JERUSALEM, THE CITY IN FLOWER

ROSENFELD, ALVIN

JERUSALEM, THE CITY IN FLOWER ALVIN ROSENFELD Spring 1975 Jerusalem in spring is a city of flowers. This spring it has become as well a city of bombs. For the past two weeks there have been almost...

...I went twice and managed to see about half of what was there, exhausting myself in the doing...
...the book burners ultimately condemn themselves to the fire...
...It is a time for the out-of-doors, for children to take to the forests for sport with bow and arrow, for bonfires to be set ablaze in open fields, for dancing and some drinking on the slopes of Meron...
...And therein lies Israel's special strength, its most advanced "secret weapon," for more powerful by far than any bombs in the hands of the terrorists are the books in the hands of the men and women strolling this week through Independence Park...
...Would that have caused any remorse, one wonders, to the young man now resting in a comfortable bed at Hadassah Hospital...
...The conqueror depletes the spirit along, with more material things...
...I leave it to others to debate the fine points of the learned Sheikh's textual and historical analysis, but on one matter I must credit him for being indubitably correct: the Jews never change, at least with respect to their books...
...What other people gathers such novel bouquets for itself and transmutes, as if by magic, books into flowers, flowers into books...
...Just as darkness rules the streets of Warsaw, so does it dominate our minds...
...answers his aged father mockingly, and then, wielding an iron bar...
...In the kibbutzim there is dancing amid the wheat, and children everywhere are adorned with floral crowns...
...Nor should it come as a surprise to realize that to the Jews a book is really a flower, a flower a book...
...Yet what they shine through is a screen of Jewish memory and ritual, which is textual and sacramental in character, and has the effect of tempering and transforming nature, turning it into a book...
...Contemplating the sacrifice of books as a possible way out...
...It fell to Kovner to organize defensive positions and command the resistance, but lacking sand with which to build sandbags, he was caught short in his planning...
...Had it gone off, the likelihood is that the victims would have been Arabs as well as Jews...
...The attractions of the book fair are threefold: the books are sold at a discount of 25 to 35 percent off the normal retail price...
...nor was it the case during Shavuot, when the bathers at the Dead Sea oasis of Ein Fesh'cha were caught by an explosive device hidden in a picnic basket, which went off injuring 22 people...
...Tn Jerusalem this spring they are spending a lot of their time, and more of their money, at book fairs...
...At least in Israel both will outlast the bombers and their bombs...
...The first thing we learn is that the Jews' wicked nature and inherent sinfulness account for the disasters, the afflictions and persecutions that befell them throughout their history...
...They have usurped Palestine from its rightful owners, doing evil, shedding blood, ripping up pregnant women and blowing up villages, disregarding and defying the world opinion...
...As often as not the victims are the bombers themselves, young Arabs who blow themselves apart while handling their explosives...
...Meanwhile, and again undoubtedly more by design than by accident, the sun is shining and the flowers are everywhere in bloom, posing a challenge all their own...
...Livery spark of light is a potential breach in the kingdom of darkness of bestial Nazism...
...And we have been trying to live every day...
...D. F. Green...
...The observant will stay up throughout the night to engage in study and will greet the early morning sun with the first day prayers...
...Many a time were they punished for their evil, but they never repented or gave up their sinfulness...
...It is, in other words, clearly a holiday whose origins are clouded in a pre-Judaic or non-Judaic past, and its pagan elements shine through clearly enough...
...to destroy a people by extirpating its sense of itself as created in the image of God...
...The celebration of Shavuot, by contrast, shows an almost exactly opposite process of accommodation between the natural and spiritual impulses...
...More fully and perceptively than anyone else of his generation, it was Kaplan who saw, and recorded in the extended lamentation that makes up his "scroll of agony," the absolute terror of the Nazis and under it the inevitable spoliation of Polish Jewry: This is not the eve of destruction, . . . . but destruction itself...
...For confirmation, one need only watch them strolling the lanes of Jerusalem^ Independence Park this week, jostling one another for position and eagerly grabbing up books...
