forthcoming

Schindler, Alexander

forthcominq JEWISH IMAGINATIVE WRITING November, 1982 Vol. 1 No. 1 David Rosenberg, Nessa Rapoport Note from the Editors F2 Arthur A. Cohen In Memoriam: Great Uncle Salomon F3 Cynthia...

...You always observed to me that the most powerful and aggressive postage stamps used black and red...
...10 She has a collection of smiles that were smiled at her, and strangely not just people smiled at her, not just a dog, apparently poems smiled at her, books smiled at her, a varied collection...
...We were both outsiders in their home and we came together for warmth...
...That night, when Rabbi Pult had gone home (he lived around the corner on the Rue des Ecouffes, over a kosher boucherie), Joseph confessed to his mother that he had been tempted to enter a large house, seemingly as public as any market place but with nothing for sale, where he had stumbled on a fine statue of Rachel the Matriarch...
...What is more remarkable is the way these complexities were reflected in these people's more general habits of ownership...
...Once again it pouts, persuades, entices: March azaleas, Adonises between riotous smiles, the billowing white mist of almond trees...
...The wall was full of dark stains, the piss and spit of the worshippers...
...Third stop: the xerox center...
...He said he would go as he had arrived: but he pushed into Rabbi Pult's briefcase, alongside the Ta'anit, a swiped copy of an early play by Edmond Fleg: La Bete...
...Will you read a manuscript by me...
...And there was no escape...
...Rabbi Pult, unlike Joseph's parents, was preparing for a journey...
...Every year at Passover the river flooded the valley, and one day, so my father said, his little eyes bulging with a peculiar passion, it would flood the whole world...
...The aunt was excessively sharp and perplexing without being intelligent...
...He had a quick hand and a sure aim and I lost them all...
...The nights are quiet...
...The light flooded everything...
...I thought about mother's doktorl, suddenly I started seeing the edges of his clothes and the tip of his flying beard...
...But here was Andreyev - plus half a dozen other authors — writing about us...
...Perhaps this latest phase — a return to Jewishness, a reconnection to my inward, "grounded" side - began with a trip I made to the Soviet Union seven years ago...
...It was the primary coloration of their days...
...It is only out of excess of desire...
...Like my six-year-old self, I was again "a Jew and proud of it...
...He was in command of his neighborhood — not its hawkers and stalls, but the secrets of the old Paris...
...The stone beauty was Rachel — who else if not Rachel the Mother of Israel, Rachel who weeps for her children as they pass before her on their way into their long Captivity...
...he employed workers...
...A still slumber holds the whole village...
...And I had another line going through my head: "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart...
...I wrote huge sections of poetry to you" "You never gave a thought to your mother" — and I thought she was still mad in Hades — like a drunk who blacks out & doesn't really recognize you — she not remembering not reached by my Kaddish — and went down on the ground howling & crying convulsed by love-pain & hurt feel, lament for her incommunicability - couldn't reach her still, a huge solid spurt of anguish on the pavement, my whole life gathered in that knot of frustration — suddenly in an instant woke in bed and my face altered to normal expression...
...They say she fabricates...
...When Father finally awoke, though, he didn't drive them away again...
...It was another six months before he found the courage to go in...
...The servant girls tried to console her, but she refused to take heart...
...Only Joseph was letting himself see...
...Jesus was one of his thoughts...
...Madame de S?vign...
...Not a bush...
...When they sat now, they closed their eyes and listened...
...Copi was curious: "What do you know about him...
...They would have judged these enchanting and glorious histories to be frivolity, idolatry...
...In the language of the prophets the elder recounted how once the family had been great and powerful, and how its enemies and ill-wishers had brought it low to its present state...
...Daylight time shines with stars...
...She brushed my table, leaving this stubborn shadow...
...The name of it was J?sus, recont...
...An agreement not to talk...
...He was a founding editor at Noonday books and several other New York houses...
...For two years or so I loved it...
...Vasil swore that if they didn't pipe down he would throw them out...
...Ren?e," he said, "you shouldn't spy like this...
...It's hard to know...
...The whole room had its eyes shut...
...So I came to New York and worked as a waiter for four years...
...He was the first to properly assess Father's anger...
...There's the joke about the Jew who runs out of the prayer house shouting "Jews, Jews...
...We're sent off to the city when we're still wet behind the ears...
...I had mastered the alphabet and could read simple books...
...How simple it was to do things...
...Heaven's gates are fire and water": a quotation from a liturgical poem by Simeon ben Isaac (Germany, c. 950...
...Rather it is to confront this single, terrifying fact: there could be no manumission...
...If there were no Tel Aviv, they'd sing of it in Haifa...
...the small curled mouth had just swallowed a bon mot, and shone with appetite for more...
...Messianism may be defined as the supreme criticism of history, and it too, therefore, must be understood in this context...
...It was more than we could grasp, and so we mistook their good intentions for bad...
...I'm not afraid...
...In his secret thoughts he called his place and his plight nox perpetua, and kept his little lamp burning even while he slept...
...Joseph had in fact never kissed anyone other than his father and mother and his sisters and brothers...
...After that she sang her song again: "Ol kuml er mein doktorl, Zey weln im nisht zehen, Zey weln im nishl zehen, Die blimelach weln blihen, Um main doktorl wet flihen, Mit mir kein Eretz Yisroel...
...Opposite the corner of the orchard, against the background of the western horizon, rose two cypress trees, beautiful and serene...
...That was all...
...He swallowed down a full mouth of nausea — he felt he was frothing, like a rabid dog — and said yes...
...There we all lay with our forefathers...
...His affection, however, more than pedagogic, was loving — he respected me even as a child...
...She is of the same family as Our Lord...
...But of course, there was much more than that...
...Adrian was a gregarious man whose office was in his apartment...
...You'd rob a child if no one was looking...
...When "the silence became overwhelming, Father unstrapped his holster, took off his boots, and fell asleep on the sofa...
...He began to feel a mystery about Claude, into whose peculiarly welcoming bed, during the cabin's last seizure, he had been thrown, or had fallen, or had perhaps been purposefully drawn...
...He was not caught...
...Her novels and books of stories include Trust, The Pagan Rabbi, and Bloodshed...
...Magazines devoted to imaginative work are thriving in Israel...
...Or it could be, as I'm discovering in my passion for Hebrew, one that I've not felt for any other language...
...He had never before laughed down here...
...Scholem has stressed the revolutionary character of messianism...
...But Bellow by then had won a National Book Award, and in 1958 Malamud won one...
...Commentary, a magazine which initially carried a lot of writing by Jewish scholars and social scientists, must always have required extensive editing...
...Messianism is usually interpreted as an expression of Jewish idealism...
...Claude got himself and Joseph invited to tea with one of the elderly great-aunts...
...We" are also supposed to control the Times Book Review, but the first four books I edited at Harper and Row that were reviewed there were badly and unfairly panned...
...Among themselves they called him Vhomme de science, and apologized to him for imprisoning him out of sight of the stars...
...It is all over...
...I wasn't afraid of Yan-kele, but I didn't like anyone holding me by my arm or any other part of me or my clothes...
...Secondly, there was Commentary's role as a conduit and clarifier between the New York intellectual, broadly understood, and the Jewish community out there in America...
...His oldest son went to Germany to study medicine and returned as an emancipated European, a "Spinozist" as he called himself...
...A believer can explain this quite easily: he is turned away because he is not true, which we know because he did not meet the requirements, the tests that our forefathers devised to determine the truth of any such claim...
...even if he could, and if he pressed her carcass into one of the big book boxes, what would be the good of it...
...It was enormously exciting to me...
...In America I'd never understood what it meant to have roots...
...Don't worry, you'll get yours...
...I disobeyed the Bishop and he sent me down here to catalogue a deceased priest's library...
...An answer comes to mind, and it is intriguing...
...She inflates, she makes an excess out of so much faith...
...He himself was an enthusiastic Bundist, his face was red and his voice rang from one end of the street to the other, gentle and firm at once, I've never heard a voice like it...
...it was, rather, the interest of an entire religious mentality, of the spiritual style of halakhic Judaism...
...At such heights climate and time are meaningless...
...Did you imagine that you would be murdered...
...Reluctantly, Joseph brought this news to Rabbi Pult...
...The fields are empty...
...Save yourself from shame," she warned Joseph...
...A violent story about the boy we'll call him Yitzchak one day Yitzchak set out to look for work as it was summer between school year and school year and it was expected of Yitzchak to find work and work was found for him in textiles in Yaffo-Tel Aviv between a 17 year old worker who tucked up an old housedress over her breasts and panties and a mouse in the form of a man named Eliahu who would shove his hand between the two segments of her buttocks on every occasion and the loom is an infernal instrument which doubles the time and triples and septuples it to annihilate you the loom is in your mouth between your teeth and you're between its teeth and between the tooth of mouse Eliahu and between her panties which show from time to time floating on an ocean of longing frothing from under a terrible steam and especially after the noon break dragged back to the loom in a rusty tin halter and incited Yitzchak standing in a damp undershirt and wishing himself the fate of a thread or a thread in her panties and mister Levkovitz in ex-mandatory khaki including knee-socks including a khaki handkerchief with air holes like some cursed detector in Africa passes and bores with his finger the damp undershirt and the hot flesh to the heart of the gizzard and asks all's well with my servant Jacob may the dogs lick your blood and the whores wash in it and this is the incident in the story of Yitzchak's flight into the dust of summer and riders of soot via Salam...
...The fisherman scooped them up without nets as though God had made them for no other purpose...
...I simply broadened it to cover the breakthrough of American Jewish writing in general in America...
...But the next day all four of the nuns came to him...
...I keep to my schedule...
...The evening before, next to the well, Hirshel told fantastic tales about what happens to heads when they lose their necks...
...Then he splashed up a lyrical little book, which seemed autobiographical, called L'Enfant prophete: Fleg's metaphysical travels, he saw, led from agnosticism to Hebrew sympathies, but via a Jewish Jesus...
...He was ashamed, before his parents, always to be reading ecstatically, uselessly...
...it was, rather, its condition...
...There would almost always be clever, impressive people at Adrian's...
...And finally it was a year or so before it reached him that this had been the home of the astonishing Madame de S?vign?, though he did not yet understand who Madame de S?vign...
...American readers, no less than American writers, deserve a place where they can come together with the best Israeli and international authors on grounds of Jewish interest...
...Only then would the body cease to clamor for bread...
...Their speech was so old-fashioned as to be nearly archaic...
...And then I sang songs by Eliezar Steinbarg, the Protector of the Poor, which Yankele had set to music...
...He had turned private, taciturn...
...His palms were as hard and dented as goat horns, and the nails of his fingers and toes were thick and jagged, like broken teacups...
...The nuns secreted him in a storage room in the subcellar of a convent school...
...He doesn't apologize...
...In the cells of the fodder of finches Joseph spied Demeter herself: a fishy iridescence of light and moisture, breast-shield scaled with indistinct fetal eyes, hair woven of braided faint membrane, all her liquid shadows oddly permeable by what looked like schools of swimming babes...
...Somewhere in the suburbs they were stopped, checked, passed...
...That time there was a plantation of young pines here, no taller than the children who were playing...
...As I saw it, the Jewish writer was one who had a particular compassion for the common life...
...I mean their "less Jewish" was still, on my terms, very Jewish indeed...
...But I wished he would let go of my arm...
...I'm not being fatuous...
...I didn't agree that I had changed his point of view, only clarified and strengthened it, but still his reaction brought me up short...
...The doleful winds blew harder, ungovernable...
...It is obvious that there is no place for nihilism in the rabbinic outlook, for the simple reason that nihilism cannot coexist with halakha...
...There was some red-baiting on the one hand and plenty of Stalinist demagogu-ery on the other...
...The crossing to Calais was far calmer...
...I have never seen such a place, and I am amazed at the persistent feeling that I have been here before...
...At night they muttered, whispered, and burrowed into the darkness...
...I had bumped it on the wooden gate as I ran...
...Fourth stop: her breasts, your breasts, flutes in the pelvis, harps in the flowing hair...
...The second son, the author, became a lawyer, but retained his faith and cherished his Jewish culture, more or less living out the father's example and dream...
...Cruder methods, to say nothing of screams and shouts, would get nowhere...
...On lucky days he drank fresh cream or sucked on new peaches straight from the orchard...
...Give us back our faith, they were shouting...
...There is, then, an emotional valence, a dimension of affect, to the doctrines of the philosophers and the mystics...
...He felt himself more and more turning into a beast of the microscope, and it was increasingly curious to him (though now he never dared laugh out loud) that the one book, beside the Ta'anit, that he had brought away with him was called The Beast...
...I surveyed the familiar objects standing in their places...
...Perhaps it was the words, I'm not sure...
...Finished...
...11210, Tel Aviv, Israel...
...He thought of the Middle of things...
...Yankel the lame got hold of me first...
...France - Paris especially - could allow and even embrace such curiosities and accidents, but curiosities and accidents were not France...
...Secondly, I decided to put the initiative with the writers rather than with the editor...
...They have, you might say, a special sort of spiritual sweat...
...Thirstily it kept gnawing away at its shrunken channel...
...No," Joseph said, "he insists I mustn't ever pay him back...
...Ours aren't Jewish at all...
...But I had to reach the back of the little synagogue before dark because there, my cousin Shmiel had promised, he would show me something I had never seen before...
...They were simply too much for an overtaxed memory to support...
...Harris had the audacity to say that maybe Walt Kelly was a more important figure in our culture than Charles Dickens...
...Whom he had taught nothing but the joke of the Enlightenment...
...The plain is very low-lying, and if you look down from above in the light of the coming day all you can see is the covering surface of water: a grey sea...
...It was a cellar-smell...
...What do we need Jewish sprites for...
...The subcellar, with its cot, its lamp, its cave of books, its meal-carriers and water-carriers - all of that struck him now as paradise lost...
...They ignored us but not cravenly...
...Finally he is found out by the one unalterable identifying mark of the Jew which also proves to be his ultimate resource...
...The first time he dared to step into the Mus?e Carnavalet there were so many brilliant objects to seize his attention that he feared he would be late for the sweeping and the sawdust and the chairs if he lingered...
...blossoms a moment in red splendor between the leaves...
...It was not until years later, when Joseph had already crossed the Seine to the Sorbonne, that he learned who these antique yet lively women were...
...My own Jewish background is so meager...
...It is an empty, desolate spot...
...Once you got used to them, Karola said, they weren't so frightening any more...
...The ABCs had deserted the flat on the Rue de Poitou a month before, and had gone to work in separate factories...
...There is no difference...
...Sometimes Vasil would sit and stare at them...
...it seemed the two of them were confined inside some vast tossing cradle...
...I, doubled, slide into the tray, curriculum-riculum-riculum, shining like a new bill...
...Also from Jean-Lucas, whose uncle was a priest, Joseph picked up another bit of neighborhood lore: how, long, long ago, but only a few squares away, in the Clo?ture des Billettes, in the Rue des Archives, there had occurred the miracle of "Dieu Bouilli...
...We won't allow it, we won't take it lying down...
...they disliked him because he was the age a son of theirs might have been, had the woman not been barren...
...The "Jewish influence" on publishing of their period was mostly, I suspect, an openness to Europe and to other literatures besides English and American...
...Reb Shkolnik was hard put to explain this to us, and in the end he said "like Yankele the lame...
...Slaves, however acquired, could not be freed under any circumstances, not by any law of the society or ancient custom, but by reason of a law of nature itself...
...All the lights are out...
...As Naomi, whom I could not stand, & put away from me in Asylum...
...it was humiliating to be an immigrant's child and fill one's mouth with the wrong noise...
...Immediately he was ashamed that it was not neat, littered with his wild blanket and a dozen or so of the old priest's books...
...So then I sang him songs of winter and frost and snow falling like dead doves...
...The rest vanished in the garden...
...he ran...
...He matriculated under the formidable Guy Gaillard, the master and key-keeper of the cell...
...1154, Jerusalem Note From The Editors The authors in Forthcoming's first issue are not unknown writers looking for a place to publish...
...For the messianic age to be experienced as the fulfillment of what came before it, as the realization not only of God's scheme but of an individual's desires, some continuity was necessary...
...Father looked pale and a hard, coppery cloud passed over his brow...
...graduated Columbia (.'oliede...
...Platto, hmmm...
...I was his prisoner of course...
...He did not know how they managed his concealment...
...But it was Rachel the Mother of Israel," he protested...
...Joseph did not mind...
...Many of these veterans felt that the future of the United States was being fought out in their organization...
...Gone was her frail, hushed laugh...
...Was he a Christian or a Jew...
...but felt no relief...
...Mountain time flows into valleys...
...he discovered that he had an ineradicable and incessant tremor...
...One day (or more likely it was night, since no one was bringing him a meal) Joseph dug out a strange book...
...At first, we thought about what name would best serve a new generation, and then we thought Forthcoming could stand as well for the contemporary generation of Israeli, American, and other writers who have established a Jewish consciousness in world literature...
...He tried a bit of Rousseau...
...he often took his cake from the table to his room, explaining to my parents with some embarrassment that he wished to eat it before bedtime and then, surreptitiously, after my lights had been extinguished, made his way to my room and presented it to me with a whispered, "Sweet daughter...
...he made himself think of the ABCs in Sweden, in England...
...Consultant National Foundation for Jewish Culture Art Editor David Rosenberg Design Eli Gilad Logo Adrianne Onderdunk Dudden Typeset S.T.I., Scientific Translations International Ltd., P.O.B...
...he says it's all right...
...The quickest way to go from home to his father's fish store was straight down the Rue Vieille du Temple, which led most directly to the Rue des Rosiers, with its teeming little shops, dim and odorous, and pavements dense with fruit hawkers and dry goods peddlers, vegetable carts and street criers, all in the dialects of the immigrants from Kiev and Minsk and Lithuania: a multitude drawn to the great capital and citadel of freedom - Paris, the founder and purveyor of jralernil...
...he did not care what he read...
...Appelfeld's other books in Hebrew include collections of essays and stories...
...Even a storage closet was like the studio of a brooding painter of our day, every hammer a violinist's dearest Amati...
...Their loudness was gone, and they kept conspicuously away from the veranda...
...he thought of matter — but not the deep matter of the atom, where the universe rages and echoes again, only in little...
...Also, perhaps, an alertness to issues, which Jews seem to carry in their DNA, understandably so...
...I was desperate for the arrival of real school...
...composed, in two languages, by the virtuoso priest himself: Mon dme de serre grossit comme une grenade d'hiver qui va ?claler...
...Men who till the soil go forth at first light to the fields and vineyards and the women go to the apple orchards...
...there was a minute stir, a muffled rustle, as if someone else was present, lurking and watching...
...In the morning Rabbi Pult sent him home...
...Sometimes two would descend together, one staggering under the big tin tub for his bath, the other with a great snowy towel and extra water jugs...
