-part poem of 150 cantos and almost 18,000 lines about a naive American named Clarel, on pilgrimage through the Palestinian ruins with a provocative cluster of companions.

And this is an insight:

Clarel carries the erotic theme all the way through to the conclusion of the poem; and, moreover, it attempts to answer the question of why the erotic and the metaphysical should be interrelated in the first place. Clarel, its protagonist, is a young divinity student who goes to Jerusalem to assuage some vague religious unease. In the Holy City he meets and falls in love with Ruth, a beautiful young Jewish girl. Ruth's father Nathan is an American who had married a Jewish-American girl, Agar, and converted to her religion. Espousing his new faith even more than his new wife, he has emigrated with his reluctant spouse and daughter to Palestine. He is hostile to Clarel, while the homesick Agar likes the youth. Thus when Nathan is murdered by marauding Arabs, Clarel's romantic prospects change for the better.

Clarel's reaction to the improvement in his fortunes demonstrates a deep ambivalence which, so long as the affair had been potential only, was not brought into play. Hearing of the killing, he immediately decides to depart the next morning on a pilgrimage which has been organized by some of his friends. His pretext is that because the women are shut away from him in ritual mourning, he cannot bear the solitude of Jerusalem. On the pilgrimage, the poem's foreground is occupied by discourses among the pilgrims on such topics as science, faith, and politics. It would appear that the romantic situation has been jettisoned. And the very few interpreters of Clarel--for it is a poem of over 18,000 bumpy, clangorous lines-are unanimous in viewing the love story as a clumsy frame, all the more clumsy because it occupies the entire first quarter (one out of four books) of the poem. [1]

But because in Clarel the evasive nature of the protagonist's behavior is recognized, the abandonment of love becomes part of the plot itself. The events of the pilgrimage and the incredible quantity of talk in the poem are elaborated against, and referred back to, the motivating event: Clarel's flight from Ruth. Thus the intellectual and erotic dimensions of the situation are integrated...

If you are interested, try this.

^

Edgarian: Good - or Bad - for the Jews?

Found:

Bernard L. Madoff (who looks to Lena like “a Jew with a George Washington haircut”)

That description is from this book, THREE STAGES OF AMAZEMENT by Carol Edgarian.

Is a Washington haircut good or bad?

^

John le Carre and Israel (And the Jews)

In his new book, "Our Kind of Traitor", he manages to get in a mention of Israel in a neutral fashion on p. 121:

...his son Ben having invited an Israeli school friend...

I point this out because of le Carre's conflict with the issue of anti-semitism:

a) 1996

...people might say you were embracing anti-Semitic stereotypes?

I have carried that label around with me ever since I wrote "The Little Drummer Girl." I received such awful letters from organized Jewish groups that I never felt on safe ground after that. My great sin was suggesting that the state of Israel — that Palestine — was in fact a twice-promised land.

Still, I didn't feel queasy about addressing the tradition of Jewish tailors in the East End.

b) 1997

In his Nov. 15 article Mr. le Carre said he was warned by friends of the futility of responding to the Times review that appeared on Oct. 20, 1996, which he contended ''smeared'' him as an anti-Semite. The review, by Norman Rush, a novelist, praised the book as a ''tour de force'' but faulted it for portraying the principal character, a Jew, as ''yet another literary avatar of Judas.'' Mr. Rush said the association, ''however little Mr. le Carre intended it,'' left him with a feeling of ''unease.''

Mr. le Carre described his reaction in the article, saying, ''I realized that we were dealing not with offbeat accusations of anti-Semitism so much as the whole oppressive weight of political correctness, a kind of McCarthyite movement in reverse.'' He said he wished he had ignored his friends' advice and gone ahead and written to The Times.

But in fact he did. The Times published his letter complaining that he had been ''tarred with the anti-Semitic brush.'' on Nov. 3, 1996, along with a response from Mr. Rush denying the contention. ''I have not said or implied that Mr. le Carre is an anti-Semite, and I do not think it,'' Mr. Rush wrote.

c) 1998

Here, in the plush surroundings of London's Savoy Hotel, John Le Carre wants to talk about the pain of the outsider and the yearning to belong, about Smiley and Jews and anti-Semitism. And, of course, about Israel.

"Perhaps I learned too early how the British can treat you if you are not quite one of them," he says. "Perhaps that lesson continued as I discovered how the English punish their artists.

"Or perhaps," he suggests, "I am no different from any other artist anywhere in the world who feels himself an outsider in his own country and believes there's another country somewhere else where he will be happier and safer."