...On the one side, as if to prop up the great weight of the international book exhibition, is Lag B'Omer...
...More often than not the crude explosives fail to go off, or they are detected and defused in time by the local police and security forces...
...Where plunder is based on an ideology, on a world outlook which in essence is spiritual, it cannot be equalled in strength and durability...
...I do not know whether Andre Schwarz-Bart knew of these events — nor do I know for certain that they actually took place — but in The Last of the Just he offers us an analogous recounting of how in Jewish fate the life of books and the lives of men are mutually determined...
...All kinds of books, in all shapes and colors, and on every imaginable subject...
...He has recently returned from a sabbatical year in Jerusalem...
...Just what is a book to the Jews...
...oleander and pomegranates, brings into the heart of Jerusalem in spring...
...nearly 80 publishers are represented, making the selections far wider than is possible in any single bookstore...
...Yet the Israelis, more voracious in their intellectual appetites and less fatigable in spirit, have just mounted a second book fair, this one not confined to Jerusalem alone but spread over most of the country from Eilat at the southern end of the Negev to Afula in the central Galilee...
...We learn also that the Jews never change...
...That was not the case early in April, though, when a 37-year-old father of three lost his life to exploding paint cans placed on the stairwell of his apartment building...
...And all against a backdrop of flowers...
...delivers himself unflinchingly of the traditional Jewish reply to barbarism: "For a thousand years the Christians have been trying to kill us every day...
...fortunately for him, an Israeli police officer was passing by and took him to a hospital for treatment...
...Never, never, never...
...The fair is one part of a larger whole — Hebrew Book Week — which has now become an annual event in Israeli life...
...It was in the fall of 1943 and the Jewish fighters, few in number and with fewer weapons, were greatly outnumbered and outmatched by the German forces that surrounded them...
...Yet in one crucial respect Kaplan was wrong...
...What is it the mob below wants from them...
...Lag B'Omer may be the only Jewish holiday that is celebrated neither in the synagogue nor in the home...
...The books first...
...How many other countries hold a national book week, one wonders...
...The poet-fighter of the Vilna Ghetto, who commanded his men to positions behind Sholem Aleichem and the Talmud, has lived to tell his tale...
...Yet while the bombs fly — and they include a Katyusha rocket sent whizzing onto the grounds of the Hebrew University just a short time back — the people go browsing through the books, hundreds of meters of books, all in a setting of flowers...
...This alchemy of transference is overlooked in the Sheikh's otherwise cogent analysis and deserves some fuller reflection...
...Yet while the textual nature of the holiday is paramount, it is not all that characterizes Shavuot...
...Both have the same end in mind...
...The religious character of the holiday is central, of course, and commemorates the giving of the Ten Commandments — according to tradition, actually the giving of the entire Torah — at Mount Sinai...
...on the other, as if to balance the burden of worldly knowledge with the more indigenous and sacred variety, is Shavuot...
...Their Holy Book taught them the worst that a teacher could teach his pupils...
...Elsewhere they may represent antagonistic forces, the pull of the earth against its mastery by spirit, but in Israel they have reached an unusual degree of accommodation and near-unity...
...Evil, wickedness, breach of vows and money worship are inherent qualities in them...
...They're all worked up...
...His essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of journals...
...And while the bombers plot their next moves, what are the people in the cities doing...
...Thus while Lag B'Omer is the one day during the 49-day period of the counting of the Omer when weddings are permitted, it is also a day especially set aside to honor students and scholars, and it recalls in particular the fame of such learned rabbis as Akiba and Shimon ben Yohai...
...Then in a moment of insight — a poet's insight and a Jew's, they are one and the same in this instance — he improvised his defense line in a classically Jewish pattern: He ordered his men to collect whatever books were still remaining in the Vilna library, and behind this shield of learning — with their guns propped up on the classics, the Yiddish poets...
...In Jerusalem many pass the night in such study at the Western Wall, and to accommodate them the Ministry of Religious Affairs provides free snacks, a reward as well as an encouragement to their devotional labors...