...Thus the major ruin appears when beauty is put into disappointing shadow by an almost opaque moral presence which has crystallized only in time...
...It had its own expressions of anger, of appeasement and reconciliation...
...Anne and Claire straggled back to Paris and set up housekeeping together...
...They are uncommonly conscious of time...
...The yard came to a stop from the unseasonable heat...
...Just when it seemed certain that we would never see the last of them, Father put on his riding pants and leather jacket, strapped a pistol to his waist, stationed himself in the doorway, and said: "Get out...
...His moment covers him like a diver's suit...
...To be in an adversary position gave him energy and purpose which, at least as a writer, he didn't seem otherwise to have...
...But there's something else too...
...Not far from Madame de S?vign...
...For it had not been translated very well and read woodenly...
...Sunlight: D?licieux...
...They made it LeFevre...
...She taught English in a Jewish day school, and was the most important single influence in my life...
...It is, then, a mixed picture: rejection of the world of exile vs...
...All of a sudden the words flew their coop...
...What is your name...
...he veered, and ran the other way...
...One thing should be made clear at the outset: the ancient society in which the events I shall recount took place was unique in its laws of property and, particularly, in its system of slaveholding...
...some of them are directly related to their predecessors, but mostly we are from the Russian-Jewish background, though by now mostly third generation...
...Whether of some ordinary or rare illness...
...He wondered what he ought to do...
...I also grew up playing first base rather than in prayer...
...Joseph sometimes pretended to himself a conversation between Gaillard and Rabbi Pult, on the subject of the true substance of things...
...Then he ran toward the poissonnerie in the Rue des Rosiers, and his broom...
...The interview was something to remember...
...His veins had been injected with air...
...here it seems more a crisis of memory — historical and personal...
...he had the light and he had the dark...
...Some wise guy will saunter up to me at a reception after a lecture at some university and say, "My name is O'Brien...
...The game was Edmond Fleg's - Corneille and Racine set beside Jonah and Koheleth...
...he wanted to pulverize her for being there...
...On account of the Jews the whole world had to suffer...
...I was sure it was all because of the fire he made every Sunday, when the bells in Father Serafim's church rang for mass, to burn the mice he caught during the week in the wooden traps he made with his own hands...
...Commentary was a very heavily edited magazine which in the last years added to my other tensions with Podhoretz...
...he made the messiah less fearful by assuring the Jews that not all that much would change...
...It was apparently the one thing they hadn't expected...
...The old acacia flowers again...
...you know the sisters don't allow it...
...The earache will pass...
...Its spiritual stature, however, must no longer be scanted...
...His shaven face was strangely blotchy...
...First stop: the accountant...
...Joseph did not tell this to Rabbi Pult, and certainly not to his hard-working parents, still scraping scales and lifting out fish skeletons to make the clean white filets that lay on shaved ice in snowy rows, all for the sake of his drinking in, at the University, everything that makes a French gentleman...
...So I went in the navy for two years...
...It was afterwards that I saw father's wooden clowns and mother's white, jubilant face and I broke into a run, blood flowing from my nose, crashing through fences, animals and people, all the way down to the river valley, and there I galloped in the wet grass neighing like a horse until I reached the corner of the orchard...
...And why not believe in ladies journals...
...Still, as time went on, my relationship with Podhoretz became strained...
...The art rested on a kind of impassivity, as in Flaubert and Joyce and Eliot...
...The old men knew you had no daughter, and as for me I was delighted you loved me so well you claimed me for your own...
...Currently, he is Visiting Poet at the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa...
...His blue shirt on his trim body made him look like an athlete...
...These reflections must be ratified by the study of certain texts — the texts, for example, of Jacob Saspor-tas, and Jacob Emden, and the Satmar rebbe...
...One learned the fundamentals, including how to persist, which is what editors mainly do, after they have set their course...
...Joseph, panting and praying, his throat bloated, tried to visualize the neat little settlement-towns in Poland his parents and brothers and little sisters were being led to: perhaps Ruth, who was only two, would forget all her French, and would have to grow up speaking Polish...
...I could sense how they had embarked on a long pilgrimage on which they meant to take us too...
...His waiting room was also his breakfast nook, and he sometimes practiced in his bathrobe, Russian-style...
...I asked if it didn't burn itself up...
...This is a messianism that preserves the identity of the world and the identity of the self...
...She is already beautiful in the faith...
...Here and there a jet of foam...
...Mother was busy crisping the white, freshly-starched sheets...
...My pockets were full of nuts to play with...
...There were a lot of skeletons in the Communist closet and a good deal of blood on their history, particularly Jewish blood...
...We'd like to broaden the audience for this generation's forthcoming books — as a way of building a place for the younger generation to emerge...
...Uncle Salomon was quite alone...
...Messianism without nihilism...
...I was afraid to smell in case my nose started bleeding again...
...herself: his mother had been nearly right - she was almost completely nude, down to the very top of her bosom, where the lace frill made a pretty border...
...He did not know that his mother and father, Gabriel and Loup, Michelle, Louise, and Ruth would live for a week penned up in that spot without food or toilets, in the open, body jammed into body, under a devouring sun, squatting or sprawling among the faint and the dying, day after day, the bawling of the infants rising, never lessening, until the terrifying and delusive relief of the coming of the trucks - and then the loading and unloading, and again the loading into boxcars, and again the unloading, the undressing, the run to the false showers...
...I saw a face as white as mother's receding from wall to wall...
...It was like a glass filled with ocean water: everything that is in the ocean is in the glass...
...The survival to which the Jews aspired, however, was not merely physical...
...The cows appeared to him more intelligent than the man and woman who were preserving his life...
...He was formal, grave, and estimably bourgeois...
...its red roofs are all identical and its lawns glisten with dew in the shade of its trees...
...They never understood...
...I fell on my back between them, watching their shadows lengthen as the sun set behind us, and my head burned with fever...
...It hurt and it did not hurt...
...Faced with the same problem, I kept on polishing my subtle stories about the buried life...
...That's more or less the song my mother sang...
...They only got in the way...
...This confused him...
...My best friends...
...She's gone crazy from the pain...
...I later put this experience into an essay, called "Silence, Exile and Cunning," about the meshugas of trying to be a writer in those years when we were much more conscious of our literary values than of our actual experience...
...He may come any minute now...
...I couldn't recall a single formula for the life of me...
...perhaps, said the elder, that was their fate, to be shorn of everything...
...But who would hear...
...He wanted to send her away, but he was afraid...
...The soul of a Yiddish journalist...
...I was offered a job at the Herald Tribune editing its book section...
...Whereas to us everything seemed planted in the sky...
...They had left us, Father had forgiven them, yet they shouted on and on...
...I put it "through my typewriter," as we said, trying to maintain the thought, the spirit, but rewriting it in a way that made sense to me...
...Part of this directive was personal...
...He was running again...
...I tucked in the tips of my collar to get the "Oxford" look, and put on a tie that looked like scrambled eggs...
...Don't go far, mein kind...
...He seized the radio, held it over his head, and prepared to hurl it: he hoped the tubes would implode and a bit of glass lodge in the little thing's eyes...
...I began to learn about people like Thomas Masaryk...
...Howe's book was so tremendously important because it provided the missing link, as it were, specifically Yiddishkeil, which flowed down to me in all sorts of clues and cues — political, social, cultural — that had shaped my parents', aunts', and uncles' ways of thinking, feeling, being...
...The combinations wheeled in his brain...
...Joseph, this is the legacy of your Enlightenment...
...Then he heard the little thing's voice: "Etes-vous l'Abb...
...He later told me, "You didn't know what you were talking about, but you guessed right 90 percent of the time, so I figured you'd probably make a good editor...
...My boyhood idol was Lou Gehrig, the writer I first emulated was Hemingway...
...The slap hurt, but your large, warm slapping hand was the same hand that had stroked my cheeks and pushed back my hair...
...Copi recommended that I take the humanities course...
...the evenings too were long and twi-lit...
...We walked along the street, my left hand held firmly by uncle Salomon, my right hand clutching a satchel in which empty pads and sharpened pencils lay ready...
...Those values were carried over into the way and spirit in which we edited...
...May, July/August and November issues of Moment...
...Otherwise, it would hardly have been readable...
...Father strode about it in his riding pants, shooting at imaginary thieves and frightening us all...
...How much you taught me with a slap...
...Podhoretz in fact recommended me for the job, as I remember...
...In the twenty minutes between his leaving the Rue des Ecouffes and his return, fire and steam had transformed the world: the glass of the boucherie below Rabbi Pult's flat was smashed...
...She'll punish me for sneaking down here...
...Play a little for us, play...
...They told him it had been eight months...
...Rabbi Pult was not astounded...
...This, in time, led me to my main principle as an editor, which I still fall back on in the difficult situations: treat writers as you expect to be treated when you're on the other side of the desk...
...It would decay...
...They surfaced for me, and for everyone else, too: those I've mentioned, along with Kazin and Howe and Harold Rosenberg and Leslie Fiedler and Delmore Schwartz, as well as a lot of younger fiction writers and poets...
...At a cruelly casual pace, the blood gyrating in his neck, he wandered through Paris, himself its prey, reminding his numb fist that it was more unobtrusive to swing than to clutch Rabbi Pult's briefcase containing the Venetian Ta'anit...
...It struck Joseph that there were no women, and that some of the young men were holding one another's hands...
...It's interesting to watch a priest make peepee just like anybody...
...He made a living...
...A hallucination...
...The elder reasoned and recounted while their thin faces lit up with amazement, entranced by the riches that he mined from his memory...
...I wanted more scope and responsibility and didn't get it...
...And, let it be said once and for all that my important education as an editor came from Podhoretz and that learning to be an editor from him was like learning to be a football coach from Vince Lombardi...
...1 rose up in breast "1 thought of you all the time...
...Finally I had come to understand Mother's repeated complaint that the greenery was driving her mad...
...I could lie down, staring up at the filthy parched sky or down at the black earth, and wait for something to change...
...I think I also represented a part of himself - the literary part -that he wanted to overcome to become the completely political animal he is now...
...more recently, he has worked as a newspaper editor and University lecturer in Tel Aviv...
...It looks like powdered basalt, and emits a disagreeable mineral smell...
...I wrote perhaps five stories in four years, and all of them were repeatedly and perfunctorily rejected...
...A body could even feel sorry for them...
...he had to hide his own profane tears...
...A noiseless, undissembling lassitude descended on us...
...I read, or imagined I did, because you can't read in the dark and it was already dark...
...The word for "slave" in their language was derived from the root for "word", although their writers seemed not generally to be aware of this...
...The arrival of the messiah threatened the Jews with the end of meaning...
...Cohen lives in New York City and manages a book service for rare and special editions...
...My notion of art was tinged with a Russian Jewish sentiment which did not at all consort with the Christian detachment of Eliot and Joyce and Flaubert...
...then the Host wept tears and cried for mercy in the Virgin's own voice...
...he was miserable from it...
...Every so often I walked past the Partisan Review offices, hoping to see someone brilliant and famous like Delmore Schwartz come out...
...On this road we grew up...
...I had two older roommates, both veterans, both very active in the American Veterans Committee...
...it stores, remembers, predicts what is to come...
...iimberg has also published several volumes of torre-spondente and journals...
...It isn't hard to understand why I loved you...
...Expectation sharpened my senses...
...I was on my way there to give a talk about the current situation to a roomful of teachers, and here I am...
...from this he knew that another week had gone by, and also that it was the middle of the night...
...Since I felt very unfulfilled, it was easy for me to thrill to that statement...
...A lot happened to Norman and he has now written about it himself, but I think that his intellectual style never changed much at all...
...they had talked of getting away to Sweden, or even England...
...Once, at twilight, he ran squatting and stooping through a labyrinth of hayricks until he reached a brook...
...Afterwards I chased my grandfather all the way down Tomozhenna street shouting Reb Srul, Reb Srul, but he didn't turn around until I jumped into a puddle on purpose and splashed his trousers with mud, and even then he didn't turn to look at me...
...Podhoretz himself is a very clear, distinct, economical writer...
...It probably marked the first time that names like Howe and Podhoretz and Marcus, Roth and Fiedler and Herbert Gold had appeared in the TLS...
...The poor thing," said Karola...
...the carpet was as green as grasshoppers...
...She sat down on his cot under the lamp...
...Did I know anyone who had gone to Yale...
...Either way I have no idea which way to turn or what precisely I am expected to do...
...The days grew longer...
...We gravitated here because this is where publishing is and where the action is, such as it is...
...for example: just as their intimate, responsible, life-maintaining relations to their slaves prevented them from "using" slaves like things or livestock — or even, by extension, from brutalizing themselves by metaphorically "using", as we say, other citizens — so something of this extended to any place or thing to which this equivalent of our pronoun "my" could be suffixed...
...It is in harmony with this view that Rabbi said (Makkot, 19a): / learned much from my teachers, more from my colleagues, and most of all from my pupils...
...The following poems are from a recently completed manuscript of translations, Five Israeli Poets...
...They have not sufficiently pondered the degree to which Jewish ideas are desires...
...Dead...
...They cared mainly about eating...
...Their gauntness was deceptively vital...
...The outside burst in and invaded the house...
...She got me to read Russian literature when I was fifteen or so, and it was then that I really became interested in books...
...I sang for him willingly...
...On account of them us peasants suffer too...
...I put Richard Chase into the same generation as Norman Podhoretz and Steven Marcus, referred to Sholom Aleichem as "Aleichem" and to Karl Shapiro as a Catholic convert...
...The invaders had made a bonfire, enjoyed it for a time, then doused it...
...Such a relation would certainly help to understand the scarcity of messianic activity about which Cohen spoke...
...I may have left a word out here or there, or added one, but the doktorl and the melody are hers...
...She wouldn't taste the soup that the servant girls brought to her bed...
...That it peers from the lattices": this alludes to the lover in The Song of Songs (2.9, AV), "shewing himself through the lattice...
...Like irate heirs...
...it made him think of Leviticus...
...out fell a fragile bit of paper, again in the priest's old-fashioned stormy alphabet, with a quotation from Heinrich Heine: The lizards on a certain hillside have reported that the stones expect God to manifest Himself among them in the form of a stone...
...Over the years I've encountered a lot of negative feeling about that, not unlike the anti-New York talk that surfaced a few years ago when the city was on the verge of bankruptcy and the general wish of the country seemed to be to saw off New York and let it drift out to sea...
...His throat roared with a burning...
...Time has built ruins by more means than those of obvious destruction, for it has brought into being such vast concerns as ours for the qualities of human labor and freedom, outrage at generations of toil in order that the Gods of Others might be embodied in space and stone...
...We both knew how they ridiculed your kashrut, making sly reference in front of guests to your vegetarian habit...
...This memoir, twelve to fifteen pages, was finely felt and tersely expressed...
...He was allowed to make himself useful on condition that no part of him, not even his shadow, would ever be glimpsed by anyone...
...The pyre...
...I never knew exactly what he liked, and I would try a little of everything...
...He also worked on my teeth...
...In literary matters, New York is perceived to be the corrupt and corrupting center of things which operates through a kind of conspiracy made up mostly of Jews...
...If slapped, they never felt it...
...APPLE OF THE EYE Aharon Appelfeld Translator: Hillel Halkin Aharon Appelfeld lives in a Jerusalem suburb and teaches at Ben Gurwn university of the Negev...
...then grew suddenly sane...
...He opened it and read, in the same kind of suppressed growl: "By a transposition of the senses, M. de Cambremer looked at you with his nose...
...Let's live and love, my Lesbia...
...That is, if you're an editor...
...There she was, small, commanding, radiant, with a chin and mouth so perfectly bent on vitality that he waited for the lips to turn to rosy flesh and speak...
...They had taken him away the very morning after Joseph had stayed the night in Rabbi Pult's flat on the Rue des Ecouffes, helping Rabbi Pult pack his books...
...He was always someone, even as a young literary critic writing about Camus or Faulkner, who felt most sure of himself when he was hacking away at the prevailing opinion, the conventional wisdom...
...In point of fact, I didn't know much about the subject either...
...Your mouths are full of piety and your hearts of hate...
...I never forgave uncle Salomon for that lesson...
...Claude was scornful, and called him Dreyfus, and inveigled his friends into calling him Dreyfus too...
...a broadly Jewish point of view that was also American and contemporary and so felt confident enough to poke its nose into anything that interested it...
...The spiritual situation was always in danger of sinking beneath the weight of the historical situation...
...Uncle Salomon had turned religious after his wife's death...
...The carpenter falls asleep fully dressed and dreams of his mother...
...was, or why she astonished...
...Now everyone was sick with it, a fine, thin powder that choked us during the nights...
...it frightened him terribly...
...I don't mean to suggest any great ideological struggle, which I was in no position to make, but my decision to leave coincided with our bombing of North Vietnam, about which Podhoretz and I sharply disagreed...
...In the past years, I've experienced similar promptings, which I'd rather not go into just yet but which have led me to study Hebrew and to prepare myself to join a prayer group...
...They refused to be slapped...
...The light wilted and turned autumn colors...
...he had yet to set his business on a solid basis and restricted himself to doing job printing of no particular distinction...
...Is she a Jew...
...Put your soul at rest...
...Joseph was again isolated...
...But they were alert, ferocious...
...My two younger sons are still here and my main means of earning a living is here...
...Everyone knows anyhow...
...Mother absorbed me into her enormous arms...
...And yet there is a sense in which the problem of survival was not only external to the medieval conceptions of what Judaism should be...
...The larger dining room, when the butler led them past it and Joseph looked in, seemed as broad as a meadow...
...Most historians have not detected this...
...Scholem may have pioneered in this, too, because he saw not only the content of certain religious conceptions, but also, in a strict sense, the power in them, and the panic...
...We left in peace and arrived safely...
...On the other hand, I had lost any desire I might have to emulate him and I ended up doing something very different as an editor from what he does...
...True, it had split up and scattered, and had ceased to acknowledge its ancestry, but it was in the power of memory to prevail...
...If you didn't trick him, he didn't buy...
...Come on...
...Or it could be in my feeling for Russian literature and culture which Howe pointed out had a strong influence on Yiddishkeit...
...I felt I had much to learn...
...Edmond Fleg has brought together all his visions and sacrificed none...
...At the end of that period, my wife got pregnant, and I decided that though it had been all right for my father's son to be a waiter, it wasn't all right for my son's father...
...They temporized or became enraged...
...partly from the paradoxes of editing a paperback literary magazine which would have to be national in tone if it was to succeed at all...
...The earth turns a blind eye...
...They were only three at table in the smaller of the dining rooms in an endlessly mazy flat in the Rue Cau-laincourt...
...FAMILY PICTURES Like children who remained after father and mother left, so we sit married children...
...cried Yankele...
...also that I was being put in touch with my'two mysterious grandfathers, one of whom had named me...
...and his mother grew even angrier when she learned that Claude would pay for everything...
...Pult, Pult...