..."I knew nothing of the Middle East, but then I have always seen my novels as opportunities for self-education," he says. "Investing my ignorance in my central character -- a leftist English actress -- and making a virtue of her naivety, I set off on a journey of self-enlightenment, living my character, leaning with each breeze -- now toward Israel, now away from it -- in a series of schizophrenic visits to Amman, Damascus, Beirut, South Lebanon and later Tunis. Then back to Israel, across the Allenby Bridge or by way of Cyprus."

Israel, he says, "rocked me to my boots. I had arrived expecting whatever European sentimentalists expect -- a re-creation of the better quarters of Hampstead [in London]. Or old Danzig, or Vienna or Berlin. The strains of Mendelssohn issuing from open windows of a sumer's evening. Happy kids in seamen's hats clattering to school with violin cases in their hands..."

Instead, what he found was "the most extraordinary carnival of human variety that I have ever set eyes on, a nation in the process of re-assembling itself from the shards of its past, now Oriental, now Western, now secular, now religious, but always anxiously moralizing about itself, criticizing itself with Maoist ferocity, a nation crackling with debate, rediscovering its past while it fought for its future."

"No nation on earth," he says passionately, " was more deserving of peace -- or more condemned to fight for it."

In the offices and homes of his Israeli hosts, Le Carre bounced around ideas and probed -- without, he notes, ever having to persuade anyone of his goodwill. "And when I told my hosts that I was about to walk through the looking-glass and take my questions to the Palestinians, they said, 'good idea' and wished me luck. And I believe they meant it."

...What exercises him above all -- wounds him -- are dark charges of anti-Semitism from the United States that have persistently hung over him and his closely examined, intricately dissected work.

"In my perception of the Jewish identity -- in my continuing dialogue with it, in private and in my novels -- I have been aware from early of a spiritual kinship that embraces what is creative in me, and forgives what is despicable, and shares with me the dignity and solitude and anger that are born of alienation.

"Ever since I can remember, my ears have been pricked up for the careless chamber music of English prejudice. And certainly I pride myself on having as good an ear as anyone for the nuances of that repulsive, but mercifully dying art-form, British anti-Semitism in the chattering classes.

"I have been so keen to reproduce it in my books that sometimes the undiscerning have mistaken the singer for the song. These are nervous times. They were nervous from the day I started writing some 40 years ago."

d) and let's go back to 1983

...examining Fiedler in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, a character Mr. Laqueur summarily dismisses. There are four main characters in the book, a spy novel which has not been equaled since its publication in 1963: Leamas, the disillusioned anti-hero who works for London; Mundt, the ex-Nazi who runs East German security; Fiedler, the brooding intellectual East German Communist who suspects his superior of treason; and Liz Gold, the naive, idealistic British Communist party member. Her Jewishness is crucial to the story, but it is inexplicably overlooked by Mr. Laqueur.

London wants Fiedler destroyed to save Mundt, its “mole” in the East German regime. London's plan hinges on the mutual sympathy that will develop between Leamas and Fiedler: behind their cynical, jaded façades, both men in fact . . . attempt to stay true to what they perceive as their ideals. It is the book's supreme irony that in a fearfully symmetrical denouement, Leamas unwittingly helps destroy Fiedler, thus helping to restore Mundt's credibility in the eyes of the East Germans. . . .

But The Spy Who Came in from the Cold should be read on another level: as a reflection of the Stalinist show trials of the late 40's and early 50's in Eastern Europe. Fiedler personifies the old guard, intellectual Communists—mostly Jewish—whom the Stalinist apparat had to destroy. Leamas's words to the tribunal: “I'll tell you something—no one else will. . . . Mundt had Fiedler beaten up, and all the time, while it was going on, Mundt baited him and jeered at him for being a Jew.” This mirrors the actual truth: Hungarian, Polish, and Czech Communists of Jewish background were above all jeered at as Jews during their interrogation and torture. Nowhere was this as obvious as in Czechoslovakia; seven out of nine “deviationist” Communists tried in Prague, including Slansky, general secretary of the party, were vilified as Jews. And earlier, in a similar trial in Hungary, the accused who had changed their names were meticulously identified by their original, Jewish-sounding names.

It is surprising that Mr. Laqueur would miss these historical analogies and can accuse Le Carré of implausibility. After all, how many Western authors have written about these trials, not to mention with Le Carré's insight and sympathy for the falsely accused Jewish Communists—and as early as 1963?

And now about The Little Drummer Girl, set in the Middle East. In a curious twist, Mr. Laqueur now finds a “fraudulent air of authenticity hovering about all [the] implausible situations” described in the book. He singles out Kurtz, the leading Israeli anti-terrorist expert, for his analysis. First he searches for literary clues and finds that the trail leading to Conrad is a cold one. Mr. Laqueur is looking for a Jewish villain, but Kurtz defies categorization. . . . Mr. Laqueur himself supplies enough quotes to illustrate Kurtz's nonconformism, yet never spells it out.