...Their nature, habits and customs have remained unchanged since the dawn of their history...
...Soon afterwards the mystery was unravelled and I got to know the reason for this behavior on the part of the Jews...
...For more than anything else, it is the life that a people defines for itself in peace that will determine its freedom and security, and determine as well the outcome of war should war once again be forced upon it...
...he felt certain that a nation possessed of both the book and the sword "will not perish...
...The Kab-balists refer to the final redemption of Israel as perach, "a flower,'* and everyone knows that the Torah is another such flower, in whose unfolding a life devoted to study and good deeds will hasten the redemption...
...Unlike other holidays, Shavuot has no prescribed text, but a Tikun Shavuot, a special arrangement of texts selected from the Torah, is customarily read in the synagogues and houses of study...
...The Nazi has robbed us not only of material possessions, but also of our good name as "the people of the book .. . ." As to what Jews look like when deprived of the blessings bestowed by their books: "Sometimes we are ashamed to look at one another...
...It should come as no surprise, then, that on Shavuot the Sephardim decorate their Sefer Torah with flowers and Ashkenazim adorn the pulpits of their synagogues with blossoms and greens...
...Thus a reAlvin Rosenfeld teaches American literature and Jewish studies at Indiana University...
...One may not find it written in Clausewitz, but there is a notable military lesson to be learned here, about the strategic place of literacy in culture and the respective strength of books in a people's defense: those who live by the book will be preserved and fortified by it...
...w hat is it that accounts for the avid book-buying of the Israelis...
...From Arab Theologians an Jews and Israel, ed...
...Thus a holiday that undoubtedly began in an alien past, possibly in homage to the gods of fire and earth, has taken on a characteristically Jewish face, one adorned with spectacles and softened by the character of learning...
...Sholem Aleichem, and the great tomes of the Talmud — the Jewish resistance of the ghetto awaited the Germans...
...Schwarz-Bart romanticizes the story somewhat, no doubt, but his fiction succeeds in making its point all the same: in the fate of the Jews, books are a shield against savagery, a front-line of defense against the coming of night, and they are to be defended with all the strength and determination of life itself...
...The books are mostly in Hebrew, although some English titles published in Israel are included as well...
...Blessed is the eye which has not beheld all of this...
...the Levy family is huddled together behind locked doors in the upper floors of their dwelling, awaiting their fate...
...Here are some possible answers, all taken from recent history...
...And more permanent a part of this city's life, surely, than an occasional exploding paint can is the explosion of colors that the perennial bloom of roses and bougainvillea...
...Without them, as Chaim Kaplan wrote in his diary of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Jews were condemned to a state of double darkness, "physical darkness because the electricity has been shut off...
...Between these twin supports lie thousands and thousands of books, too many to count and certainly far too many to read...
...Finally, Lag B'Omer ushers in the first of the major book fairs, which draws as many people to Jerusalem as the all-night bonfires and dancing do to Meron...
...And worse, we have begun to look upon ourselves as 'inferior beings,' lacking God's image...
...And what city other than Jerusalem would think to serve its citizens two such literary banquets within the space of a single month...
...Just how does that happen...
...Benjamin Levy considers that matter and replies...
...It is the holidays that enact the reconciliation, transforming flowers into books, books into flowers...
...The Thousand Year Reich, which grew out of a people of high culture, nonetheless did not last more than a dozen years before it crumbled into ruin...
...cent news story reported the case of a 21-year-old Arab who came staggering out of a ditch on the Ramal-lah Road in East Jerusalem with blood streaming from his arm, torn apart prematurely by a blast he had intended for others...
...T Mhe Jerusalem book fairs occur, not by accident, in the same period as two Jewish holidays...
...To see this same garden hung with book bags as well as blossoms is to understand the complete nature of Shavuot...
...It was a Jew who insisted that a rose is a rose is a rose, yet something deep in the Jewish psyche resists the mere naturalization of nature and argues a contrary truth, insisting that the rose is really a hieroglyph, an emblem of eternity...