...I keep to my schedule...
...that has little or nothing to do with my people's history and sensibility — i.e., the New Criticism, the Chicago criticism, Hemingway, James, the French symbolists, Lao Tzu, you name it...
...had molded the literature of France...
...When I reached the eleventh grade, we moved to Roselle Park, a town outside Elizabeth, which was almost entirely gentile...
...Catullus and Madame de S?vign...
...I began to learn about American popular culture from him, as I did about the New York literary/political culture from Norman and Midge Decter and from Sherry Abel who was the managing editor...
...Blood...
...There were mobs moving toward the Seine and its bridges...
...Levin...
...To you who were eighty-three and murdered...
...It is easy to understand why the arrival of my great uncle Salomon unsettled him...
...To tell the truth, I was a little in love, and I wanted to yell out loud so that everyone would condemn me and Kuka would love me, that there was no God and the sky was a black hole in the ceiling into which my father flung all his wooden toys...
...INDEPENDENCE GARDEN A voice at the next table: lch hab genug gemusst in meinem Leben...
...when I grow up to be a man, and you grow up a woman, we'll kiss again in front of everyone and make noise every night without shame...
...For all that, I still wanted to be a labor lawyer...
...Give me a thousand kisses, a hundred, and then again another thousand...
...Yet somehow it doesn't work...
...He has also published books on theology, Jewish philosophy, modern art, and Russian poetry...
...I wanted to tell her to taste it, to tell her that it was sweet, that it was good for everything...
...You could be something fancier...
...I asked...
...They gave me a psychological test...
...Because of his twisted leg, hopelessly out of joint at the knee, he was no taller than me, but when he spoke like this his face was radiant...
...If there were no Jerusalem, they'd sing it meanwhile in another place...
...Once I imagined I didn't think of death...
...He raced up the three flights and found everything tranquil, everything in its place — the bread on the table, half sliced, the knife lying mutely on a white dish...
...In the course of medieval Jewish history it takes many concrete forms — the friendship with non-Jews, the local and national patriotism, the justification of suffering...
...How do you know there's a God...
...Some steps further, in the Place des Vosges, in a seventeenth-century house of red brick, Victor Hugo had bent over the manuscript of Les Mis?rables...
...Her face was tanned brown, and an eery merriment glittered in her eyes...
...They argued for days, but in the end he went...
...Then the objections of other writers began to get to me...
...Norman Podhoretz, who had just taken over Commentary, particularly wanted to know who the author was...
...There was someone else...
...I had a little trick: whenever anyone started with me, pinching or biting, or when Uncle Nahum cross-examined me about my lessons with Reb Shkol-nik, or when mother began singing about her doktorl, I punched my nose and made it bleed...
...He became a model for me...
...A joke: Phlegethon is the river of fire that runs through hell...
...To tell you they're satisfied, that they irritate in their self-satisfaction...
...He later shortened it to Copi...
...Thank you...
...She is a proof over which we rejoice...
...Her hair, with its ghostly veil trailing behind, was all ringlets, her eyebrows were smooth and shapely, her nose was unrefined (a bit too spare at the bridge, a bit too coarse at the tip), her jawline disappeared into the plumpness of the too-thick neck, even her wrists were not slender enough — but the lips and eyes were vessels of wit...
...I didn't know what that was but I remember running to you, seizing your arm, and saying, "He isn't, he isn't, he's uncle Salomon...
...At the spot where my eyes are trying to focus there is a stone ruin from the days of the Arabs, a kind of minaret decapitated by shelling or explosion, but this too is merely an upright rock among prostrate rocks...
...All the girls know...
...It is, in a sense, an ontological commitment, within which historical changes may occur...
...At the same time, simply to say "Okay, you're a Jew...
...For Rabbi Pult the future remained as clarified as it had ever been: it was the white space into which messianic redemption would intervene...
...But I don't care who knows...
...In his new sanity he admonished himself to come to a halt...
...France knew what it was, and Joseph, nibbling his roll brought from home at a caf...
...My hands turned to fists but I didn't punch my nose to make it bleed...
...Hollander has drawn on Jewish sources for many of his poems, as in the book-length poem, The Head of the Bed, and in Spectral Emanations...
...Our city cousins, who had holed up not far away, returned to the yard...
...I didn't care if they talked about me like they did about Niuma...
...Sometimes they bobbed and bowed before they turned upside down...
...The gutters of Paris a wilderness...
...Xe'a Jersey in l')'2f...
...He swam and he drank...
...Was this related to "|e\\ishness"'.J Jewish character had come to mean what you might call a full heart...
...It was about this time that the Cuban missile crisis occurred and with it a noticeable shift in Commentary's politics...
...I'm not sure...
...He raked manure and heaped it and mixed it with compost...
...In the streets creatures like centaurs scuttled and scrabbled, flinging their rods, sticks, rocks, poles...
...You'll endanger the sisters...
...It was not, for that reason, insincere...
...He had liked my essay on Bellow, Malamud, and himself...
...From Carnavalet," Joseph read, "came the purest and most perfect French hitherto written in the land...
...I was sure to fail the entrance exams, as did so many boys from the provinces who aspired to study in Vienna...
...He liked better Fleg's translation into French of Goethe's Faust...
...The-Poet-with-Two-Initials, though he held his page in front of him with a long hand hung on a long wrist, had also shut his eyes...
...In Russia I did...
...BIRD'S-EYE VIEW Amos Oz works, teaches, and writes on the kibbutz where he has lived since growing up in Jerusalem (where he was born in 1939...
...His legs would not obey...
...A pagan hall had enticed him, an image had ensnared him...
...he was a dead man...
...Karola snapped...
...I let out a cry of astonishment...
...Then he ordered them to show dignity, fearlessness, to slacken, to stroll, to saunter, to walk...
...This constraint, again, consists in a fundamental commitment to this world as the arena of religious meaning...
...I keep to my schedule: I squint at the child and listen...
...On the other side of the street Por-choi was fixing the last slats of wood into the gate of the Vishnitzers' new house, his eyes lurking behind their slits...
...I was an 80 to 90 (percentile) student and felt that the other kids really had a leg up on me...
...Bare, fine, and tense her hand does not rest even a moment caressing the strip of green green hard plastic grass...
...In a melodious voice he spoke of our huge family...
...As it was, something not very different happened in Chicago...
...But these strange modes of possession of other people affected all other property as well: land, houses, cloth, pots, weapons, harps, drums, scrolls, and carved representations of their pleasures and sorrows - these people appear to have had no gods...
...In everyone but the doctor...
...the grains had unusual potential, akin to bone meal, for human nutrition...
...All this time she was busy powdering herself in front of the mirror...
...I was just about to begin it," I said, controlling myself, though I couldn't bear the tone of his voice...
...He cast a spell over them...
...Fangs, hoofs, strange hairinesses...
...The author's father was a well-to-do and highly civilized Rumanian whose life had remained centered in Judaism...
...His homburg was set upon his head and he had combed out his beard until the white strands seemed separate and distinct in the Assyrian manner...
...An hour later, she came into my office with tears in her eyes and said, "Ted, buried deep down in you is the soul of a Yiddish journalist...
...Father made no effort to quiet them...
...Still, he was quick to intuit that he had come upon a singular elegance, though elegance itself was foreign to him...
...Go downstairs in GUM and you're in Klein's basement...
...No doubt a certain sociology is at work which brings Jews into publishing, but there's no concerted effort I've detected to create a Jewish influence, much less dominance...
...He came to live with us when I was four years old, that is in the fall of 1911, after the Jewish New Year was over...
...He is longed for, but he is always turned away...
...I kept thinking of a line from one of Rosenfeld's stories called "The Hand that Fed Me...
...If you don't forget, if you don't neglect...
...There was a special wit, forthrightness, humanity in Ro-senfeld's voice that worked on me as the Russian writers had in my adolescence...
...An old man sits on a stool knitting a sweater for a great-grandchild, his son's granddaughter...
...Going to the theater to see "The Cherry Orchard" or "Mother Courage" was like dreaming — the familiar turning strange, the strange somehow familiar...
...He stood under an archway and looked across a secret flowery courtyard emblazoned with statuary — how pleasant, how eerie, to think that real people had once slept in ordinary beds inside this delectable mansion...
...They were observant Jews too, which for Karola was another point in their favor...
...The disjunction between messianic speculation and messianic activity is a problem only so long as it is assumed that messianism is revolutionary...
...When everything becomes a metaphor, one should say simple things...
...He read like a maniac...
...He was vomitous with regret — what had he done wrong, what mistake, misstep, disloyalty, discordance...
...But the images were scrambled: it was his saviors, not his betrayers, who lowered Joseph into the pit...
...Many writers have recognized that the first fact about Jewish ideas and institutions is that they were almost always in peril...
...Why precisely bowels, I don't know, but I cried with joy and sang about the simple working men who are "the black sheep of their families, while the slaughterer's knife gets all the prestige, and kills with the rabbi's blessing...
...Frangoise...
...The wisdom of this poor man is not to be despised...
...Under Podhoretz, Commentary became less Jewish, but there was still plenty there for me to discover...
...I told him I hadn't exactly chosen it yet...
...Go and get Soeur Th?r?se," he said...
...The careers of publishers like Ben-net Cerf, Donald Klopfer, Harold Guinzberg, Alfred A. Knopf, Max Schuster, etc., suggest a pre-war Jewish presence...
...If a solitary bird remains, it is not a living bird but a piece of newspaper blown by the wind...
...Then you will be still more indebted...
...Put side by side, something is being said that goes unheard when each author appears in isolation...
...his conscience was strong, and hummed with his mother's own inflections...
...he was quiet, neat, trim, despite the assertiveness of his white beard and the black homburg he kept clapped to his head at all times except at home where he exchanged it for a small black cap...
...Vasil got up to ask if he should drive the intruders away...
...Still, the Jews had sincere expectations of their environment, and knew many satisfactions in their daily life, and continued to have access to their God...
...when he came to Rabbi Pult's door, it was torn off its upper hinge, hanging crazily: no one was there...
...How powerful an influence would the AVC be...
...I was sure that he had wrestled with the angel and now he was full of vigour and might, and his lameness was a mark of his valour...
...In such a place there would be throngs of sculptured unclothed women, an offense to modesty and a scandal of impiety...
...A change that is not an end...
...Through a chink in the curtains he saw Paris fly away: buntings, swastikas, but also the airy life of the streets as always...
...he shouted, as though it were the army...
...He was unsure whether he liked it...
...Haggling was a language in itself...
...When he was ill — this happened frequently, because of the dampness, and then the pail had to be carried away much more often - they could not bring a doctor, but put down a thermos of broth to "get him through the night," as if, in his perpetual blackness, they expected him to know night from day...
...He suffered enough for all of us, the poor thing...
...After all, the "life lived in deferment" (Scholem's famous formula) is the ideal life...
...Clearly the understanding of messianism in Jewish culture will not be furthered by ideas, taken from the Marxist tradition, about theory and practice...
...I don't want another peep out of you...
...He grabbed me by the arm and wouldn't let me go until I sang him something he liked...
...so he churned past paintings and clocks and carved panels and golden plates and resplendent old costumes, determined to choose just one stone lady to stare at and moon over and remember...
...They brought him a radio...
...Vasil, at any rate, no longer seemed to mind them...
...Not a good reason," he would say, "but any reason for coming home is a good one...
...We never knew where their houses were...
...And all the dogs of the town set up a howl in reply, from the graveyard of the goyim to the "Golden Mountain" of the Jewish millers and the market lane and the quarter where the pious peasants called "Katzapniks" lived, all the way to the houses of the respectable citizens and community leaders of Tomozhenna Street...
...TOMOZHENNA STREET Yitzhak Orpaz Translator: Dalya Bilu Yitzhak Orpaz came to Israel from Europe at an early age and has lived on a kibbutz...
...The old priest had often tarried inside Edmond Fleg's mind...
...He did keep away, at least for a while...
...forthcominq JEWISH IMAGINATIVE WRITING November, 1982 Vol...
...What do we know about anything...
...He would have been afraid of a church...
...The flaming sword...
...The soil is black and dusty, as though after a fire...
...She spent all day in the river, coming back to fall asleep at night in her clothes like a charwoman...
...His mother and father and brothers Gabriel and Loup and little sisters Michelle, Louise, and Ruth had already been taken away...
...No one knew much about him except as a contributor to little magazines...
...And the dogs press their eyes to the bars, frantic for a last breath of air...
...I didn't see her face...
...Elizabeth was an industrial town with a heavy working-class population, lots of Italians, Poles, Irish, etc...
...Joseph's only companions in the cellar were numerous mice and the books heaped on low platforms to save them from the damp floor...
...I grew up in essentially a gentile world in a family that had more or less turned its back on Judaism...
...Nothing...
...he treated Joseph like an intruder...
...I knew nothing about it, but it gave me secret pleasure to turn on your night light Friday evenings in the winter when darkness came early and walk with you to Synagogue where the old men gave me candy and patted my head...
...and it was a marvel that the lovers H?-lo?se and Ab?lard were buried in a mausoleum in the Jewish cemetery, and that Anatole France, with his stirring surname, could also have been a Jew...
...Someone was sitting on the bottom stair, lurking and watching...
...She'll make me copy out half of Julius Caesar...
...Have you ever heard of any other philosophers...
...the opening up of political and cultural consciousness...
...The smoke cut into my throat and nose, and I choked...
...FRUIT A burning cigarette flipped into the tree (at 5 a.m...
...But also it seemed to him sometimes that the nuns, when they came with his supper of bread and cheese and their smiles, carried the odor of candles in their habits: a continual burning, a smokiness...
...Once, several years after his arrival, he discovered me examining by flashlight a map book beneath my blankets...
...They went on packing in silence, filling suitcases...
...The juxtaposition made him laugh...
...Those Jews are lively and our Jews are sad...
...Trofitz was mooing again...
...Now they were at each other's throats...
...They spoke to my personal experiences, mainly what it had meant or, better, might mean, to grow up Jewish...
...God Himself was impassive...
...his life was a miracle, he was miraculously at leisure in a dungeon, wallowing in the old priest's massive library...
...I also came upon an essay by Leslie Fiedler called "The American Jewish Novel and the Breakthrough," which gave me my theme...
...The decoratively carved chest of drawers, the two Venetian armchairs, the chaliced vase with its paper flowers...
...The next day we smelled their carcasses on the evening breeze blowing from the river Boog...
...It was about nine months after I came there and so I never got to know him...
...Apart from that, my father had the bleariest eyes I've ever seen...
...This nose of his was not ugly, it was if anything too handsome, too bold, too proud of its own importance...
...Rupture de semence tourbillonne le clair ruisseau...
...What could be simpler than that...
...I could feel that happening...
...Cariba's face had turned an earthen gray...
...Those that are asleep" was later taken to mean "the dead," or "those who sleep m the ground...
...I became aware of the realities and enormities of the Holocaust...
...There was, moreover, not a single volume in French...
...whether by the apparent result of a dazzled condition in which the victim would step calmly into a deep cistern or climb to a snowy height and fall asleep — in any event, nature did not suffer a freed slave to live...
...The stalling (joint of his inquiry was the striking scarcity of messianic activity in a people so given over to the messianic idea...
...Trust in God...
...THIS IS YOUR CAPTAIN This is your Captain...
...He saw the civilization that invented the microscope side by side with the civilization that invented conscience — cell-seekers and God-praisers uniting in a majestic dream of peace...
...He read whatever was there...
...Joseph in Egypt" expands this concern, evoking the confrontation between Jewish and European cultures during the Holocaust...
...The magazine's point of view was a strong but flexible one...
...The four conspirator-nuns who had concealed him believed that in this laboratory, with God's Kelp (it was a theory and an experiment), he would end by turning Christian...
...In the snug little sitting room in London with its out-of-season gas fire where the grate ought to have been, Claude appeared to be acquainted not only with The-Poet-with-Two-Initials, but with a surpising number of other listeners in the room...
...All the same, he did not send Joseph away...
...She asked Joseph intimidating questions that had no focus...
...They made the Middle-Western college scene seem more reachable for me than Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, which seemed to me more like the Elmora Country Club...
...So, as is often true of anything creative, which I think NAR was, it was the result of a number of things coming together: the opportunity to do a different kind of magazine - essentially a "little magazine" that had to survive in the mass market...
...And on Sabbaths, how they sometimes left you in the dark when you couldn't ask for light...
...What power they had in their jaws...
...The taste of Paradise...
...I woke up in bed at home...
...The-Poet-with-Two-Initials said...
...You don't know what you're talking about," she said...
...That's why I brought you," Claude said...
...Why would I choose Yale...
...Clouds cast their shadows and passed on, leaving the light behind them...
...he came to seem like the best model for the academic I was becoming: a Jewish Matthew Arnold, full of graceful energy and high cultural concerns...
...The crew is here to serve yoVi...
...And she had that look in her eyes again...
...I may see people with whom I'm supposed to be in league once or twice a year, if then...
...Rabbi Nachman ben Isaac and Proust, the half-Jew (on his mother's side...
...They stood together on the deck, pushing into the straight and steady wind, and Joseph knew before it happened that Claude would kiss him, and in a particular way, not as two bold friends kiss...
...I took my three by five cards into the stacks where I read Commentary and Midstream all the way back to their beginnings...
...A youthful poet decides at evening that the word water suits water and the word light suits light...
...The Jews of the medieval age wished to survive physically, of course, but this was not precisely a part of Jewish perfection...
...Here I was in graduate school studying American and English literature from an Aristotelian point of view and writing my dissertation on The Bostonians...
...It came time for me to go to school...
...I took it in, because the only people I knew with ideas were my Uncle Adrian and his patients and my Aunt Fan...
...A child cries on the lawn...
...And we all let you say this without correction...
...In our streets they were few and far between...
...He tried to frown himself into the same kind of concentrated expression, but Claude's hand, closed over his, was a furnace of distraction...
...The peasant children threw stones at them and still they went on...
...His work on these obscure systems of thought belongs, certainly, to the history of Jewish ideas, but also to something else: the history of Jewish subjectivity...
...Carmi, the former editor of Ariel magazine, is editor and translator of the recently published Penguin Anthology of Hebrew Verse (Viking/Penguin...
...Joseph splashed his hands (how sore they had become in the dungeon that was his haven, the knuckles often bleeding) through volume after volume, coughing with impatience: what else had Edmond Fleg set down...
...An unbeliever, naturally, cannot be satisfied by such an explanation, nor can a historian...
...In the spring he bathed in a metal barrel that gathered rainwater, but it was full of leaves and twigs, and the mouth of it was crisscrossed with gummy spider webs...
...He let him rake the barn, he let him hide — he never let him do any of the milking...
...Realized from that how solid & potent & present the emotion of buried life is — this the knot of emotion toward women - realized also toward Elise To whom I gave $40 the night before & sent her on bus into darkness of America, maybe to her doom-suicide before she reaches New York...