Kurtz is a Jewish Smiley. But just as Mr. Laqueur consistently refuses to recognize Smiley's humanity and integrity amid the cunning required by his profession, so he refuses to see Kurtz's higher morality in his skeptic's disguise. Le Carré describes Kurtz as “too paradoxical, too complicated, made of too many souls and colors,” and this does not fit into Mr. Laqueur's argument. In fact, Le Carré captures the more general fate of the Jews when he says about Kurtz: “When he spoke of death, it was clear that death had passed by him often and very close, and might any moment come his way again.”

I also take exception to Mr. Laqueur's accusation that Le Carré takes a pro-Palestinian Arab line in this book. Equating sympathy for bombing victims with a pro-Palestinian stand can only be attributed to narrow-mindedness. After the unusual publicity build-up that preceded The Little Drummer Girl, I was frankly disappointed by the book. I found its overwrought plot slightly insulting to my intelligence, but not at all offensive to my hypersensitive Jewish feelings.

Thomas B. Windholz


Walter Laqueur writes:

...Thomas B. Windholz has lived under both Hitlerism and Stalinism, but Le Carré, alas, has not. Mr. Windholz says that he found The Little Drummer Girl not offensive to his Jewish feelings. Nor did I. Le Carré was charged with anti-Semitism by some critics following the publication of an earlier book, a fact which seems to have escaped Mr. Windholz. I tried to make it clear, unfortunately without success, that I thought this specific charge misplaced: Le Carré seems not to like people in general, why should Jews get preferential treatment? As for Fiedler, the Jewish Communist in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, it is perfectly true that Le Carré makes him more sympathetic than Mundt, the ex-Nazi; one ought to be grateful for small mercies. Regarding Liz Gold (in the same novel), I did note that there are a number of characters in these novels who, judging by their names, may or may not be Jewish. But their Jewishness is no more meaningful in this context than the color of their hair, and the issue is therefore irrelevant.

I always remember that he even got the scene in Jerusalem's Hall of Heroism Museum wrong, when he has his character visitor to gallows' room where two Hebrew underground fighters took their own lives rather than permit the British occupiers to hang them.

^

Oops, There Goes The Conflict

Despite a slight interruption, Michal Govrin, an Israeli author, escaped from a conference of Middle East writers with only good news.

According to Haaretz, in Hebrew only so far,

we've lost our central position as the main conflict in the region.  a lot was spoken about civil war in Algeria, the tesnion between Turkey and Greece and the war between Serbia and Croatia.  on this background, the Arab-Israel conflict was but one of many.

To be fair, I don't know if she is disappointed.

I found this:

Is this barrier going to be "The Wall of The Ghetto?" And for whom: for Palestinians or for Israelis? Will it discourage terrorism, and put a border on hatred, or only instigate more frustration and hatred? Does it establish the grounds for a future recognizable border at the end of occupation? Is this barrier the unavoidable stage of separation needed to delineate property, identity, nationhood? Is it a fatal mistake, or is it a means to one day enable the tearing down of barriers and of fences, as in the year of "Release"?

I climb the Hill, watching this complex space changing, year after year, raising the most challenging question about space: What is the space that will make a place for the complexity of otherness; multilayered enough to enable the co-existence of fully distinct "others?" Facing this question will require not less then a global revolution - in the Muslim Jihad's claims to ownership of the land, in the Christian Western aspirations of dominion over Celestial Jerusalem and terrestrial oil wells, and in the Zionist dream. And maybe there also must be a Jewish dimension of "Release."

I stand on the Hilltop in the midst of an oppressive present moment. I watch this intense space imprinted with history like an Archive of the layered story of Western civilization, with its heights of belief, love and poetry and its abysses of stupidity, fanaticism, jealousy and cruelty. I stand on the Hilltop, in the midst of this amazingly beautiful arena of nature and mankind, and I cannot resist naming it "outrageous hope." Another synonym for "Jerusalem."

Anyway, I've asked her and will wait her reply.

^

The Problem With Funny Jews

Jews who are funny, who have the flare of the comedian in them, the smart, clever and flippant variety, are a problem. For them, the case usually is, the most funniest topics and situations they can make fun of are....Jewish ones.

Now, I am not against making fun of one's self, or family or the whole gantzeh tribe. But when Howard Jacobson, author of “The Finkler Question” which won this year’s Man Booker Prize, takes on Hanukkah, with expected results, it is all so disappointing.

In his Hanukkah, Rekindled, written in Dublin of all places, he makes this point:-

...But how many Jews truly feel this narrative as their own?...Hanukkah — at least the way it’s told — struggles to find a path to Jewish hearts...it doesn’t quite feel authentic.