...As an illustration of the second method, here are some excerpts from the scientific writings of Sheikh Kamal Ahmed Own, Vice-Principal of Egypt's Tanta Institute, who addressed the Fourth Conference of the Academy of Islamic Research on the revealing subject, "How Jews Are The Enemies Of Human Life As Is Evident From Their Holy Book": The Jews as represented by their Holy Book are hostile to all human values in this life, (and) their evil nature is not to be easily cured through temporary or half measures...
...For the past two weeks there have been almost daily incidents of terrorist activity, and while most of these have been negligible, a few have been lethal...
...The day also marks the arrival of the first fruits, and these are made abundantly available throughout the country...
...But for that very reason, every such spark was systematically extinguished by the agents of darkness, and as he watched the shutdown of the schools and synagogues, the end of the newspapers and the radio stations, the pillage and padlocking of the Tlomackie and Sejm Libraries, Kaplan knew all he needed to know about the will of the Nazis, and it broke his heart to realize that the Jews, stripped of their culture, would be virtually defenseless against it: I fear such people...
...There is more than one way to burn books...
...Because it had an inferior sword or an inferior book...
...Modern civilization has only increased their hypocrisy, their power, their wealth and their penetration into the social life- of nations from behind the scenes...
...Do you know why...
...The Sixth International Jerusalem Book Fair, which closed two weeks ago, was attended by some 70.000 visitors, almost all of them local people who paid a handsome entrance fee to wander among aisles and aisles of books, 45.000 different titles in all...
...The scene is one of pogrom in Stillenstadt, a sleepy German town in the Rhenish provinces, but it could have taken place anywhere in Germany on the night of November 10, 1938, when throughout the country hundreds of Jewish libraries and synagogues were put to the torch...
...Are they companion or rival worlds, this garden of flowers and garden of books...
...and the pleasures of open-air browsing are not to be denied, especially in such a setting as Jerusalem's Independence Park, where the capital's book fair is situated...
...The security forces that were called into the area found and quickly dismantled another explosive device just nearby...
...I was utterly astonished at such atrocities and excesses as the Jews, though humiliated and persecuted by Hitler and the Nazis, perpetrated in Palestine just before the establishment of their state in 1948...
...A "friendly" German offers a saving piece of advice: "Give them some prayer books for the fire in the street...
...Just the books...
...The Israeli poet Abba Kovner tells a remarkable story about the special role he discovered for books in the defense of the Vilna Ghetto...
...Because we never give up our books...
...The Nazis did it quickly and crudely by heaping them onto huge bonfires...
...Independence Park, one begins to see, is no misnomer, for as long as the people of Jerusalem can take themselves and their children off to the floral gardens that this week serve as an open-air library and literary salon, the city is in no danger of turning into a Belfast...
...Nothing offered a better explanation of their wicked behavior than their Holy Book itself...
...In Schwarz-Bart's imaginative retelling of Krxstallnacht...
...but worse than that, mental darkness...
...In this same vein, a poem by the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever relates how the type plates of Rom's Publishing House, for generations used in the printing of the Talmud, were seized by the Jewish resistance in Vilna and were melted down for the lead that would yield bullets for the fight against the Nazis...
...The international Bible Quiz is annually held at this time, and its attraction for many makes it a close rival in popularity to that other springtime national passion, soccer...
...And every day we manage it somehow...
...At least you have to give them that...
...Never did I think that this book inculcated in their minds such rules of individual conduct and international policies as only the devil could approve of...
...The author of Mein Kampf wreaked havoc over Europe and then went to a suicidal death...
...others prefer the slower and more refined method of combustion through "scientific analysis...
...To see them parade to and from school with poppies and sweet peas is to see a peripatetic garden...
...And yet this nation seemingly obsessed with reading plows into the miles upon miles of book stalls that in spring connect Eilat with Afula in a great land bridge of literature until, in no time at all, all that remains is a lone aisle of novels here, some scattered histories there, a driblet of dictionaries and do-it-yourself manuals left behind for a rainy day...
...What should we learn from this survey of the Old Testament...

Vol. 1 • December 1975 • No. 5


 
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