...There was more...
...A flash of Fleg...
...The servant girls couldn't make heads or tails of it...
...Adam Bede and Silas Marner and Ethan Frame and the other fiction and plays we read in school were all about them, about the gentiles or about the old-fashioned America on whose margin I lived...
...Afterwards I rubbed my sandals and pulled the belt of my short trousers round to bring the buckle to the front...
...Girl, I'll remember you at night as I sit half-naked on the balcony watching a lizard climb the house wall, I'll remember you little lizard with your two eyes your hand and your fingers that you brought to us from Kfar Saba...
...Joseph declined the whorled pink cakes the maid set down and anxiously ate a buttered brioche, wondering why Claude had maneuvered him here...
...Even their odious fussiness had quieted down...
...Editor David Rosenberg Associate Editor Nessa Rapoport Contributing Editors Mordecai Richler, Cynthia Ozick, Arthur A. Cohen, Amos Oz, Yehuda Amichai, Elie Wiesel, Alan Lelchuk, Ted Solotaroff, Robert Alter, Leon Wieseltier, Menachem Peri, Gabriel Moked Editorial Board Alexander Sened, Shlomo Derech, Gershon Shaked, Avraham Huz, Dani Shavit, Nilli Cohen, J. Michman-Melkman Special Assistance Nilli Cohen, Elie Wiesel, Michael Kerem, Abraham Atik, Richard Siegel, Leonard Fein, Yehuda Amichai, Yitzhak Komem, Steve Adler Publisher Hakibbutz Hameuchad Publishers, and Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature U.S...
...He spoke with authority...
...Let me try to explain this a little bit because, in a sense, it taught me how to be an editor...
...Your family wishes your interests were more cosmic," his new friend Claude mocked...
...They had even, it appeared, bribed the servants...
...I'd become a loner on the magazine...
...You had had terrible experiences in your stamp shop...
...And I was being asked to write 3,000 words...
...I've got the answer, give me a question...
...Spend her afternoons with eyes shut, abandoning her face to the sun...
...She had clever nostrils, "Why did you come down here...
...She wishes to be as we are, and we thank Our Lord for the gift of His blood through His seed of the flesh...
...I heard that Rosenfeld was teaching at the downtown center of the University of Chicago...
...It might even be said that the real consolation for exile, almost its real refutation in the consciousness of the Jews, was not messianism but halakha...
...It was agreed at the last minute that great uncle Salomon would accompany me to the school yard, as mother was otherwise engaged and Papa had already left for his printing works...
...And even Haifa will sprawl out on the Carmel like an Arab stone cutter...
...Even Voltaire could not be trusted...
...But both his father and his mother looked into his books anxiously — what was this, what did that mean, and how could one get one's living from such trivia...
...Joseph's parents thought it a wild expedition with no sane purpose, to cross the Channel to England only to sit on a hard chair while an Englishman recited out loud in an incomprehensible barbarian tongue...
...But usually the question is a bit more veiled, i.e., "What's it feel like to be part of the New York establishment...
...He was helpless...
...I could deny it all: it never happened...
...They themselves didn't know where their elder was taking them, but still they went after him, or rather, were pulled...
...In the midst of this, my roommates made me aware of the Moscow trials, not to mention the Hitler-Stalin pact...
...By now they were friendly with the villagers, with whom they bought, sold and bartered...
...What was the flaming sword...
...it was, he discovered, more difficult for him to find intellectual heroes than it had ever been for Claude...
...They bought from them cheap golden pins, hair combs, silvery porcelain, and other trinkets that the peasant women couldn't resist...
...I said I was going to be a labor lawyer...
...When were the mats folded away...
...i.e., my literary heroes, except for myself, were not Jewish...
...He said instead: "Good...
...The Fleg book was dense with Talmudic and biblical references...
...It was an easy trot, winding down from the fish store on the Rue des Rosiers along the Rue St...
...If I didn't stop digging trenches and rolling in the dust, my mother said, she'd go away and leave me on my own, to teach me a lesson...
...Mother shut herself up in her room...
...I'm being punished too...
...The patch is unnoticeable...
...That night, in bed, I recited Hear O Israel with great fervour and set the angels Ariel and Gabriel and Michael and Raphael at the four points of the compass to watch over me, and still I dreamt all night of dark orchards and walls within walls...
...Aunt Bliumtzi, who was always braiding her enormous plait, with her little cherry mouth turning this way and that, dispersing tidbits ol the latest, most shocking, information as if she were telling tales of the saints, had told me confidentially: "Your mother...every year when spring comes round, her doktorl starts coming...
...And what will she do now...
...We have reached cruising altitude...
...What a revelation...
...also Julius Ceasar...
...There was, however, no evidence of a funeral, almost no evidence of anything — only movement, and the brush of his own unaccustomed swathings, and the nuns' murmurs among themselves, shutting him out...
...his mother said...
...He gave half a shudder and half a jump...
...Joseph, sinking down, locked himself into the hidden membraned dungeon of the invisible cell and made himself its prisoner...
...I am expected there, perhaps they have already stopped expecting me...
...To which world did he belong...
...In Poland...
...I did not understand then what he meant...
...The temporal dimension of experience, on which fiction feeds, is all awry here...
...The Weariness was a shade of grey...
...Yehoshua Benjamin Tammuz Robert Alter Jonathan Cott Yonat and Alexander Sened Nissim Aloni Leslie Epstein Michael Brownstein David Avidan Michal Govrin Joanne Greenberg Allen Mandelbaum Yona WaUach Zelda Julia Markus Yitzhak Ben Ner Arieh Sachs Grace Schulman Harold Schimmel Natan Zach Dahlia Ravikovitch David Shahar Joachim Neugroschel IN MEMORIAM: GREAT UNCLE SALOMON Arthur A. Cohen Arthur A. Cohen is the author of In the Days of Simon Stern, among other novels...
...Vasil did what was right," snapped Cariba...
...JOSEPH IN EGYPT Cynthia Ozick Cynthia Ozick's current book of fictions — stories and novellas — is Levitation...
...Now he did not know what he should say...
...I saw that Shmiel was trembling too...
...Nevertheless he was afraid...
...At the same time, the essay was full of passion, discovery, excitement...
...But he meant just the opposite: remoteness...
...In Judaism's ideas he studied Judaism's energies...
...O dearest uncle, how I delighted in being your Sabbath handmaid...
...As if he had managed at last to cast off his blue mood...
...The daily work I did was my way of making contact with the working class: I found it at 80 Warren Street, where unemployed waiters went to get temporary jobs...
...So Joseph perceived that - despite his father's immigrant gratitude for the privilege of egalit...
...After the war he found the ABCs alive, but no one else...
...Everyone was gone...
...The Channel was so choppy that Claude was reluctant to venture out on deck, and made Joseph stay with him below, reading...
...Sweat spilled from behind Joseph's ears down into the well of his collarbone...
...Antoine to the Bastille: the very spot where modernity began...
...little fish darted anxiously through the receding waters...
...Great God, to be having such a conversation in such a place, with the noose already around his neck...
...Skilled fingers, hardened by hard nights...
...every strange sentence she spoke frightened him more...
...Father suddenly got to his feet...
...To what end all this...
...Does it work for you...
...This was nothing ordinary...
...Why should they be complacent, and indeed they are not...
...All the sisters know...
...It says so in the Bible," said Hirshel...
...I turned my head and saw that the sun was already touching the corner of Father Serafim's orchard, and it looked like a seraph, a blazing fire and a flaming sword, in other words terrible to behold...
...Otherwise I would kill them...
...Nail it, saw it to see if it has resistance: this book is a rag of paper with letters like flies, while you a rag of flesh, eat dust and drip blood, wonder at it half-asleep...
...When I sang the wrong song, Yan-kele scolded me and reminded me that my grandfather was a rabbi and a professional hypocrite...
...Joseph brooded on Rabbi Pult...
...Once you looked, there were Jewish writers everywhere...
...How about you...
...whether by some grotesque but unavoidable accident, such as one involving a huge, falling stone...
...I sang "On the rivers of Babylon" for him, and he shut me up and turned my cap around: "Soon you'll start singing ? Redeemer has come to Zion' — redeemer my arse - pooh...
...The warm weather had sizzled his brains...
...We could hear them perfectly clearly...
...the title that drew him was Le Juif du Pape...
...The phenomenon posed by the history of messianism is, loosely speaking, psychological...
...His recent, very short fiction, and essays, have appeared in Harper's and Partisan Review, among other American journals...
...It embittered Joseph to know that the work at the laboratory went on very well without him...
...Partly because of that, I enrolled at the university in the master's program in English...
...Not gently either...
...It was a horror...
...The builders in wood, here and there a manservant or a maid in a rich man's house, the shiksas on their way home from the fields in the evening, laughing and singing bawdy songs, and this same Porchoi, an expert craftsman who mended the Jews' wooden pantries and fences with a thick carpenter's pencil stuck behind his ear and his eyes hidden behind their slits, lurking...
...Father rose early and shaved...
...Monsieur Prall, be calm...
...My special figures were Joyce — "silence, exile, and cunning" was like a motto pasted on my forehead — and Kafka, as well as Rosenfeld, who was writing like Kafka and touting the marginal vision in a more local way...
...He was looking at a girl of fifteen, hazel-eyed behind spectacles, curly-haired, wearing the convent uniform, altogether plain...
...But the American preoccupation with success often blocked a penetration to other sources...
...Uncle Salomon lived to be more than eighty...
...he was well into his advanced degree and had been assisting Gaillard in the Teapot until Gaillard suggested it was, for the time being, better not to...
...He said, it burns and is not consumed, like the burning bush which burns and is not consumed...
...Old crones came in the dead of night to cast magic spells over her...
...I lived in that temporary waiter ambience for several years, down and out in New York - which I felt one had to go through to be a writer...
...Then I wrote my first short story, which won an award...
...I don't care...
...Naturally I could shout...
...And perhaps I was afraid to sing...
...When my own book was published, for example, it was not reviewed in Commentary, or Partisan Review, or in the New York Review of Books...
...Pretty, sweet-smelling flowers always made me sneeze, but I couldn't give the beautiful Kuka the prettiest, sweetest flower there was...
...He said this, or something just like it, to his schoolmate Jean-Lucas, who hooted at him because he had never heard of Crusader knights...
...Joseph was uneasy...
...They could not have fallen very far if so much truth could fill every precinct of life...
...a few doors down Rachel had powdered her white face — the red-slippered actress, not the Mother of Israel...
...That was typical of him: in any personal matter, he was always a mensch...
...He said, an angel which burns like fire...
...There is an essential relation between ideas of Judaism and ideas of survival, which may be described as follows: every idea of Judaism includes within it the imagination of its own impossibility, and every idea of survival includes within it the imagination of the form in which Judaism should survive...
...It was bright day...
...The villagers came to buy fabric and gilded porcelain from them...
...And there is a tranquil village on the low-lying plain...
...Listen to this bit," Claude, curled in his bunk, called to Joseph...
...Instead he ran, he ran nowhere...
...Long before the time of which I write, it had been determined that any slave, set free by his or her owner, would die within a few days...
...Even when Mother called "Paul...
...He ran through the village as though it were on his heels, calming down a bit only upon reaching our house...
...Whenever I could, starting at age thirteen or fourteeen, I'd come to New York for a weekend...
...It may be characterized as the reluctance to be redeemed...
...He is fascinated by the erotic machine, the mechanics of living bodies being his favorite domain...
...He reminded himself that he was rid of nox perpetua...
...Could it afford to take in Communists and expect to have any credibility...
...he had sometimes heard his father remark on the iridescence of the scales of the ordinary morue, how a fish could become a mosaic of rainbows...
...Germaine...
...In the recent past, autobiography was a source of defining Jewishness for modern writers...
...Around this time, 1959, the Times Literary Supplement asked Roth to write an article on the Jewish role in American letters...
...They assumed he was preparing for medicine, healing, reversing injury and pain...
...So Joseph abandoned literature and history, the side of the mind that, whatever pictures and illuminations might be slung there, was like a cave teeming with bestial forms: he looked for a place without a taint...
...Its subject is, most simply, what Jews wanted...
...he made himself think of Joseph Prall, a fugitive, temporarily fallen into a hole in the grid of roundup and capture, caught...
...This is the problem for the Jews...
...And in that school I flourished...
...I tore off a bunch and chewed...
...I joined a Jewish fraternity, and in general associated with other Jewish boys...
...He swung the Ta'anit upward - mother...
...To hide the radio's vulgar brown face (the knobs like cruel eyes), he laid the Ta'anit on top of it...
...Augustine...
...Their names were strange but not the dark music of their lives, made up of yearning and melancholy, just as I was...
...This is my daughter," you announced proudly...
...I said I wanted to enter law school in three years...
...Gradually it came clear to him that the old priest had loved thought more than Jesus...
...The performance of the commandments implies that this world is a sufficient theater of meaning, that it lacks little that is necessary for the attainment of perfection...
...Respectable citizens on their way to the town hall for a Zionist meeting would stop to wonder, and they never tried to argue with him...
...On the flyleaf there was inscribed a single word in the old priest's handwriting: D?licieux...
...Who'll bring us perfume now from the city...
...Doctor Munther didn't dare enter the room...
...The youngest son became a religious fanatic, driven to extremes of piety and austerity that carried him as far beyond the family pale as his oldest brother had been...
...Evenings their elder told stories...
...Her bed stood just as it had four centuries earlier...
...She wrote letters thickened by scones, pies, creampuffs, currant buns, breads kneaded of rye, malt, wheat, corn...
...even out in the fields, to which he had driven them, they didn't stop bickering...
...were separated by an aeon, but what good friends they were...
...Horrible cross-sections, Joseph...
...Arched, polished, gleaming, brand new, it was amply prepared to atone for the inadequacy of his eyes...
...he held doors open for me...
...If only we could manage to remember, greatness would be ours again...
...The further into night it got, the less they spoke, the more they sang...
...Joseph's job, after school, was to sweep and wash the wooden floors of the poissonnerie, sprinkle them with new sawdust, and then, when dusk began, hurry into the back room to straighten out the chairs in readiness for Rabbi Pult's arrival...
...I saw no curtains now...
...Beloved uncle Salomon...
...My mother found her uncle as unsettling as did my father...
...The river level kept dropping...
...The days ran on by themselves...
...The continuity of the commandments is the perfect symbol of the Jewish constraint upon messianism...
...He saw what they thought about him: you live, and our son, only on account of not having been born, is dead...
...If alive, she would break into hilarity...
...he was finished...
...Forthcoming is now possible because of Hakibbutz Hameuchad (Israel's leading literary house) and Moment, and with the support of the National Foundation for Jewish Culture in the U.S...
...Silence was in their dress and gait...
...He also was reassuring politically...
...Here comes my little doctor, They won't see him, They won't see him, All the flowers will bloom, And my little doctor my groom, will fly with me to Eretz Israel, With me to Eretz Israel...
...We wish to think of it - although by reason of no laws of mechanics, as a structural defect...
...Who was Edmond Fleg...
...Or I could give up...
...It assumed that the old Commentary had pretty much exhausted the "hard anti-Communist" position, that we were in a new decade with an opportunity to articulate new issues and new perspectives, mainly from the liberal left...
...His main figure is a sophisticated, elegant Ukrainian Jew with a symbolist's imagination...
...We're his cousins, why should we fear...
...Your relation to your work as a writer was as impersonal as possible...
...Whereas at Thomas Jefferson in Elizabeth virtually all of us studied Latin for four years, at Roselle Park I was the only boy in the third year Latin class...
...Mother went to have a look at him several times but he didn't wake up...
...In a plenitude of grief he took it in that it was all over for him...
...You go to GUM, for example, the department store in Moscow, and it's just like being back at Klein's...
...We passed a small park and instead of continuing a circuit about its iron fence, uncle Salomon directed me to a bench inside and seated me...
...So that nobody could be said to "use" a tool in the sense that we do...
...I knew...
...But there was another place he liked to pass whenever he could, still without telling his father or Rabbi Pult...
...We had enough of these hobgoblins...
...My life in two copies, or three, perhaps...
...But I willed myself to write that article because I sensed a kind of destiny at work...
...Boulders...
...I cannot understand how I got here, and I have no idea how to get away or in which direction or how it is possible that I have been here before...
...a transparent spiral of vapor curled out of its flank...
...The old acacia flowers again": "shita", meaning "acacia" and "system", is reminiscent of a line in a poem by Hayim Nachman Bialik (1873-1934): "The acacia blossomed, the butcher slaughtered...
...But I could have...
...l'lulonian Ode and Other Poems ((lily Lights) teas published in I'J/12...
...earlier books are available in paperback from Bantam and HBJ...
...a political explanation, for example, according to which the messiahs posed too great a threat to the authority of the rabbinic establishment, which had a strong interest in discrediting them...
...and Israel's Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature...
...and liberie — catching up eighteen centuries late, Rabbi Pult said with a special pucker between his eyebrows, to the postulates and civilities of Hillel and the fathers...
...They don't even allow us to die...
...Joseph still did not laugh - in fact, it hurt and shamed him — when he remembered the ignorant blunder of his boyhood: how, at his first visit to the Mus?e Carvavalet, he had mistaken the effigy of an actress, famous for her frivolous songs and red slippers, for the biblical Rachel...
...I'd fallen into a kind of fascination with gentile literary culture, with that elegant otherness - trying to be related to it, even to become part of it...
...You're on the side of Demeter, though you deny her...
...I would have gone to the University of Washington from Chicago if I'd not written that article in the 7X5...
...Rosenfeld was like a secret taste, a secret affinity...
...There were also the immediate affinities I struck up with so many of the writers and editors I met...
...But just as that was about to happen, he died...
...He made himself think of her growing up without the clear murmur of French in her mouth, in Poland...
...He no longer slept well...
...It was Proust: Sodome et Gemorrhe...
...he wore a cutaway to the office which he removed when he arrived and replaced with a grey alpaca jacket...
...They warned him to lie back, to keep his face from the window, to pretend to be sick and asleep, to cover himself with his veil...
...When he looked at me, the blood gushed from my nose and trickled into my throat...
...They had been caught and enslaved...
...I had to keep putting it out — it was syndicated - without its staff for about five months...
...Low hills...
...Flushed and quivering with excitement and expectation I arrived at the back of the Sadigora synagogue...
...If one's to believe in ladies journals it doesn't have to happen...
...But how can I? boys of my age...
...How Paulina had changed...
...You may smoke and lean back...
...So would they yellow and fall when we were gone...
...His wife of thirty years had died of a cerebral stroke and he was alone...
...was another painting that seemed to be paired with the first: it was of a younger woman, haughtier, cooler, much more beautiful...
...but the deferment of the ideal is an excellent strategy for making peace with the real...
...The early sixties were good years at Commentary...
...I trembled...