Isn’t there something a touch suspicious, for example, about our defeating the Syrian-Greek army? It lacks equivocation...Exodus played to our strengths. Similarly, Esther — who had married out of the faith, remember — turning the tables on Haman. In our best stories, we lose a little to gain a little. We use our heads. Trouncing the Syrian-Greeks sounds worryingly like wish fulfillment...

Of course, being a galut Jew, it doesn't occur to him that it is not wish fulfillment but motivation to fulfill our national responsibilities and obligations. Heaven forbid that Jacobson should think of the IDF in this context, not to mention (he is British, you know) the Irgun, Lechi or Palmah.

A Jew a soldier? A hero? A brave, self-sacrificing individual? And tens of thousands of them now? Jacobson can't be proud of that so he puts down the who thing with a smirk.

And he adds,

...The cruel truth is that Hanukkah is a seasonal festival of light in search of a pretext and as such is doomed to be forever the poor relation of Christmas. No comparable grandeur in the singing, no comparable grandeur in the giving, no comparable grandeur in the commemoration (no matter how solemn and significant the events we are remembering...those Hasmoneans — who sound too hot for this time of the year — don’t have a chance of engaging our imaginations.

So what’s to be done? Either Hanukkah should merge with Christmas — a suggestion against which the arguments are more legion even than the Syrian-Greek army — or it should be spiced up with the sort of bitter irony at which the Jewish people excel.

Irony?

Mr. Jacobson, that even isn't sardonic wit.

It's a manifesto of the League of Trembling Israelites who are embarrassed by their own kith and kin and our heritage and tradition.

^

The BBC Is Addictive

I just thought this interesting:

...He passed the BBC, an institution for which he had once worked and cherished idealistic hopes but which he now hated to an irrational degree. Had it been rational he would have taken steps not to pass the building as often as he did. Under his breath he cursed it feebly — '[expletive],’ he said.

A nursery malediction.

That was exactly what he hated about the BBC: it had infantilised him. ‘Auntie’, the nation called the Corporation, fondly. But aunties are equivocal figures of affection, wicked and unreliable, pretending love only so long as they are short of love themselves, and then off. The BBC, Treslove believed, made addicts of those who listened to it, reducing them to a state of inane dependence. As it did those it employed. Only worse in the case of those it employed — handcuffing them in promotions and conceit, disabling them from any other life. Treslove himself a case in point. Though not promoted, only disabled.

There were cranes up around the building, as high and unsteady as the moon. That would be a shapely fate, he thought: as in my beginning, so in my end — a BBC crane dashing my brains out. The [expletive]. He could hear the tearing of his skull, like the earth’s skin opening in a disaster movie. But then life was a disaster movie...

It's excerpted from Howard Jacobson's new novel, "The Finkler Question".

^

He Wants to Scream? I've Been Screaming For Years

Howard Jacobson ponders his situation:

“To me, being a comic novelist is obviously to be serious, too — what else is there to be comic about?” Mr. Jacobson said. “But when I hear people call me a comic novelist, I want to scream, because they mean something different. I can call myself a comic novelist, though, because I know what I mean when I say it.”

He, however, unlike me, has won the prestigious Booker Prize:

...The winning book, “The Finkler Question,” is Mr. Jacobson’s 11th novel...It is an unusual Booker choice, both because it delves into the heart of the British Jewish experience, something that few contemporary British novels try to do, and because it is, on its surface at least, so ebulliently comic. It tells the story of three friends, two Jewish and one, Julian Treslove, who longs to be.

When Treslove is attacked by a mugger who mutters something like, “You’re Jules,” or possibly, “You Jew!,” the experience sends him on a long exploration of the nature of Jewishness, culturally, socially and politically. He grapples with questions like, What makes someone Jewish? Is it anti-Semitic to make generalizations about what makes someone Jewish? Why are British Jews so much more open and warm than British non-Jews?

...his friends argue endlessly about Israel, forever “examining and shredding each other’s evidence,” Mr. Jacobson writes. One of them, Sam Finkler, who writes pop-philosophy books, joins an anti-Zionist group called the ASHamed Jews — mercilessly lampooned by Mr. Jacobson — that meets regularly at the fashionable Groucho Club to denounce Israel’s foreign policy.

Some readers have misunderstood. “People think they’re parodies of Jews who happen to disapprove of Israel,” Mr. Jacobson said of the ASHamed, sitting in his apartment in the Soho neighborhood here, his new Man Booker statuette gleaming behind him. “But they’re not. They’re parodies of Jews who parade their disapproval of Israel.”

...there is an ominous undercurrent in the book in the form of a growing number of anti-Semitic attacks, mostly offstage, that shatter the complacency of characters who resist the notion of Jews as perpetual victims. Mr. Jacobson says that such incidents worry him too, and that some of the views in the cacophony of arguments and counterarguments in the book reflect his own opinions. But mostly, he said, he adheres to the notion, as one of his characters says, that “as a Jew, I believe that every argument has a counterargument.”

As BDL has written:

So now we a have a book which has won Britain's highest literary award - and it makes fun of anti-Israeli lefties! What is going to happen in Israel when it is translated into Hebrew? Will Haaretz carry articles explaining how the British literary establishment has suffered temporary insanity?

- - -

Can I Intrigue You?

Is this not an intriguing statement:-

I’d always heard that if you understand kabbalah, you’ve probably got it wrong

If intrigued, read the book review of THE FROZEN RABBI By Steve Stern.



What is the book about?

Here's another book review summary:

The book's 370 pages are packed to bursting with epic adventure and hysterical comedy, with grim poignancy and pointed satire, as Stern repeatedly shifts time and tone to craft a wildly entertaining tale of the 20th-century Jewish experience and the paradox of tradition.

The author of seven works of adult fiction and two children's books based on Jewish folklore, Stern grounds his fantastical tale within the perfectly recognizable: "Sometime during his restless fifteenth year, Bernie Karp discovered in his parents' food freezer -- a white-enameled Kelvinator humming in its corner of the basement rumpus room -- an old man frozen in a block of ice." It seems that while meditating near a pond in Poland in 1889, the mystic Rabbi Eliezer ben Zephyr was flooded, frozen, cut into a block of ice and eventually left in the care of Bernie's great-great-grandfather Salo King (or Salo Frostbite, as he's soon called).

- - -

Back to the Theme of Jewish Self-Hatred

I have dealt with Irene Nemirovsky previously and now in the Times Literary Supplement, Frederic Raphael has a review essay.

The issue, for me, is insanely attracting in that elements of her outlook and behavior seem to keep repeating themselves. In Israel, the theme of self-hatred is not simply a polemical shout of political antagonism but a very real and threatening development among our elite, as self-crowned as they are.

I have selected passages from the essay that deal with the question of the author's Jewishness, self-hatred and reaction to antisemitism:-

...Did Némirovsky satirize Jews simply in order to ingratiate herself with an alien audience? Anti-Semitism was a stylish conceit in the Parisian circles to which she so diligently sought entry, but the émigrés’ world of conspicuous insecurity was also the one she knew best...

Like Proust, only more so, she at once acknowledged and derided the Jewishness she could never shuck (although females are never quite “Jews”, even to themselves, to the degree to which the anti-Semite takes males to be). Literary “self-hatred” can combine self-advertisement with a play for exemption. Karl Marx’s early polemic against the “huckster race” is an example; Harold Pinter’s bully boy Goldstein, in The Birthday Party, just might be another. Self-criticism is, however, fundamental to Judaism: it metastasized into both Communist and psychoanalytic confessional modes.

Némirovsky said later that she would never have written David Golder (and other stories) in so scathing a tone, if she had known that Hitler was imminent. In fact, the dormant bacilli of the Dreyfus affair, and its vocabulary, were always, like shingles, ripe for resuscitation in the Right as it itched for revenge. Meanwhile, the young Robert Brasillach, although already an acolyte of Charles Maurras’s right-wing Action française, stepped out of the ranks of Tuscany to cheer Irène’s early work: “this young woman of both Russian and Jewish origin . . . [grasps] the secrets of our race better than French writers”.

Only with the rise of Fascism, and then of Nazism, was Brasillach engorged by the prospect of power and happily perverted by the genocidal malice which, some say, has to be excused in Céline’s lethal frivolity. In the same spirit, after the defeat of 1940, Henri Béraud – a “friend” of Némirovsky who had won the Prix Goncourt in 1922 – chose to associate Jews with the English and with Freemasons and conclude, “In all conscience, yes, one should be anti-Semitic”. Anti-Semitism is often less a recondite sentiment than a social contagion; opportunism in its Sunday best. Under the Occupation, it could be worn, with profit, all week. Brasillach then advocated giving “serious thought to the deportation of little Jewish children”...

...Suite française occupies a place in Némirovsky’s oeuvre not unlike that of the last section of À la Recherche du temps perdu, in which Proust’s narrator perceives that the gratin to which he has deferred so sedulously, and so long, is a decadent crust. Redemption is recovered personality. Némirovsky’s last work mentions the word Jew only twice. All the vices which had seemed specific to Jews she now realized to be pandemic: her fastidious Parisian aesthete, Langelet, in his flight, cares more for his porcelain collection than for France itself. He scorns the Jewish fugitives hoping to reach Portugal or South America, but all his refinement cannot save him from being run over in the common panic. In the margin of her manuscript, describing his end, Némirovsky scribbled “the end of the liberal bourgeoisie”. Similarly, Hugo Grayer, in the short story “Le Spectateur”, presumes himself too fine for the doomed Europe which he abandons, only to find that he has taken flight on a literally sinking ship...