...And I measured with my right hand and my left to make sure that the buckle, a scouts' fleur de lys cast in lead, my pride and might, would be seen to advantage from the street where the beautiful Kuka was about to pass...
...I was guessing much of the time and guessing wrong some of the time...
...It was hardly a banquet...
...In the conative history of the Jews there must be a chapter about messian-ism...
...It is a privilege to invite you, Monsieur Prall, and also to invite this child...
...His face was unshaven and sores covered his skull...
...Jewish academics are nurtured, but not the imaginative writers...
...He no longer made such blunders...
...In order to show that just as a small piece of wood sets on fire a big piece of wood, so minor scholars sharpen the minds of greater ones...
...All that day and the days afterward, while Joseph was sauntering over the face of Paris, sauntering and swinging the Venetian Ta'anit, then exploding into speed, then again swinging and sauntering, his baby sister Ruth, in the Velodrome, screamed and screamed...
...I have known teachers who used their leather belt...
...He was afraid for himself...
...Meanwhile, I tried to write very polished Flaubertian paragraphs...
...What a shame that he threw them out," said the plump servant...
...She was being punished for it now while still alive...
...My answer is "It's pretty much like not being part of the New York establishment...
...What were my career plans...
...And then, you slapped me...
...The more I went on, the more distance grew between us...
...There is a grey glow in the sky which suggests autumn, but the air is scorched...
...He whispered his thanks in her wake...
...The old priest had read" — this was a surprise — novels and plays...
...He discovered that he was praying for his three older sisters - only what seemed to be prayer of the lung was merely panting and throat-pain...
...Articles about today's writers have often appeared in Jewish magazines, but the writers themselves rarely publish there...
...Heaven's gates are fire and water...
...As I can see now, there has been a kind of pattern in my career, a moving out from and then a return to what you might call home: home being represented by New York Jewishness, the flow of my people's history in me and through me, what I think of as my grounded side...
...They refused to wait quietly until you said your prayer at meal's end, instead bolting to the library for coffee and leaving me to watch your lips move...
...As proof, he pointed to the surface of the water in the well, where one of them was floating in the shape of the moon...
...The yard was empty...
...As he neared his own house on the Rue de Poitou — he was running like a madman - the shouts and the roil began to subside...
...I'm not really asking, I only guess...
...At night, when it was very cold, he climbed down the ladder and snuggled close to their swelled udders, between twin flanks, like a baby burrowing between a pair of breasts...
...She too, the woman too doesn't lick honey...
...They kept to their own affairs and left us to ours...
...4, 18, 28, 31, 32, 33, 37, 39 Mark Podwal: pp...
...Sometimes a woman starts singing an old song and all the other women join in...
...In the late sixties I wanted to strike out again in the direction of otherness, which presented itself as the America of the antiwar movement, of the counter-culture, what I called at the time "the imagination of alternatives" which seemed to me a kind of last-gasp attempt to restate the democratic tradition and to reorganize the party of humanity before the rational maniacs of the warfare state took over for good...
...There were velvet clots of emerald algae...
...He had forgotten the game of Fle-gethon...
...He presented me with a stamp album on my birthday and taught me geography by giving me each Sabbath a dozen or so stamps from various countries, attaching to each a history of its situation, climate, population and custom...
...They made me change my name," the girl said...
...He was hidden there by four nuns...
...When they are angry they call me Jew...
...The mother, according to one source, was "insane" — she loved her daughter obsessively, pathologically, so much so that she spent her life penning her longing in letter after letter...
...Gerson Cohen entitled his excellent lecture about niessianism '"The M\ th and the Reality...
...Yes, I'm sorry...
...I soon learned, from their determined point of view, that the Russian Revolution hadn't spread throughout Europe only because of capitalist intervention, aided by terrible White Russian generals who killed Jews...
...Forthcoming will bring together the best of these writers, who until now remain scattered...
...What kind of obscenities...
...until the torrents of water whirling like the mythical Sambatyon washed her away into the stillness at the centre of the river...
...Beware the invisible deeps," The-Poet-with-Two-Initials said, "the hidden pits, lest you be sold into Egypt...
...it was not conventional...
...David Rosenberg Nessa Rapoport In Future Issues of Forthcoming Herbert Gold Elie Wiesel Adin Steinsaltz Johanna Kaplan Yoram Kaniuk Jay Neugeboren Mark Mirsky Lynn Sharon Schwartz Alan Lelchuk Mordecai Richler Norma Rosen Yehuda Amichai Hanoch Levin Leonard Michaels Mark Helprin Phillip Lopate Steve Katz Harvey Shapiro Walter Abish Max Apple Amalia Kahana-Carmon Dennis Silk Aharon Megged Herman Wouk Hugh Nissenson Saul Bellow Robert Kotlowitz A.B...
...There were flickering spirals behind his eyes...
...The people who are saved would be the same people who wanted to be saved...
...Much later the halakhic mentality was similarly no encouragement of Zionism...
...At the problem of halakha and history I stop...
...Only the slap itself remains incomprehensible...
...We're all miserable sinners...
...Distant years and people, forgotten names, flew about and bit like vampire bats...
...In vain Mother coaxed her to play...
...Mother looked from me to Porchoi, the unruly goy who pinched the shiksas' bottoms and made their titties bounce...
...We no longer asked questions for our part, and they no longer grumbled for theirs...
...The profound and complex cast that this circumstance bestowed upon the owner-slave relation, manifested in custom as well as in law, may be imagined...
...The following piece is from his new novel, An Admirable Woman, forthcoming this winter...
...it bled off the discontent with history that might have exploded the whole thing...
...A yellowing leaf falls from a tree and spends a long time at the mercy of the breeze before it reaches the ground...
...And you'll feel relieved a bit and sleep, and I'll sit and watch...
...If he was thinking, that is...
...The more I looked at them to make sure they were real, the stronger grew my feeling that nothing was any longer the same...
...Let them go to the woods where they belong...
...in his twenties and has published three volumes of original poetry in Hebrew...
...Uncle Salomon's room, down the Jiall from mine, was cleared of packing cases and old clothes and he moved in...
...and who will wake you and eclipse your tears and prop you oh one more degrading night...
...Even the watchdogs sleep peacefully and the doves are silent...
...The nuns were proud of him - an intellectual, more than a simple holy man, though he had been that as well — and were gratified to have been given interim charge of his spiritual possessions...
...Papa wasn't particularly successful in those early days...
...The rosette of the Legion d'Honneur in his lapel and the frontlets of the Covenant on his brow...
...And neither told a lie...
...His parents were pleased when they understood Joseph was going to study in a laboratory...
...After the reading, quizzically, very kindly, The-Poet-with-Two-Initials asked to be introduced to Joseph...
...His essays have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, Dissent, and elsewhere...
...POEM ABOUT JERUSALEM If there were no Jerusalem, what would they do with a poem about Jerusalem...
...His hps speak through mine": The Hebrew Idtom is derived from a verse in the Song of Songs 7.9, "causing the lips of those that are asleep ?? speak...
...And you would never have slapped me without giving reason...
...The high school there was much more relaxed...
...Similar notes tracked through page after page...
...The-Poet-with-Two-Initials was again a proper oracle...
...Anger and sorrow took turns on his face...
...Cariba whispered acidly that men like themselves should be put out to work...
...Grace Schulman, his current translator, is the author of Burn Down the Icons (Princeton), poetry editor of The Nation, and Director of the YMHA Poetry Center in New York...
...For one thing, venerable as the wondrous house was, he could tell it was not a church — not only because there were no crosses carved in the doors, but more particularly because he was not afraid...
...His prose always drives toward a point...
...Yet what was a man without faith...
...After that he kept away from Claude...
...That was when I began to have trouble in school...
...And I would be able to taste it too...
...Not only that...
...I saw a wall around a wall...
...There's a guy I've been meaning to read named Nietzsche...
...Because I'm a radical and want to work for the Political Action Committee of the CIO...
...You could be an existentialist...
...Father didn't know, and my teacher Reb Shkolnik answered me more or less as follows: a flaming sword is a sword, in other words, like any other sword, and it is flaming, in other words terrible to behold, because it is held in the hands of a seraph...
...I was spellbound...
...His friends, new ones from arrondissement* to the west and north, did not sound their vowels as he did...
...Yes," he said, "I hate it...
...it was a breakthrough, at least for me...
...Then the little wooden people somersaulted in the air, the blackheads on father's forehead cleared, and a kind of smile appeared on his lips...
...And she dreams...
...And so it was...
...Our city cousins sat munching the apples that Karola had brought them...
...The history of Judaism has been written as the history of Jewish ideas and the history of Jewish institutions...
...And after that Joseph kept secret from his father and from Rabbi Pult everything he was savoring about damsels and dragons and chivalry and - he hardly let his eyes pluck at the words — the Holy Grail...
...The watcher moved toward him, a little thing...
...A TALE OF YITZCHAK Meir Wieseltier Translator: Harold Schimmel Meir Wieseltier was born in 1941 and came to Israel from Moscow at an early age...
...What is unique is that they have never been published together...
...Your London hero thinks he's an oracle," Joseph complained to Claude on the boat-train going home...
...I hate you...
...Another time Claude told Joseph that it might be a lark to visit a certain English poet — he called him The Poet-with-Two-Initials - in London, and that if Joseph would consent to go, Claude would foot the bill for the two of them...
...How different they were...
...Occasionally the danger of the veterinarian's visit...
...It was written on her face that she was meant to die...
...Joseph protested that his English was not good enough, that he had not comprehended three-quarters of anything...
...I was prepared for that partly because we lived in summer boarding houses where I'd run into older Jewish kids, and many of them were at either Michigan or Wisconsin...
...He counted fourteen meals before he told the breakfast nun (so orderly and predictable were they) that a Ren?e LeFevre had wandered into his hiding place...
...The horses stamp their hooves restlessly, sniffing death...
...POEM Take poems, and do not read do violence to this book: spit on it, crush it kick it, pinch it...
...Stay away from here," Karola implored...
...His short prose pieces have appeared in Harper's and other magazines...
...The law presumes that the absolute is already available...
...But finally, it didn't surprise you...
...it turned upon Seize the Day, The Assistant, and a couple of Roth's stories...
...Those are real Jews for you," said Cariba...
...Comme le cerf abattu dans la veld le ruisseau rouge saigne pour contenter ma soif...
...This was a marvel, that two souls, two such separated tonalities, so to speak, could between them describe the true map of life...
...The first story I read was "The Seven Who Were Hanged...
...During childhood (before the house in Charlottenburg was built) my mother's uncle, his name was Salomon Klarsicht, lived with us in our apartment in Berlin...
...I was interviewed by a man who looked as if he had just stepped out of the corporate loan department of Morgan Guaranty...
...Editorial Offices: P.O.B...
...He was part ghost, part beast, part shard...
...How unschooled each would think the other...
...His novels published in English translation include My Michael, Touch the Water, Touch the Wind, and The Hill of Evil Counsel...
...Never forget, child, what you are: you are a Jew...
...by contrast, spoke only ol "taking a trip...
...They had already spent all the money that Grandfather had given them and hadn't a penny left...
...1 David Rosenberg, Nessa Rapoport Note from the Editors F2 Arthur A. Cohen In Memoriam: Great Uncle Salomon F3 Cynthia Ozick Joseph in Egypt F5 Aharon Appelfeld Apple of the Eye F14 Amos Oz Three Sketches F77 Ted Solotaroff Jewish Ghosts F19 Allen Ginsberg Dream of Naomi F26 Leon Wieseltier A Passion for Waiting F27 Yitzhak Orpaz Tomozhenna Street F29 John Hollander In Ancient Days F33 T. Carmi Three Poems F34 Meir Wieseltier Eight Poems F36 Drawings Ivan Schwebel: title page, pp...
...I was more of a street kid than most of my friends who where already looking for signals to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and so on...
...Of course each of these social and spiritual settlements was matched by the experience of exile, and by the yearning to be free of it...
...She refused to let the doctor see her...
...And so it was...
...It became more and more urgent to cry out that his family had disappeared (but he did not understand what he was doing, or why...
...They were everywhere at once...
...Jewish kids tended to hang together in the melting pot of the local high school...
...My first published essay was a long review of "Goodbye Columbus," called "The Jewish Moralists: Roth, Bellow, and Malamud," which was mainly about the role of suffering in reaching moral truth...
...Soeur Th?r?se warned us there could be an inspection at any time, there might be a stranger at any time, in any corner of the school, even a surprising place, and it would be you...
...How do I account for that...
...But our social origins are generally different...
...And a big sun will kiss all those places, as if they were children who rebelled and returned tc the good And it will be hot and quiet in our place...
...That's all...
...and finally my own felt need to be moving on and out...
...There is also another conclusion that may be drawn...
...As a man of science, you will understand the elation one feels at divine theory revealed in human experiment...
...It was as if an understanding had been reached between them...
...The days were still long...
...it had a certain austere concentration...
...Even your silences are stored in the black box...
...He heard his name and felt he had been shot through...
...Life flowed through closed circuits while we battered on the dissipating beauty of it...
...Instead of arranging for almost everything in the magazine to be written along predictable lines, I'd let the writer tell me what he really wanted to write about...
...I would describe the conservative character of messianism in this way: it protected the acceptance of the world by confining the desire for change to a hope...
...I would begin with a smaller, but no less striking, fact - that for the Jews the history of messianism is the history of false messianism...
...She was singing something sad...
...Jewishness is probably much less pronounced and coherent than WASPish-ness was when book publishing was in the hands of the Harcourts and Scribners...
...Most of the time I lived on Macdougal Street where I didn't get to know very many literary people...
...Everyone knows...
...He had a brother-in-law in a high ministry of Vichy...
...I sat on the veranda, abandoning my face to the winter sun...
...Some were burned to ash, some only charred...
...I read Thucydides, Herodotus, Homer, Greek tragedies, Aristotle, annotating almost every speech or paragraph...
...I had been educated in the Middle West, at Michigan and Chicago, and felt that much of that experience and what vision it had given me had been more or less unemployed in the years at Commentary...
...Take," she said...
...In Amos Oz Translator: Nicholas de Lange the evenings they sit outside on easy chairs to enjoy the westerly breeze...
...Can't you see that the Master is angry...
...I still have that...
...They have not fathomed the full meaning of the problem of the future for Jewish spirituality...
...There were no more harsh words and complaints...
...Yet the author spoke to me and spoke to me...
...Rosenfeld too wrote about this dilemma...
...it would smell...
...He read it in a gulp: it was about an encounter between Pope Clement VII and Solomon Molcho, the Marrano visionary burned by the Inquisition...
...You call me a speculator...
...They understood this meant the Bishop wished them to relieve him of the old priest's baggage: he had had a dangerous reputation for liberalism...
...He could listen, if he liked, to the war...
...He apologized for the pail of excrement they daily carried away...
...As night progressed, the agents' voices grew louder...
...Our memory must be wakened — not the outer core of it, which was riven with quarrels and old feuds, but that other, ancient memory, in which we were all indivis-ibly one...
...He was circumspect around my parents, keeping his conversation to matters of general curiosity, never insisting that my parents join him in his custom nor criticizing them for their indifference to his observance...
...Buy a single earring...
...Joseph Prall, born into the middle of his time, close to the middle in a family of nine children, was the fifth to wake alive in the cramped but broad-windowed flat above the Rue de Poitou, in the Marais, not far from his father's fish store in the very middle of the Rue des Rosiers -where, in the back room, among crates of fresh silvery mackerel and tall brown-glass bottles of brine, Rabbi Pult taught a class of five boys every evening, two of them Joseph's brothers Gabriel and Loup...
...But after a stretch of this — time was amorphous - his four saviors lugged down to him a huge and enticing library, all in what seemed no more than a week or so, straining down the unlit stone stairs under the troubled weight of box after cumbrous box, until he found his cot surrounded by a maze of boxes, each loaded tight with books, but without order of any kind...
...he was not certain of what he saw...
...And as suddenly they would disappear again...
...Their new source of income inspired them with hope...
...Mother's voice reached us from the inside of the house...
...A puddle still trickled from the center of the pyre...
...hence, according to the Jewish code, as much a Jew as Rabbi Nachman himself), both measured the world, one by passion for the ideal, the other by passion for the sardonic detail...
...Like a dog, I slunk down the street, climbed the Vishnitzers' high wooden fence and leapt heroically from an imaginary cage to freedom...
...even Voltaire had contempt for Leviticus...
...They gave him the husband's castoff overalls and a threadbare blanket - a corner of it was stiff with dried blood, animal or human...
...It might be called the conative history of the Jews...
...When I started the New American Review, one of the strong directives I gave myself was to try to create a national magazine, rather than my generation's version of Partisan Review...
...his family, originally from Minsk (Berthe cackled out the irony of it), owned a bakery in Manchester...
...The dried-up Pruth was angry...
...The pocket calculator lights, turns off, adds up...
...Now he was inside Madame de S?vign?'s own apartment...
...He seemed proud of that invisibility...
...But you, dear old man, were neither...
...Then he noticed that the Ta'anit, also leather-bound, also dark green, almost exactly matched the old priest's volume of Cor-neille — at first sight you could not tell the difference...
...I began reading Partisan Review fairly early on in college and there too I learned a lot...
...No repose even...
...Not only that...
...Perhaps it had to do with the hush that ran quickly through the drawing room, painting it different shades of yellow...
...Thus would it be, with or without us, for ever and ever at this time of the year...
...We steal across fading boundaries...
...What had happened to Father...
...They dwelt with - not merely in -their places...
...I was by then nearly seven...
...All of these are complex developments...
...In the middle of the floor he saw all the books they had packed into suitcases the night before dumped out...
...In addition to his many books in Hebrew, Ants (Iowa Review) and The Death of Lysanda (Jonathan Cape) have appeared in English translation...
...Safe on the tongue of a liar...
...it's from his biblical cycles...
...Stay away from here," Karola kept imploring them...
...It is nearly half an hour since I received the last...
...That was my "good" outfit...
...One would hardly have known he was a Jew...
...I almost drowned, until I heard her singing...
...He could not tell whether it was Jewish or Christian...
...I keep to my schedule...
...It seemed natural to them that he was immersed in Latin — ancient languages are always serious - but what would they have thought of Catullus...
...The one from behind the curtain...
...I left the Trib after nine months or so to start the New American Review...
...And in the meantime the town came alive with people and activity...
...Our estate and all that was on it would become a distant memory...
...A joke, a joke...
...They believed in every superstition...
...The items of her collection appear, of course, in her dreams: all the smiles daub perfume just for her and in evening dress, refreshed, they appear one by one and hover on the steps and the kisses and the handshakes a madwoman...
...Rupture of seeds swirls the clear brook...
...Black mineral dust...
...She went about barefoot and rolled in the grass...
...New York is still the place where my two aunts lived and the Upper West Side is still the place where I feel most at home in America...
...To get there, he had only to turn sharp left on the Vieille du Temple, into the Rue des Franc Bourgeois, and walk two streets over...