...As for Némirovsky’s “self-hatred”, a single intelligence might have guessed that the mercilessness directed at “her own people” concealed a much wider scorn. Her underlying topic was the interplay of emotion and callousness, the alternations of vanity and despair, in all the players of the world’s game. Imaginative impersonation is the mark of the natural novelist; fiction is where the truth can be found; documentary is too often where it is confected. Némirovsky could play male or female, be villain or dupe, candid or duplicitous. She moved the black and the white pieces with equal versatility. The insolence of her impostures was a function of an isolation from which neither success nor marriage dispensed her...

What do you say?

The Jewish Spark, Muriel Spark

I think I blogged about this previously (yes, I did), but here, then, it is again:-

...Spark (whom Stannard familiarly, and annoyingly, calls Muriel throughout the book) was born in Edinburgh in 1918. Her father, Barney Camberg, was the son of Russian Jews; her mother, Sarah, known as Cissy, was raised as a Christian but agreed to be married in a synagogue. Neither was very religious, and what the family really worshipped was middle-class respectability. Barney, who worked in a rubber factory, came home to their rented flat every night, bathed and put on a suit and tie. He and Cissy liked to dance and entertain and take a drink. (Cissy, who may have been an alcoholic, admitted to going through a bottle of Madeira every day to steady her nerves.) Both parents made a point of sending their children (Muriel had an older brother) to fee-paying schools even if it meant taking in lodgers and banishing Muriel to a sofa in the kitchen.

Spark went to James Gillespie’s High School for Girls, where she came under the influence of an eccentric, charismatic teacher named Christina Kay, the model for the title character in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” (The original, who was stocky and had a mustache, sounds less glamorous than her fictional counterpart but shared Brodie’s habit of speaking in non sequiturs and her love of Mussolini.) Unable to afford university, Spark left school at 16, took a course in précis-writing at a secretarial college and went to work at a fashionable department store. She always had disastrous taste in men, and at 19 she married Sydney Oswald Spark (or S.O.S., as she later referred to him), a math teacher and nonobservant Jew 13 years her senior, who promised her a new life in what was then Southern Rhodesia.

The wedding night, Spark later said, was a “botch-up,” and so was the rest of the marriage. S.O.S, who was mentally unstable to begin with, became violent and abusive. They soon separated, and in 1943 Spark, who by then had a 4-year-old son, Robin, divorced her husband. It was forbidden to transport children during the war, so she parked the boy in an African convent school and returned on her own to Scotland. Robin didn’t make it home until he was 7, and by then Spark had embarked on a new life as a struggling writer in England. She left his upbringing to her mother and, intermittently, to her ex-husband, who raised him as a Jew...The transforming event of these years was Spark’s conversion to Catholicism in 1954...

...Predictably, Spark and her son grew estranged, especially after Robin embraced Orthodox Judaism, and she cut him out of her will.

Jabotinsky's Samson - Coming to Your Screen Soon

Well, a good film once, hopefully a better film again.

The news, Sergei Bedrov to to direct a film adaptation of Jabotinsky's Samson:

The Book of Judges (13-16) tells us of the heroic life of Samson, one of the most famous characters of the Old Testament. He was a wise judge, a fierce fighter and a brave defender of his people.

Vladimir Ze’ev Zabotinsky in 1927 wrote a brilliant book titled «Samson the Nazarite». In his unique interpretation of the biblical story, he empowers Samson with supernatural strength, yet at the same time he never loses sight of Samson the man. This story rages with the scope and drama of a major cinematic event.

Samson overflows with life. The Philistines are his tribe’s enemies, but they are also his closest friends. Only with them can he be himself, drinking and laughing and entertaining them with his jokes. When his people accuse him of not acting like a judge, Samson answers them: «In my land I live and act as a judge. When I am away from you, I follow my dreams. Do not judge my dreams!» But his dream ends when he falls in love and marries the Philistine beauty Semadar. When his closest friends kill his wife and her family, Samson vows revenge. He burns their fields and towns, killing hundreds, and then flees. The Philistines send their army to capture him. To save his people from war, Samson surrenders. He is rescued by friends, but then betrayed by a woman who loves him. The Philistines blind him, robbing him of his power. The years pass. Blind Samson knows that the Philistines plan to invade his homeland and destroy his people. The day of the great festival to the gods arrives, and Samson takes a horrible revenge.

Samson was the first Superhero in history. His story comes to us from the ancient past, from the land of the Dead Sea. Yet a Superhero never dies. He will live again in this movie.

Genre: Action, epic, drama.
Screenplay: Sergei Bodrov, Carolyn Cavallero
Based on a novel by Ze’ev Zabotinsky
Director: Sergei Bodrov (MONGOL, NOMAD)
Language: English
Casting director: Susie Figgis (PRINCE OF PERSIA, HARRY POTTER)
Production designer: Wolf Kroeger (PRINCE OF PERSIA)
Visual concept: Khamid Savkuev
Locations: Israel, Morocco
Production Co: Bodrov Film Production, Russia, Tengri Production, USA, Kinofabrika, Germany.

Here's Sergei in Jaffa at the event:



And here's Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the author's grandson and great-granddaughter:




Do you understand Russian?

____________

UPDATE:

The promotional trailer:

Laurie R. King's "O Jerusalem" Notes

Last month I noted a novel, I had previously been unknown to me, "O Jerusalem" by Laurie R. King.

I managed to obtain it through the good services of a dear friend and have finished it.

It is good.

I recommend it.

But, being a fairly thorough reader, a few observations:

1. On page 86, the author writes that Beer Sheba was the "southernmost town of the ancient Israelites".

Now, the phrase "from Dan to Beer Sheba" of Judges 20:1; 1 Samuel 3:20 is quite well known and even used by the British:

September-December, 1918. ...new political interests began to be incorporated in the delineation of borders. Although they did not accede totally to Zionist requests, the British did deviate from the Sykes-Picot line and adopted the biblical "Dan to Beersheba" for Palestine, as based on a map of "Palestine under David and Solomon" (Hof 1985,11), in negotiations with the French over the temporary boundaries of "Occupied Enemy Territorial Administrations (OETA)...

...North Palestine must include the Litani River watersheds, and the Hermon on the east ... Less than this would produce mutilation of the promised home" (unpublished telegram, 16 February 1920, Zionist Archives). Lloyd George and Berthelot finally fell back on "from Dan to Beersheba," as described in an atlas written by Adam Smith, a Scottish theological professor, where ancient Samaria only brushes against the Litani, and has a boundary on the west coast more southern even than the Sykes-Picot line (Hof 1985, 11).

With all that, Eilat was the southernmost town:

The original settlement was probably Eilat at the northern tip of the Gulf of Aqaba. Glueck found walls from the Kingdom of Israel...Eilat is mentioned in antiquity as a major trading partner with Elim, Thebes' Red Sea Port...Eilat is first mentioned in the Bible in the Book of Exodus in the stations. The first six stations of the Exodus are in Egypt. The 7th is the crossing of the Red Sea and The 9th-13th are in and around Eilat after they have left Egypt and crossed the Red Sea. Station 12 refers to a dozen campsites in and around Timna in Modern Israel near Eilat.

When King David conquered Edom, which up to then had been a common border of Edom and Midian, he took over Eilat, the border city shared by them as well. The commercial port city and copper based industrial center were maintained by Egypt until reportedly rebuilt by Solomon at a location known as Ezion-Geber (I Kings 9:26).

In 2 Kings 14:21-22: "And all the people of Judah took Azariah, who was sixteen years old, and made him king in the room of his father Amaziah. He built Elath, and restored it to Judah, after that the king slept among his fathers." And again in 2 Kings 16:6: "At that time Rezin king of Aram recovered Elath to Aram, and drove the Jews from Elath; and the Edomites came to Elath, and dwelt there, unto this day".

2. On page 237 we learn that Holmes and Russell on in a...kivutz.

That should be kibbutz.

3. On page 242, our heroes are reading the Jerusalem Post.

That paper was only founded in 1932 and was named the Palestine Post until 1950.

On page 285, The Palestine News is mentioned. I'm trying to track that down if it is fictional or not.

What Watson, Jerusalem?

You just never know:

O Jerusalem is the fifth book in the Mary Russell series by Laurie R. King.

Set during the voyage of Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes to the Holy Land, the action of this novel takes place chronologically during the action of The Beekeeper's Apprentice. In Palestine Mary and Sherlock meet up with Mahmoud and Ali Hazr, two apparently Bedouin guides, to counter a plot against the British in Jerusalem under General Edmund Allenby to seek out spies in post-WWI Palestine

Mary Russell

is a fictional character in a book series by Laurie R. King, focusing on the adventures of Russell and her partner and, later, husband, an aging Sherlock Holmes. Most of the novels are told in first-person retrospective from Mary Russell's point of view.