...After that he kept his eye perpetually on the staircase...
...his ribs were in agony...
...He didn't budge when Mother sat down next to him...
...He was too many streets away by now to be among those good citizens who could hear the moaning, soughing, and sobbing behind the Velodrome's walls as the day's heat gathered...
...DREAM OF NAOMI Allen Ginsberg Allen Ginsberg, born in Pulerson...
...He sat on plush so princely that he was certain this must be the car that follows the hearse...
...Please fasten your seat belts...
...Chonneh the cartdriver's whip is better and more honest than you are...
...He was a serious student, and felt it his obligation to keep it from his parents that French gentlemen are sometimes not serious...
...Certainly not...
...I was from Roselle Park and I didn't know how to dress for such an occasion...
...then they turned into a leafy road and drove all day and into the night...
...The blood pounded in my ears...
...But the formation of an unspoken point of view, if there is one, could occur anywhere...
...I never went into that dark hole...
...Claude's father was the director of an autombile company, in which certain ornate old great-aunts held shares...
...The Bishop had requested them to sort and catalogue at their leisure...
...Thank you," whispered my mother...
...We've lowered the wheels...
...I had...
...a blow on the eyeballs...
...A wide corridor preceded her salon...
...Let them all bleed...
...He was, however, meticulously clean and upright...
...In the blackness he heard the ranting against the Jews and preferred the lamp — he had grown intimate with the old priest's nomad intellect, and sank into it again when his tending nun went away...
...A peasant was forever a peasant...
...That's all right, then...
...The shocking fact about Judaism is not the degree to which it was determined by its history, but the degree to which it was not...
...And I felt my mother drawing the curtain slightly aside, her eyes on his...
...Pult of the pyre...
...I had to do something else...
...She said she's a third-generation Catholic...
...Standing in amazement, perhaps still waiting for some explanation that cannot possibly come...
...Joseph said he was...
...Ann Arbor in 1948 was like City College with trees...
...it was folly to go back...
...Claude was an aesthete...
...Dream ?J Xaomi "is from a selection of journals edited by (tor don Hall and forthcoming from drove Press...
...Joseph saw that every face was composed into a special attentive look...
...Inside a stately dark green leather-bound volume of Corneille, in a violent hand, Joseph discovered a mysterious poem — did it signfy religion, or love, or confusion...
...There were professors of mine who would have killed to get a letter to the editor printed in the TLS...
...I pick up a handful of something and run it through my fingers: no, it isYiot soot...
...He lassoes the dog's head, poking and pressing with his stick, and drags it off choking and howling...
...The cabin tilted, catapulting Val?ry out of Claude's grasp and jolting Joseph first toward the low ceiling, and then more or less into Claude's arms...
...They helped him into it (the smell of laundry soap and burning, the smell of the pyre) and led him to a curtained car...
...Come into the light...
...The two white horses, our companions over the years, stood uncertainly through the day without moving, nuzzling their necks against the window when evening came...
...Among his earlier volumes are Tales Told of the Fathers and Movie-Going...
...Now this standard did not begin with Norman...
...he said this in English, for the play on "level" and "lever"), Gaillard had become narrowly uneasy about his Jewish students...
...I hated the Soviet system but felt so deep a connection with the Russian atmosphere, as though I were returning home to the place where I'd spent my earliest years...
...His father perhaps did not altogether despise poetry and novels...
...It made their indifference less significant...
...While they waited to have their teeth fixed, they would talk about fascinating subjects such as Trotsky, Kolchak and Deniken, and the Red Army...
...After six years of being told the answers, I was ready for some questions...
...He renounced meat when he joined our household so that he could eat with relative impunity at our unobservant table, restricting his diet to bread, fruit, vegetables and boiled eggs...
...His easygoing manner had disappeared...
...Nevertheless he did not dream where his family, at that very instant, might actually be: no more than half a mile distant, having been herded and driven with nine thousand others into the Velodrome d'Hiver, a sports stadium whose ramparts he had glimpsed only half an hour ago, reflecting the morning's honeyed sunlight...
...Yes, children were playing here and a lot of mothers were sitting in the shade, on mats, knitting, feeding the children, telling us off and chatting among themselves...
...Rabbi Pult's library was sparser than the old priest's, more condensed, less distracted...
...He gathered the nuts with an air of quiet confidence, as if it was a matter of course...
...They sang in hushed voices, until the melody was overcome...
...Fulfillment without closure...
...Their books are on the trade market...
...There were stacks of poetry volumes — Joseph had gratefully volunteered to sort — and much philosophy and theology...
...He resembled a country squire whom long illness had drained but not broken...
...Quite the contrary: hope was an entirely legitimate mode of engagement, a very high mode of engagement, with history...
...He was too sane to believe any of this...
...he said...
...Towards morning the walls turned into curtains parting one after the other, with mother's face receding behind them, white as when I was awake...
...Sometimes Father too sat watching them...
...Father left the room like a man who had done his duty...
...Bliss flowered in all his limbs...
...When the yard emptied at night, they crowded together at the foot of the pear tree to pray...
...Perhaps Klein's didn't die...
...Well, then...
...They were not kind to him here — not that they were unkind, but they were gnarled and fearful old people, hardworking and childless, the husband with long leathery earlobes, the wife always suspicious inside her empty eyes, so pale they were almost white...
...It is a strange expanse of low hills, smudged here and there with grey boulders...
...Joseph debauched by dry dreams henna'd prince of the pit of ripe Egypt, hauled up to hints of grainy grandeur, the king's gatherer, youth of the silos, fresh lord of cells and bins, famine's barn-boy...
...Kiryat Motskin, that is where I am supposed to be going...
...but not many have drawn a certain conclusion from this fact...
...I was very frightened...
...You had no idea...
...The only appeal was to memory...
...Take...
...I've just been told that a friend's nephew from a kibbutz in the North fell among the cedars of Lebanon...
...but Claude was glum...
...The erotic machine, Joseph...
...As for the magazine's politics, I noticed that people like Glazer and Moy-nihan commenced to be as influential as Paul Goodman had been two or three years before...
...Settling in New York must have been my destiny — even though it superficially happened by accident...
...The piece was full of that feeling...
...Gaillard's successor took Joseph back...
...A similar encounter within myself occurred in reviewing Irving Howe's book World of Our Fathers...
...Again he gripped the radio -what kind of charade could it be...
...it got me out from under the psychological handicap of feeling that I couldn't compete with my Jewish friends...
...Independence Garden" is a park in the center of Jerusalem...
...Don't pay her any attention...
...Joseph came and stood near Claude's bed, looking down into Claude's book...
...Like a father and mother...
...7, 15, 21 Arie Navon: pp...
...That night the farmer entered the barn with a flashlight and the dwarfed but solid branch of a tree...
...The red light goes on...
...I don't know how I managed to do it...
...At least in my imagination...
...Joseph felt how naive Rabbi Pult was about the future altogether -as if, in such a Europe, there could now be a future at all...
...Don't shoot," pleaded the elder for dear life...
...They ducked down where they stood...
...He worried about whether he ought to inform the nuns about his visitor...
...That's about as much as I can report about the allegedly concerted backscratching that is said to be our favorite pastime...
...A few weeks after I went to the Trib, for example, it was struck...
...The summer heat shimmered at the open window...
...Jewishness was not my bag at the time and yet it signified, more or less unconsciously, a certain ethic that I was trying to join to a modern art that came from the gentiles...
...And the question, if there are clear questions (a situation like this and clear questions) is where did it go, where did it vanish so quickly — youth...
...he felt he would laugh again...
...Everyone knew that Kuka was a whore but no one could deny that she was beautiful and modestly dressed almost up to her dainty little ears, and her eyes were full of some secret dream, and on her arm hung Niuma, a dying young consumptive with an eternal white handkerchief to his mouth and a thick book (some said it was Marx's "Kapital") open between them...
...Commentary was very exciting...
...he cried from the heights of his horse as he galloped down Tomozhenna Street...
...Joseph, the Enlightenment engendered a new slogan: There is no God, and the Jews killed him...
...He had lost his will to read...
...I found myself secretly agreeing with him in his hassles with Podhoretz and also welcomed them because they made working on the magazine more interesting again...
...A wizened maid nearly as old as the great-aunt served, responding to a narrow silver bell the aunt tremulously pinched...
...We have been taught to find something deeply contingent about the grandeur of antiquities which were assembled by the toil of slaves — not so much a tarnished beauty as an invisible inner fault which we cannot perceive, but nonetheless know to be there...
...What can he account for on such a day...
...You see, my big escape route from Elizabeth and from my father's anti-in-tellectualism was in the direction of two unmarried aunts who lived in Manhattan, off Riverside Drive...
...If she speaks to the others...
...How will she punish you...
...In the margins of Pour-quoi je suis JuiJ there was still another sample of the old priest's hand and thought: The Israelitish divinely unifying impulse and the Israelitish ethical inspiration are the foundation of our French genius...
...You should be in ancestral sympathy tonight," Claude whispered...
...The darkness was like a doom, and terrible, and permanent...
...If I didn't sing what he wanted to hear, he would turn my cap around with the visor facing backwards, and this annoyed me because I knew that he thought I wore a cap because my grandfather was a rabbi and belonged to all that tribe of hypocrites, Zionists and pious frauds...
...Dienstfrey left because, as he put it, there wasn't enough oxygen...
...I had been accepted at Michigan and thought I would try an Ivy League school...
...The words without the slap would have meant little...
...It was a wallow, this endless resting, this endless reading, this endless Fleg, this endless indulgence of being alive and not caught...
...Not long ago, it was fashionable to think of contemporary writers confronting a crisis of spirit...
...I began to make friends with friends of his so that somehow we would be thrown together...
...He had felt an unknowable warmth and feared it...
...The Jews know how to live," Car-iba said...
...The smell stayed in the street...
...Not very much...
...This was a critical expansion of vision...
...She smeared a thick layer of goose fat on a piece of bread and thrust it into my hand...
...He was sick of human adventure...
...To cool off...
...I wanted to write like him...
...Jewish swindler," mother answered, smiling complacently...
...and no surprise to find those who might be called rabbinic messianists in arms against them...
...There was the creaturely feeling, the affection and irony, the shrugs and winks that Russians use to communicate and that was like second nature to me...
...I mean, I didn't know anything about Spinozists or about Jewish pietism...
...Its psychological utility, moreover, is plain...
...He lay passively for hours, seeming to watch his own macula, testing the edge of his winter hunger yet sometimes not even scheming to feed himself...
...I picked a bunch of lilac and sneezed horribly...
...Nothing was left of him but his body...
...Fruit was taken from the village to the city, cows to the district slaughterhouse...
...8 She sits in the cafe and caresses, unheedingly, with her fingertips decorative artificial grass that partitions between upholstered seats...
...I did apply to Yale, though, and had an interview in New Haven after I got out of the navy...
...Shhh," whispered my father...
...She wanted to know what he would study when he became down-toearth...
...Sun, rain, weather...
...However, by now I knew how to get around a research library...
...Again...
...The only choice I have left is either to close my eyes or to open them wide...
...Yes it did," Jean-Lucas insisted...
...The brass plaque announced that this was the Countess de Grignan, the daughter of Madame de S?vign...
...He made little people out of wood and the little people turned upside down and spun round very fast on the string threaded through their navels...
...It was still too early for his father to have opened the poissonnerie...
...Now, there seems a renewed interest on both sides to explore a common past...
...This is how he describes Leonardo's naked sketches: Here and there he has drawn anatomical unions, horrible cross-sections of love itself...
...The flowers were fleshy and delicious as the taste of the blood trickling from my nose into my mouth...
...The old man plumbed his memory, his voice insinuating itself...
...The only appeal was to memory...
...soon you'll start crying, and I won't, I won't...
...He carved his funny little creatures in the entrance hall, a kind of cubicle made of wood and crammed with a water barrel and firewood and gumboots and a ladder climbing up to the attic...
...The hourglass counts the waves...
...He said sadly: "You go out among them for the first time...
...He said that I had not only changed his voice, but his point of view as well, and so he had taken no pleasure at all in seeing the review published...
...He envied the dead and the free...
...You're a Hebrew lad, isn't that so...
...What had happened to the agents...
...they delivered him to a farmhouse, removed his costume, and left him...
...But the roundabout way was an ambush: it took him without his intending it, as if some immense magnet were pulling his very feet toward Number 23, Rue de S?vign...
...Throw this book into the sea to see if it knows how to swim...
...If you're also a writer, perhaps you're hetter off elsewhere...
...He threw back his shoulders, as though about to summon Vasil and ask about the farm...
...He was by now too ardently a Frenchman...
...yet the agents were so busy fighting that they didn't feel his whip on their backs...
...The other side is the more open, indefinite, experimental one that leads into otherness — the America (hat is not .New York, the experience and perspective (hat is not "Jewish...
...I finished editing it and gave the piece to Sherry Abel, a wonderfully tough, sweet woman who was sort of a combination of Virgil and Beatrice to me at Commentary...
...Then he read a brass plaque and was stunned...
...Stone wings enfolded the courtyard...
...In the course of giving it the Commentary look the prose did tend to become homogenized...
...they heard him speak of cells...
...Just to be near them...
...Go to a matinee...
...The nun kept up her unremitting smile: "She is our privilege...
...He was a fetal cell only the lens of a powerful instrument could detect...
...The girl did not return - unless she was here now, sitting on the lowest step and listening to him breathe in the dark, waiting for his heavy odorous stream to strike the pail...
...The stairwell was quiet, almost sleepy...
...They had styled themselves the ABCs: Anne, Berthe, Claire...
...The peasants loaded their wagons high with fruit and set out for town...
...He slept for two straight days...
...In Ancient Days" suggests an imaginative way to reconstruct an ancient context, evoking contrast to biblical narrative...
...It will improve your English and your scholarship...
...He said, "You make me afraid for you...
...His name was Adrian, n? Abe, and he was a cultivated dentist...
...Look, it's written," he said...
...But suddenly they would appear with banners and crosses, walking slowly with their heads bowed and their hats in their hands...
...he lived in a place where there had once been a pogrom no different from the pogrom in the savage Czarist village his parents had fled, and he avoided walking past the great gate of the Archives...
...Diagonally across the street from the Carnavalet, in tiny lodgings, in a corner of a mansion once inhabited by the illegitimate daughter of Henri II, Daudet had received Tur-genev, Zola, Flaubert...
...I was trying to plug an AC appliance into a DC socket, the Jewish ethos of concern into the Christian art of detachment...
...Who, mother...
...It was the tribute that realism payed to idealism...
...I was becoming a successful and cynical waiter...
...I burst into the Vishnitzers' yard...
...Sweet Jesus atoned for us all...
...You shouldn't be so open," he said...
...The curse of God floating on the face of the water...
...And I was full of expectation...
...There remains, however, the problem of messianic speculation, which was prodigious among the medieval Jews...
...His name used to be Guenther, but he rejected it when he came home to Judaism and began to use the Hebrew name he had been given at his circumcision...
...Our city cousins came to life again, noisily voicing their complaints...
...He defecated side by side with oxen...
...His father was more sympathetic than his mother...
...Father Serafim's orchard closed in on the town from the north, and you had to go round the orchard, and the dogs, and the church to reach the railway station...
...It seemed to him finally that no girl had come down the stairs...
...He called the game Flegethon...
...Metamorphosis and shock...
...Speculation was the complement, not the contradiction, of quietism...
...And sometimes they squeaked up there like burning mice, and the end of the world was just another wall and another wall, like one big prison, and I knew that everything they said about her and the things she did with the customs officers for silk stockings from Paris was one big lie, and I was going to die of consumption too and there was already blood coming out of my nose...
...A tortoise feels his way slowly among the thick bushes...
...What's the matter with Re-n?e...
...The walk down the Vieille du Temple pleased Joseph for one whole springtime: such a noble name, such reverence for the pieties and principles of an ancient people - a street called after the overrun and rubbled lost Temple of Jerusalem...
...The fruit glows, the fruit is extinguished, a man is replete a moment and isn't...
...Uniforms everywhere...
...realism...
...you'll endanger everyone around you...
...But he didn't...
...This made Joseph proud: he admired Claude, his accent, his haughty old great-aunts, his curiosity about sensuality, his worship of beautiful things and beautiful words, his quickness with foreign tongues...
...This landscape has returned to its evil ways...
...Do you hate it...
...Very concentrated, breathing fast, the howling stops...
...A PASSION FOR WAITING Pages from a Notebook, in Memory of Scholem Leon Wieseltier Leon Wieseltier was, until recently, a member of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University, and is now Senior Editor at The New Republic...
...Why do you stand for it...
...Uncle Salomon had become religious...
...Occupationally, we are the sons of these people...
...Toward evening they filled up the house...
...The sages would conclude with comforting words (they were right, of course...
...They were putting into literature what I had formerly considered unworthy of literature...
...Isn't it true, uncle Salomon, that you were warning me not to be like them, not to forget as they had forgotten...
...And afterwards Tel Aviv will once more be, and Jerusalem will bloom from the rock...
...Only Vasil continued for some reason to examine them with pointed looks...
...Still, I am curious to know what she intends to do...
...he should warn his father to stay away from this commotion...
...All of these amount to a less than "lachrymose" view of Jewish life...
...On your right, the Cape of Good Hope...
...She lay there in torment over her years of profligacy, over the city that had depraved her and dragged her into sin...
...Claude had recently become an enthusiast of Paul Val?ry, and was browsing in a chapter of Vari?t...
...memory alone and nothing else could restore us to them beyond all partitions of time...
...The two young men on either side broad-boned and good guys even-tempered small shop-owners laud Tel Aviv over Kfar Saba...
...He simply stood there, taking everything in with a morbid precision...
...Like the hart shot in the veld the red brook bleeds to please my thirst...
...After the second year or so, my relation with the magazine and with Podhoretz became more problematical...
...He moved deeper into the strangeness, and came face to face with Madame de S?vign...
...the furies of heat, a cold rime and so cruel his unwilled tears froze on his face...
...Her huge eyes were jubilant...
...I suspect, however, that it was more than merely the interest of an elite...
...Oxygen masks are in overhead locations...
...More than ever he wanted to annihilate her voice...
...Commercial travelers insulted you and once a porter heaved a rock through your window and shouted obscenities at you...
...Upstairs they would miss the girl...
...He flew back to the Rue des Ecouffes, Rabbi Pult's old briefcase with the Ta'anit in it numbing his fist...
...At night the village women came...
...How I should like to have a letter from you...
...I wouldn't be a Jew for all the tea in China," the plump servant interrupted her...
...She was meant to die...
...From their bowels...
...But what if messianism played a conservative role in the psychic economy of the Jews...
...But that evening I didn't see them...
...they gave him food and their steady smiles, as steady as iY they were screaming without stopping - but of course they were immensely hushed, and he guessed that in the normal world of upstairs daylight they were nearly as still...