The daughter of a British Jewish mother and an American millionaire father, Russell spent time in Boston and San Francisco as well as England while growing up. Her mother raised her in the Jewish tradition and she continues to consider herself a Jew as an adult. An ardent feminist and a respected scholar in her chosen field of theology, Russell has a variety of unlikely talents that have come in handy during cases. She has extremely accurate aim with firearms, thrown knives, and even rocks. She can also play the tin whistle, juggle and do sleight-of-hand, and pick locks. Most usefully, she speaks a large number of languages, including Ancient Greek and Latin (learned for her theology degree), Hebrew, French, German, Arabic, and Hindi.

Mehr:

It's 1918. Nineteen-year-old Mary and her fiftysomething mentor are forced to flee England to escape a deadly adversary. Sherlock's well-connected brother Mycroft sends them to Palestine to do some international sleuthing. Here, a series of murders threatens the fragile peace.

Laurie King connects us, through details of language, custom, history, and sensual impressions, to this very alien environment. Russell, Holmes, and two marvelously imagined Arab guides named Mahmoud and Ali trek through the desert and visit ancient monasteries clinging like anthills to cliffs. They also find time to take tea with the British military legend Allenby in Haifa and skulk through or under the streets of Jerusalem...

...Disguised as itinerant Muslims and paired with two Arab spies, Russell and Holmes travel through the Holy Land trying to figure out exactly why Mycroft has sent them. A pair of seemingly unrelated murders sets them on the track of a brilliant and power-hungry killer. Only Holmes and Russell (along with some unexpected allies) can stop their adversary from destroying Jerusalem if they can get to him in time. King's clear prose and her vivid depiction of a British-occupied Palestine torn between opposing cultures are the book's main strengths.

This too:

At the close of the year 1918, forced to flee England's green and pleasant land, Russell and Holmes enter British-occupied Palestine under the auspices of Holmes' enigmatic brother, Mycroft.

"Gentlemen, we are at your service." Thus Holmes greets the two travel-grimed Arab figures who receive them in the orange groves fringing the Holy Land. Whatever role could the volatile Ali and the taciturn Mahmoud play in Mycroft's design for this land the British so recently wrested from the Turks? After passing a series of tests, Holmes and Russell learn their guides are engaged in a mission for His Majesty's Government, and disguise themselves as Bedouins--Russell as the beardless youth "Amir"--to join them in a stealthy reconnaissance through the dusty countryside.

A recent rash of murders seems unrelated to the growing tensions between Jew, Moslem, and Christian, yet Holmes is adamant that he must reconstruct the most recent one in the desert gully where it occurred. His singular findings will lead him and Russell through labyrinthine bazaars, verminous inns, cliff-hung monasteries--and into mortal danger. When her mentor's inquiries jeopardize his life, Russell fearlessly wields a pistol and even assays the arts of seduction to save him. Bruised and bloodied, the pair ascend to the jewellike city of Jerusalem, where they will at last meet their adversary, whose lust for savagery and power could reduce the city's most ancient and sacred place to rubble and ignite this tinderbox of a land....

And this:

King does an absolutely superb job of depicting post World War I Palestine--the aftermath of the brilliant military campaign led by Sir Edmund Allenby that drove the Turks from their 400 year occupation of Palestine and Syria. Holmes, Russell, Ali, and Mahmoud travel nearly the entire length and breadth of Palestine in search of a mysterious killer. As they do so, they visit early Jewish settlements, Arab villages, Christian monasteries, and the Dead Sea, among other places. King is superb in painting the local color of each, especially Jerusalem, where she is so evocative that you feel as if you are right there, amid the dust, the smells, the Arabs, Jews, Christians, British, the holiest places of three religions.

Darn. "Settlements".


Laurie King:

Words To Quote

"...but even worse...would be the sealing of yet another trade route from West to East because of squabbling among the faiths. One by one they are being lost..the followers of Islam and Christianity, who in violation of God's desire and teaching and above all his good sense would rather kill than haggle."

Michael Chabon,
"Gentlemen of the Road"
pp. 108-109
paperback edition,
Ballantine Books, 2008


An insight:

At the end of Gentlemen of the Road...Michael Chabon has a quiet afterword with his readers, in which he confides that, despite the book’s official title, he cannot help but think of it as “Jews with Swords”, a working title that has not failed to cause amusement in those who heard it first. The author is not so inclined to find it entirely a laughing matter. The Jews, after all, he sees as arch-adventurers, and not the less adventurous for having embarked on their long history of persecution and peregrination in a spirit of reluctance, or even unreadiness. Their great warrior tradition (“Here’s to Judas Maccabeus, / Boy, if he could only see us”, as Tom Lehrer once put it) can be obscured only too easily by the image of Woody Allen “backing toward the nearest exit behind a barrage of wisecracks and a wavering rapier”. The gentlemen of the road in Gentlemen of the Road seldom waver, or wisecrack, or retreat.