...In the main the books were worn-out school texts and catechisms...
...They locked the door of the servants' quarters and put leeches on Cariba's sick chest...
...He could not breathe when they were near...
...and a year or two later Roth did...
...He asked me, "Have you ever read any philosophy...
...At these heights every syllable is recorded...
...What is the Enlightenment...
...I'd run into more than one contributor who protested, "You say you're making my manuscript into a 'Commentary piece,' but what you're really doing is taking me out of it and putting yourself into it...
...it was an effort for him to look up...
...He penetrated no farther than the first floor...
...When he discovered that I was the author, he tried me out with a book review and then offered me a job as an associate editor, which I almost immediately accepted and left the academy...
...Even at dawn they are empty...
...The leaves in the orchards yellowed and fell...
...He fell asleep in earnest and heard, repeatedly, a single sentence: These are holy women...
...I chewed the lilac and panted like an animal...
...I always felt that it was at just that point that Commentary began to close up its "opening to the left" and resume the hard line which was to grow harder from year to year...
...Madame de S?vign?'s unreasonable passion for her undistinguished daughter had turned the mother's prose into high culture and historic treasure...
...On your left, the Red Sea...
...After that, I got the GI Bill and took off for the University of Michigan...
...He thanked his nuns each time for each moment: each moment was his life...
...What else can I say before the first sparks rise from the battered runway...
...Claude is so lofty," she said, "and he has no down-to-earth friends...
...he had the seasons...
...The servants avoided them as though they were bad spirits...
...mainly I mixed with the Italian waiters who lived there and who helped me to get jobs in "joints" owned by "the Syndicate...
...For Israeli writers, a preoccupation with eroding ideals had a similar effect...
...he's interested in making a case as decisively as he can...
...What was meant was a matter of tone as well as of substance...
...He was fixed on getting out of Europe...
...I'm a Catholic," she said...
...Perhaps I liked to sing...
...It was a curious mixture of alienation and identification with cultural aspirations...
...The future of the soul was being plotted by the intellectuals of a people that could not be certain of a future...
...once simply punishers, now psychologists...
...He turned to me, his face drained and weary, and with an open palm quickly raised, slapped my face...
...He came to Israel at age 14 from Eastern Europe, in 1946...
...Cariba shut her eyes...
...The grace of Madame de S?-vign?'s flowery courtyard mated to the perfect serenity of a purified Sabbath...
...Much of her critical writing — essays and reviews for The New York Times, among others — explores the relationship between Western literary conventions and a specifically Jewish historical orientation...
...Because of his wits and blond hair and refined manners he is able to somehow survive most of the Occupation...
...I would call this chapter "A Passion for Waiting...
...He says at one point in his journal, "When will I appear on the page as I actually am...
...The second time he went in, his heart knocked like a thief's...
...This is a mentality for which hope meant something different than it does now, and something more...
...I had been to kindergarten...
...In Ann Arbor my freshman adviser was a philosopher named Irving Copilowich...
...Their old faiths had failed them...
...This kind of history is still in its infancy...
...it was July...
...Vasil declared that nothing could save her...
...As a farewell present he gave Joseph his old creased briefcase, with a treasure inside: the treatise Ta'anit, an ancient copy printed in Venice, received by Rabbi Pult's own teacher, and now passed on to Joseph to link teacher with pupil, a linking meant to be carried forward into the horizons of the farthest future...
...Something was happening: all the streets radiating out from the Rue des Rosiers were distraught, overrun with police...
...was Claude embracing him from behind, or was he, like a good fellow, preventing him from breaking his neck...
...And I began to run...
...The cows were coming home from the pasture and the smell of manure mingled with the smell of the lilac blossoms which had set the wooden fences of Tomozhenna Street on fire overnight...
...Copi wondered why I wanted to take so many political science and economics courses my first semester...
...It did this by robbing the dreams of the setting in which they were conceived, the only setting in which they made sense...
...I thought he was Japanese...
...My sins are as many as the grains of sand by the sea...
...Once I saw you make pee-pee into the pail...
...He ate what he found or filched...
...So you'll be big and strong when he comes...
...Life here is so present-minded, perhaps because its character is so much hustle and hassle...
...I dedicated my first book to her...
...A strange bloodshotness whispered in his eyes...
...my uncle said so, and they punished all the Jews for it...
...He stood there with his hat in his hands in front of him, describing how he had picked me up after I fell and brought me home, and his eyes were fixed on my mother's pained white face...
...And I was full of jubilation...
...It could be in the shock of recognition of reading Rosenfeld and the others...
...On your left, the Sea of Tranquillity...
...This acceptance of the world, this corollary of the halakhic mentality, is the context in which Jewish criticism of history must be placed...
...Father flung a little creature whose boots were bigger than all the rest of it into the air and it disappeared...
...he did not understand what he was doing, or why...
...Even those who didn't trade actively had all kinds of things in their suitcases...
...This may have been nothing more than the inevitable frictions and wariness between two ambitious young men...
...9, 11, 23 Forthcoming, An Independent Literary Supplement, will appear in the January/February...
...par le Juij Errant, by one Edmond Fleg...
...and so the latter had an influence upon the pitch of the former...
...Grain-goddess," Claude said, glowing...
...I knew he couldn't be a doctor like Doctor Prozdorov, who made the rounds of his patients sitting in a carriage drawn by two white horses, holding a grey concertina bag with nickel-plated buckles in his hand...
...We didn't mean to do any harm...
...Perhaps it had to do with Cariba's illness...
...Father used to whittle wood...
...Not a single tree...
...The pure and shining doors stood alluringly open...
...What's happened...
...He knew he was alone, and in this clarified aloneness he drank up the terrific joking truth of both passages, the Aramaic and the French, each chosen, as in a lottery, by an idle riffle...
...I had broken through the heavy WASP overlay of literature, symbolized by my daily connection to Henry James, to a tremendous pride, affection, interest, and curiosity about how literature was being made out of Jewish experience...
...the third generation in our family...
...He was ready at exactly seven o'clock and, after a hurried coffee and toast, he took my hand, received last instructions from my mother who kissed me on my head and pushed me off with an insistent hand, as though launching me like a toy boat...
...My adolescent politics were mostly shaped by an uncle who was a dentist...
...Since poor Thulin Grauber's departure I hadn't opened a book...
...This has been an almost geological evolution: from out of the milky liquid of an earlier age in which our faith lay suspended or, even more unaccountably, it is as if clear water could dry up and leave jagged rock in its place...
...Their bottomless bag of tricks was transparent but useful in the retail trade...
...The nuns would not keep on a man who had killed...
...He has harmonized the rosette of the Legion d'Honneur in his lapel with the frontlets of the Covenant on his brow...
...On such a day, between the accountant and the tailor, the xerox center and the evening newspaper, between spring's deception and the newscaster's grief, between your breasts...
...He didn't give me one, just lit one for himself and inhaled with his eyes shut, without saying a word and without exhaling, and I understood that this was smoke that couldn't be exhaled...
...Soon the peasants would take out their icons and beseech the heavens for rain...
...It was fumy, Joseph discovered, with the odors of the shops on the Rue des Rosiers...
...The second book I reviewed was Andre Schwartz-Bart's The Last of the Just...
...He wanted to vomit and he wanted to laugh...
...All wrong...
...No thistles grow here, either...
...He hurtled himself back toward home for some clothes to take with him...
...I stay and have no real plans to leave...
...On such a day...
...The head of the ladder disappeared into a square, dark hole...
...I told him to show me someone commonplace...
...In fact, most Jews I know in New York publishing grew up elsewhere...
...If I had, I might well have fallen under his spell and example as a highly developed Jewish intellectual...
...I was startled to see how much I'd identified as Jewish turned out to be Russian, including the word nu...
...I was writing myself and I knew that if anyone did to my prose what I was doing to others', I would surely be furious...
...Joseph moved in with them and returned to the Teapot to learn that old Gaillard had died two months before, in his own bed, of pneumonia...
...And yet, the deepest experiences of my life continue to be related to being Jewish...
...How...
...Then and there he contrived a solitary game...
...Join us again...
...On your right, the Black Sea...
...The students who frequented it dubbed it La Th?i?re du Gaillard — Gaillard's Teapot...
...The University of Chicago offered me a scholarship, but I turned it down and came to New York because to be a writer in 1952 meant you had to be alienated, and to be a graduate student didn't seem to me a sufficient basis for that condition...
...Berthe went immediately to England, mockingly, to marry a British soldier she had met on the day of liberation...
...The ladder grew narrower and narrower and the last rung was missing...
...We should have turned them out long ago," Vasil said...
...He did not know what had become of his three older sisters - they were energetic and resourceful girls...
...New York also meant going to the theater and talking with my Aunt Fan...
...One friend had written a review and I, in my desire to see it published, had drastically rewritten the opening paragraph...
...The Master's family isiff really Jewish any more.'' "How do you know...
...They were themselves experimentalists and theorists of a sort: for one thing, they were vegetarians...
...In his dark cell, there's no trace of a flower, of spring's beautiful shrouds...
...Who'll bring us powder and silk stockings...
...You're a Jew," he said...
...I asked what a seraph was...
...Now she was far away again...
...It would - I believed - mark my freedom, my going forth among the people of the world, away from my home, away from Papa reading with his pince-nez and mother silently cutting grapes with silver scissors...
...His novels in English translation include Badenheim 1939 and Age of Wonders (David R. Godine and Pocket paperbacks...
...They had urged him to take nothing with him...
...He felt like Jonathan le Juif - what sacred thing was he about to pinch, what arcane holiness not meant for him...
...He wanted more unflagging commitment from me and didn't get it...
...Don't make a noise, your mother...
...It seemed to Joseph that this must be the loveliest house in the world...
...You had no duty to love and care for me and yet you did, willingly and wonderfully...
...Sometimes in the mornings Claude would lead Joseph to the Louvre — a magnificence Joseph had never before entered — and point out the darker paintings and sermonize on them...
...So, there was something here and it has vanished...
...They fetched away his pail to empty it...
...Tomozhenna Street is from a novel of the same name that is forthcoming in English translation...
...But I was sure I could read "Zion," and something else too...
...Her pains grew worse from day to day...
...Howl and Other Poems was published in...
...he shouted, and I sang them again and again, and I cried, and I must admit that I enjoyed it...
...Father liked to see me spellbound, and he laughed...
...Futilit...
...Hold it over the gas fire to see if it's fire-proof...
...The nuns had never told him this...
...Brothers...
...That such an interest existed is indisputable...
...Narishkayt," his father said -but not without a certain sad gesture of his scraping-knife...
...It was radical and, in some areas, Jewish...
...I read it like an amnesiac who had just received the blow to the head that brings everything back...
...You will be indebted," she admonished Joseph...
...They came closer...
...I threatened to make it bleed...
...A strange smell, the smell of incense, floated round him - like Father Serafim's orchard which was always full of darkness and the barking of dogs...
...At Commentary I struggled to fit in...
...Today, Hebrew is another Jewish language which produces world-class authors...
...he called Joseph down from the hayloft and said he had been seen in the brook by a child playing in the neighbor's meadow...
...On the street met Naomi getting out of a sportscar which brought her here to San Francisco from Hades - she was a whitened shade, old as I had last seen her, with her cheek skin hanging from her chin bone, but still dark hair - but her eyes looked thru Sheol to me, bare, blank eyed a little her look — and I stopped & said "Naomi, you are back...
...They had high aspirations, got high grades, and were intensely competitive...
...The noise you hear is not the shriek of angels...
...He envied the living and the free...
...I got straightened out by my roommates during the great political struggle of that year within the AYC which was undergoing a strong challenge from the Communists...
...A cigarette from Eretz Yisroel" whispered Shmiel, leaning against the back wall of the synagogue...
...Rabbi Pult said...
...They had brought with them one of their own habits...
...It is no surprise, then, to find apocalyptic messianists proposing that in a redeemed age the halakha will be an anomaly...
...On the other hand, I never told my parents about it either...
...Idealism vs...
...They too, so it seemed, were pleased by the lull...
...On March 16, 1978, Israel invaded Lebanon in lh> Litani operation...
...He stared at me and I could tell that what he saw was some kind of New Jersey zoot-suiter with high College Board scores...
...Ren?e...
...This did not make Joseph laugh...
...table with his book propped against a coffee cup, knew too...
...I was a party to that...
...I could identify very directly with a man who wasn't simply a victim or survivor, who for all his disguises is reduced eventually to a kind of utter nakedness...
...he would be found out...
...I often feel that, particularly in the last few years when I've been trying to write fiction...
...she once wrote...
...I said, "When I was in the navy, I read something by a philosopher named Plato," which I pronounced "Platto...
...And while they went for their walks on Sunday, leaving me behind, you invited me to your room and told me stories...
...It was a trial by fire, to say the least, but from working with and watching Podhoretz, I didn't have much fear of fire...
...Despite the exquisite universality of the cell ("human leveler, not political lever" was his catchphrase...
...her new laughter frightened us...
...There was only one electrical outlet: it was either the lamp or the radio...
...Afterwards I heard the dogs howling in Father Serafim's orchard, and the two cypress trees rose from their places, proud exiles, on my right and my left, taking my hands in theirs, to carry me across the swelling waters of the Boog...
...They certainly weren't Jews, but they spoke to me as though they were...
...One bright morning, a day whose sky and gently moving air would dispel the memory, let alone the presence, of anything like mystery, on a hill which overlooked the somewhat distant marketplace of the city, a young man...
...Claude's eyes were shut...
...They too wanted their place in the sun...
...I was particularly interested in Lionel Trilling, who functioned as a guide, for young Jews like myself, to the Anglo-American literary tradition and to the higher style of criticism...
...I'd go to their apartment or to the home of my Aunt Belle's boyfriend...
...Our city cousins had fallen into place and no longer bothered us...
...They were expressed pretty much at that time by the hard-liners, particularly a writer named Oscar Gass, who was a trenchant, adamant hawk...
...Apple of The Eye" is from a forthcoming novel of the same title...
...stone masks laughed above the gateways -but Joseph did not recognize this sign of the carnival...
...Karola dipped the sheets in bluing...
...Apocalyptic messianism, on the other hand, preserves neither...
...They were willing to follow him anywhere...
...But it was really only with the Vietnam War that I developed a strong negative feeling about the magazine's politics...
...Almost never did they tell him of a danger, a close call, a relief, but he smelled it in their smiles...
...How had he failed his nuns, or they him...
...Joseph's beard hung as low as his navel...
...The uncertainty of the future imparted an urgency to every Jewish metaphysics...
...Where was the end of the world...
...he felt watched...
...Hypocrites stuffing their bellies with cholent and kishka and grinding the faces of the people...
...It was titled "Three Brothers," and was a memoir by a leading Yiddish writer about his family as a kind of microcosm of the Enlightenment and its impact on the learned Jews of Eastern Europe...
...I guess I was the star of the issue, notwithstanding all my mistakes, and the essay was widely read in New York...
...She kept crisping the sheets as though there were no servants to do it...
...They packed their things and departed...
...It was a horror to me...
...I think he felt cramped and a bit stifled by the strict and intense conception of what the magazine should be...
...He felt infected everywhere...
...Then he took Joseph's hand...
...You are a soft and unfortunate girl, and I am a bitter and stubborn boy...
...and partly from a reaction to the Commentary knowingness...
...Who calls you Jew...
...Philip said he didn't know much about that subject, but he had a friend in Chicago who did...
...The theatrical Rachel, it was true, had been a Jewish woman...
...The airport clocks — your old friends — wait for you...
...Martin...
...DIARY ENTRY ?. Carmi Translator: Grace Schulman T. Carmi, who came to Israel as a young man from New York, has published many books of poetry in Hebrew...
...In the City of Slaughter...
...keep away from such a sty...
...Unfortunately, if the eyes are sometimes the organ through which our intelligence is revealed, the nose (to leave out of account the intimate solidarity and the unsuspected repercussion of one feature upon the rest), the nose is generally the organ in which stupidity is most readily displayed...
...It was a rich, difficult experience that lasted six years...
...This is the place to end, for at this very moment his lips speak through mine...
...We too would be shriven in the course of time, would become houseless, servantless, treeless and shadeless, wanderers on the face of the earth...
...The people that invented the messiah has never allowed a messiah...
...That was pretty much defined in practice by the habitual question, "Is this a Commentary piece...
...Eventually Joseph found four or five volumes of plays...
...On this road we learned to hold our breath, walk on tiptoe, and test each other's muscles...
...Even on Commentary it had been the surprises that created the most tension and interest in its pages, such as the two years or so in which Hans Morgenthau, a regular columnist, took a stand on the way the magazine was edited and against the way it was heading politically...
...Joseph peered into a darkling marvel - slowly wandering figures, like strolling dreamers, gazing at walls, colonnades, lions, mysterious stone ladies...
...The servants had grown accustomed to them too...
...The acceptance of the world, however, is not merely ontological...
...The phrase is Walter Benjamin's, from a passage about the charm of caf?s...
...Since morning I've seen no eyes...
...This meant not accepting any writing that I wouldn't be willing to publish as it was: i.e., that my "editorial suggestions" were only that, that the writer was free to choose which he would take and which he wouldn't...
...after all and define myself accordingly would hardly account for all my sense of myself...
...Because of the Jews...
...My grandfather on my father's side was the first...
...But you're a Jew...
...If there were no Tel Aviv, what would they do with a poem about Tel Aviv...
...Frenchmen might be amused, but never by the brocaded weight of the literature of France — and (who could believe such a surprise...
...I think, was whether Communists could serve as officers...
...It wasn't like editing so much as taking dictation...
...you slapped your niece and her husband...
...and kaddish and Other I'ncms in V.Hil...
...Now I know it accompanies me most of the day, most of the night and even — perhaps especially - when my mouth is on your mouth...
...Then he took the branch and felled Joseph with three violent slams...
...Her face was white as a clown's...
...I'm not normal...
...You're a speculator...
...He devoted himself to the study of the cells of certain grains, the fodder of a strain of northern finches...
...I put on something called a "loafer jacket," mine was powder blue, and, like all the other guys in Roselle Park, I wore pegged pants...
...he cleansed himself into wholeness, washing away the beast...
...His mind had sprung a leak, so it seemed, and all his thoughts had run out of him...
...The night air was humid...
...The longer Joseph took in this portrait, the more inexplicably at ease he grew in these rooms, despite all their awesome silver and gold...
...The intellectual and emotional universe of anti-messianism still awaits its scholar...
...It's my job...
...Gaillard's laboratory was experimental and theorist...
...He knew himself to be a violator of these curious scrolls and mouldings, of these alien mirrors, of that great bed...
...Sisters...
...Their useful objects had a kind of life with them, so that even the most humdrum of activities, such as taking inventory of jugs of oil or wine, mending a sandal or a sail, reminding a child for the fortieth time that earthenware can break, all took place, outdoors or in, in a kind of holy place, sanctified by the mutual touch of human life and this figurative being of place and thing...
...After all it's fruit of the tree (tobacco, paper), indeed a different tree, but why be exacting...
...His current collection of stories is Where the Jackals Howl (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich...
...Does everyone squint as I do...
...the children come, go, relatives oppress with a visit, the neighbor woman rings, a neighbor died...
...And at the end of all the walls the square black opening into the attic, where my father flung all his wooden clowns...
...I intend to put a stop to this," Vasil declared...
...hence its frequent association with nihilism...
...Having understood that they would never learn, you taught me instead and young, impressionable, a tabula rasa desperate for print, I received your hand upon my cheek — your negative impression - and printing it black on the white page of my books, I have devoted a lifetime to clarifying your handprint, to making comprehensible your panic before Gentiles and the Gentiles's fear of Jews...
...He studied the glow of sunlight on the spiky hairs of the straw, or on the nervous ears, silky and cavernous, of the cows...
...Yes, someone in my high school class...
...I plunged into Russian literature...
...acceptance of the world of obedience...
...But he was also a pragmatist: he knew which were all the right caf?s, and he knew what subjects one would naturally exclude from elevated talk, and which lecturers to avoid as almighty bores...
...The once quietly sedate yard was turned upside-down...
...He could inform the nuns of a hallucination...
...She should not have come here, but you are in no peril...
...The sidewalk and the road are covered with fallen glances, and what hasn't drifted to earth circles above us...
...No, because no, they are not satisfied...
...They went away with my aunt and made me stay here...
...The accountant must calculate, the tailor must sew, the child must cry...
...What do you want from them...
...The sisters say I'm a blood relative of Our Lord...
...What kind of psychological gestures are all these commentaries and calculations...
...It had betrayed him and named him Dreyfus...
...So Alan Pryce-Jones wrote to me asking if I would do him the great favor of contributing a 3,000 word essay to the TLS...
...the insult was preposterous...
...His three older sisters had been scattered and starved...
...Have a good flight...
...Fifty years ago, a small number of American Yiddish writers published in Jewish newspapers and magazines which valued imaginative writers...
...At first, I didn't feel there was anything the matter with the editorial process, which I felt was in the spirit of clarity, economy, readability, and also of cutting out cant and jargon...
...Afterwards I realized that it peers from all the lattices...
...France was Egypt...
...He has been a leading translator of several Israeli poets, from Yehuda Amichai to a recently completed Collected Poems of Uri Zvi Greenberg...
...In his long skirts and his flowing headgear he was feverishly afraid...
...The world would be made not new, but better...
...The hero falls in love with a Russian girl on the welfare line and he writes to her, "Be kind to the unfulfilled...
...At the Stone of Losses, his most recent to be translated into English (forthcoming from the Jewish Publication Society), won its translator the Witter Bynner Prize...
...They talked in sign language to the peasants, who amazingly enough understood...
...hello" - but she stared at me as if I'd betrayed her, "You've already forgotten me" -"you never cared to remember your mother" - "No...
...I've seen you before...
...Where are your parents...
...The relation between perfection and history is posed rather dramatically by the theory of the messiah...
...The University inspired him to alter his diction...
...he never thought of it...
...Despite the harping of contemporary Jewish theologians about the centrality of history, which Jews leave and reenter like a space capsule in the atmosphere, there was something more formative of the Jews than history, something that shaped their souls even more profoundly than history, and that was halakha...
...According to the modern view, which has produced more good politics than good philosophy, the problem of the future is the problem of survival...
...Meanwhile, the increasingly accomplished styles of these writers tempt them, some for the first time, to explore their rich cultural inheritance without apology...
...This may be misleading, though, for some grammarians deny that their language had anything like a nominative case...
...I had been given a lovely piece translated from Yiddish to edit...
...Enforcers, now reinforcers...
...I felt that there was still a secret life of the masses and that it had been given to me to locate it...
...Second stop: the tailor...
...The sun sets slowly in our parts...
...I was sure that he was right, but I hated him for thinking that he had the right to hold onto me as if I was his prisoner...
...Years later (now as I write this), I understand almost everything of what he did that morning...
...They would face their elder toward the veranda for a tirade, and he would close his eyes and drone away...
...Just last night they had been gay...
...Messianic speculation was a kind of thought about change that was not a preparation for action...
...Whatever remained of my radical opposition slowly turned into literary opposition...
...he bowed to me on occasion...
...His library was too remarkable...
...I sucked and closed my eyes and thought, what does the doktorl look like, what does the doktorl look like...
...It was six months before he discovered what it was: the Mus?e Carnavalet...
...He spent the rest of the war in a hayloft...
...The doctor - " said father in a whisper...
...But he obviously had had doubts from the moment he laid eyes on me...
...You didn't slap me...
...Each small purchase made them as happy as peddlers...
...The house had never been so quiet...
...To tell of these people and their peculiar institution is not, then, so much to deal with their habit of distributing all slaves — bought, conquered or born in captivity (after the age of thirteen) -equally among male and female adults in the population...
...And I sang about Gittel, the feather seller, who lived in a shack and was lifted up by the flooding waters of the Boog and borne down the street on her wooden bed screaming "Yidden helft...
...Their rage du calcul produced a whole tradition of Jewish literature...
...I jumped out of the window and started to run...
...Their slaves were to them, variously according to the imaginative capacities of the owners, as pets, blood relatives or even embodied presences of one's sense of life in the world, to lose a grip on which would be death...
...through Joseph's black hair...
...And more and more he followed the roundabout way, tantalized by the beautiful house and its lordly contours...
...I was very shy: meeting Rosenfeld was like meeting Gandhi...
...Richelieu had occupied Number 21...
...Those are your real Jews," said Cariba, speaking from experience...
...For us it doesn't work...
...IN ANCIENT DAYS John Hollander John Hollander's selected poems, Spectral Emanations (Atheneum) appeared in 1978, followed by his current collection, Blue Wine (Johns Hopkins...
...Is this a Commentary short story...
...He stood loitering — now it was he who lurked and watched...
...From his own roundabout way...
...For a day or so he switched to St...
...Why that...
...By the second semester I'd forgotten about labor law...
...whispered mother behind her curtain) and Kuka wiped his face lovingly...
...The-Poet-with-Two-Initials, whose feathery mustache and round back presented him as a somewhat diffident yet dignified brown grouse, though of an enormous height and bulk, had begun to read...
...There was another young editor named Harris Dienstfrey, a representative of the new breed, who was also from the University of Chicago...
...Yet I trembled when Father entered my room to inquire whether 1 had completed the second semester of physics...
...We went out...
...he's not really interested in the graces of expression or in the richness of texture...
...The dead books reeked of ruin, flame, animal hides, a fetid steaminess...
...Good...
...I have the temper of a murderer when they begin...
...He could not bash her temples with the radio, or strangle her...
...Uncle Paul sat in a corner, lost in thought...
...it was the smell of his jail and his pail...
...He opened the Ta'anit and read to himself in a smothered theatrical hoarseness: "Rabbi Nachman ben Isaac said: Why have the words of the Torah been likened unto a tree, as it is written (Proverbs 3, 18): It is a tree of life to them that lay hold of it...
...he made himself think of Rabbi Pult...
...Schwarz-Bart and Elie Wiesel had something to do with it, as did Blood From the Sky, a novel by Peter Ravicz, a Ukrainian Jew...
...Every night Joseph scrubbed the fish smell off his hands with an abrasive soap that skinned his knuckles mercilessly...
...The water was icy and pure, tinged golden and black...
...I tried to write detached prose and at the same time write about the common life...
...Wieseltier's translator, Harold Schimmel, came to Israel from the U.S...
...A certain Jonathan le Juif, Jean-Lucas explained, having stolen the Host, the Body of God, boiled it and stabbed it...
...But mother and papa...
...Before the dust from the cows has time to settle, Antip appears with a rope tied to the end of a long stick and catches a dog...
...She gave me an anthology of Russian short stories...
...he delivered his orders once a week on a horse-drawn van he leased from a livery...
...In fact PR became a kind of higher version of the indoctrination I'd been getting from my roommates about Stalinism, while introducing me to my new gods — Sartre, Camus, Kafka, et al...
...then he was locked in the toolshed, crouching among prongs and blades...
...And Antip heaves the howling creature into the air and flings it abruptly into the waiting cage...
...An old priest, a virtuoso friend of the convent (his sisters had been educated there), had died not long before...
...It might have been his motto...
...What do you do here all the time...
...and expediency also entered into many Jewish enthusiasms...
...This was the psychological wisdom behind the messianic teachings of Maimonides...
...The lie stuck in my throat...
...I've been here before...
...Well, in the middle forties I graduated from Roselle Park High School with honors but with no encouragement or money to go to college...
...That never happened really," Joseph said...
...When were the pine saplings pulled up...
...It is the expression of a hatred of the world, and of the self...
...All of a sudden she stopped blaming herself and turned on us instead, about how we were born with silver spoons in our mouths...
...He had a hidden name for this excursion: he called it "the roundabout way...
...A historian may offer another explanation...
...Any good Christian would have done the same...
...He died in a nursing home near Berlin in 1937...
...In fact, in Israel it is even possible to run away from Judaism while continuing to identify with a renewal of Jewish culture...
...In my senior year or thereabouts I fell under the spell of Isaac Rosenfeld, whose stories and essays I had discovered in PR...
...The big issue...
...Currently Professor of English at Yale, his books of literary criticism include Vision and Resonance, The Untuning of the Sky, and recently, a widely—praised handbook to poetic forms...
...Soundlessly, so mother wouldn't hear...
...Which provides one of the ironies of being regarded all along as one of the members of the New York Jewish establishment...
...Four together signified a large event, as when he was first received into the convent...
...Hence, it's no accident, as they say, that the writers I came to depend on most to articulate the questions were themselves in reaction to the New York/Jewish syndrome — such as George Dennison, Eric Bentley, Philip Roth, Richard Gilman, Susan Sontag, Stanley Kauffmann, Milton Klonsky, Alfred Chester, Gil Sorrentino, etc., or almost completely removed from it, such as Michael Rossman, Conor Cruise O'Brien, Robert Coover, William Gass, Benjamin DeMott, Robert Stone, Harold Brodkey, Theodore Roszak, Max Apple...
...Of us, they had despaired...
...And they walked through the strolling crowds of Tomozhenna Street as if they were alone, reading and arguing, and they walked past the fine house of Niuma the consumptive's father, the lordly Mr...
...Our unchanging guards, they had scattered a lethal poison in every corner of the house...
...On the contrary, they grumble, they struggle in their cage (cultivated with labor so that chaos doesn't burst suddenly like a robber from the closet) they lift eyes to the opposite balcony to the ceiling to the fixture, no contentment...
...You didn't have to be anti-American to be an outsider...
...He was the only Jew in our family of whom it might be said that he was profoundly, even happily, a Jew...
...I guess you could say I have a powerful immediacy about being American and a powerful haunted-ness about being Jewish and that the two come together in New York...
...Jean-Lucas lent him a heap of books with pictures of castles, armor, horses, lances...
...I'm not blond, but I certainly understood that idea of someone whose Jewishness seems marginal to him but who nevertheless discovers that it has determined his fate...
...Restless animals below...
...For it was of him that it said in the Bible "And the hollow of Jacob's thigh was out of joint...
...Don't come back...
...Not one bleat, not a single scrape of anything being moved...
...I'd often wondered about all those tropisms, as it were, that Jews of my generation share...
...I took the humanities course, and it was like throwing a fish into water...
...So, again, this was like reading the Russians when I was sixteen years old...
...Pearls were sewn into the voluptuous sleeves of her gown - ah, these had the shape of crosses at last...
...Not a soul...
...Rabbi Pult...
...The sundial glows in the moon...
...A sudden slap is not the worst that they can do...
...Why did you come down here...
...QUESTION IN A DREAM I did not want to come here, and now I do not know how to get away...
...She is known to be a story-teller...
...The sun assaulted him...
...But this was deceitful...
...he had not always been in a state of full faith...
...He lay down beside me, conspiratorily joining my cause by holding the flashlight, and we did Melanesia and Micronesia together, his white beard, redolent with pipe tobacco, lying like a recumbent beast upon my chest...
...He thought he had lived no longer than two or three months in the subcellar of the convent...
...but he did not know or hear...
...In a restaurant with Peter, eating city meal, silver candlesticks, marble tiles, hypocritical waiters in sinister black ties . . . indoors under whorehouses Berlin 1930 - we ate too much, and the bill was $19.75 apiece, so I paid $40 for the two of us, scraped by, spent most of the money we had left, feeling bad - went out...
...I was not diligent...
...With the next mercilessly slow step, downward — father...
...My policy there was partially a reaction to the Commentary editorial syndrome...
...Emaciation worked in their jaw bones...
...People lived in companionate marriage with their possessions...
...Drink cappucino...
...They had had no children and uncle Salomon, a stamp dealer near the railway station, had modest needs...
...in his checkered shirt stuck to his undershirt stuck to the skin stuck to the flesh to the bone to the brain by foot to Settlements Square where Zionism rests on the crossroads as an open book and Egged buses ride on it and Petach Tikvah Way by the Maariv newspaper building where the smell of the air-conditioning floats out from the entrance like the smell of the lie from the mouth of the liar goes on by heading toward the Petach Tikvah intersection Locksmith Street Hashmonaim Street where he leaves the road and the motorcycle brakes and rattles alongside him astride it the marten faced man with sunglasses and rakish-angle cap and sopped shirt and short trousers bulging over his potbelly and the arms and the legs bare something thick and heavy and weak and crooked and damp and in sluggish and hot speech the marten faced man asks Yitzchak where he's off to and Yitzchak answers that he's looking for work for the summer period and the marten faced man points to the back seat of the motorcycle that will take him to a place of work for he has a driving school and office and Yitzchak on the motorcycle that makes summer wind from nothing and rattles south to Lilienbloom Street across from the old Eden Cinema and the man conducts him after him into a yard and in the yard dust and rocks and rusty pickle tins and children playing with them and at a piss-sodden backdoor entrance Yitzchak climbs in the tracks of a pair of legs as if boneless to the top of a flight of stairs that leads to a latrine-like door with a driving school sign and in the room whose width is like that of the large window with the filthy curtain and whose breadth is about twice that a table with two drawers and one chair and in a frame a license for motorcycle driving school management and an unmade bed and over the bed in a gilded frame the face of a Sephardi savant heavy bearded and heavy expressioned with his wife in her headdress and her earrings these are the parents of the marten faced man even if it's beyond belief they gaze in faded brown for eternity and the room is narrow to their gaze and from the drawer the marten faced man removes a stack of virgin forms on behalf of the transport ministry and a faded ledger and a rack of seals with a seal and he tells Yitzchak to be seated on the chair near the table and to fill in each form with names and details from the ledger and to sign beneath with the seal and that's all the work worries Yitzchak to himself I have a lot of work for you promises the marten faced man and Yitzchak in innocent writing page after virgin page fills entries with green ink and a seal at the end what could be easier thinks Yitzchak who felt relieved in the cool of the room while the hand that fell by chance to his knee slips over the piece of his thigh into his pants leg a steamy and dark hand touches him and the hot whisper in his ear murmurs don't be afraid and Yitzchak's non-flight at this moment and something sticks to his neck and says it will be worth your while I'll pay you a lot and Yitzchak doesn't move and a hand clasps the oval of his buttock and a voice says darling you'll have great pleasure from me and Yitzchak's straining eyes hang on the heavy bearded Sephardi savant, and his wife with her earrings and headdress and Yitzchak's young erection like a young gazelle in the room leaps for he's already without pants and the spout of the marten sucking is so pious at his feet and after a short while in the street and in his pocket 10 pounds and in his underpants like a wet cat whelp TEL AVIV SKETCHES 3 So young really and already has joined the wide public Of back from work and afterwards sit down and give themselves up to television, to newscasts, to complaints of the woman, to her hostile silence...
...His mother instantly saw his trouble — she knew what a museum signified...
...It presented the prospect of a transformation of the world so complete that it obviated their dreams...
...they fed him what they could, and left his mind to feed itself...
...Ills eighth major eolleelion of froetrx...
...In 1958 I was writing my dissertation on Henry James, like many good Jewish boys of the fifties, and suddenly like the surprise witness at a trial, came these familiar voices, those of Singer, Bellow, Mala-mud, Roth, the last being someone I actually knew from the university...
...All of which was part of finding a voice, a certain kind of sensibility which was all right to have at Commentary because that's what the magazine was in business to cultivate...
...They were nearly a pair...
...The-Poet-with-Two-Initials was a proper oracle...
...He pulled his fingers - how tender they were...
...on leaving France...
...His pistol, which used to be locked away with his hunting gun, was now always on his desk...
...And not very different from what Rosenfeld had been doing...
...Then he reached at random into one of the old priest's boxes and drew out whatever his hand fell on...
...And what if a child fantasizes a very little bit...
...Life is hard but one can outsmart it and flourish...
...The old priest had been a collector, an admirer, of Ed-mond Fleg...
...Then he gave me a puff without letting the cigarette out of his hand...
...Sometimes, when he lay curled among bird droppings and the droppings of small rodents and bats, he dreamed of razing Paris to the ground — so that it would look like the brilliant meadows all around him, the wilderness of meadows that piled gold on gold until they came to the lip of the brook...
...perhaps they just moved it to Moscow...
...At that point I think an important change occurred — namely, that just as the Russian writers in my adolescence gave me a personal stake in literature, so these Jewish writers and critics in the late fifties gave me a personal stake once again...
...Or perhaps it was Yankele's tunes...
...On the whole, they came out of the German-Jewish class...
...So that was the end of the world...
...In the meantime they had gotten bogged down here, which created resentment...
...Those of my generation who have made their way in publishing, well...
...He could not tell whether it was the urine that burned, or the bottom of his spleen...
...I asked...
...You are in no peril...
...It was only peculiar, in this Gentile homage, that the stone Rachel hardly looked pensive...
...I wasn't helpless...
...The more I got into editing it, the more I began to rewrite it, which one sometimes did at Commentary...
...He splashed in with his clothes on...
...Zilberman, who closed his doors and windows against the disgrace, and they stopped opposite the house as if they were alone, reading and arguing aloud about the social revolution, and every now and then Niuma coughed into his handkerchief ("Blood...
...He seldom looked into Rabbi Pult's Ta'anit — he did not like to open its sweet letters into such a smell...
...Oh, the trouble he had pronouncing my name, barely able to bend his mouth around all of those syllables...
...My hothouse soul is swelled like a winter pomegranate about to burst...
...He studied literature for a while -the nuances of Verlaine maddened him with idolatrous joy — but then found, because of the joy, that he could not justify it...
...said Hirshel when he saw me...
...So, too, is the problem of the ideogenic processes of the Jews, the relation between the people's thinking and the people's willing...
...For ever...
...But Joseph was already on his own line...
...To me, however, uncle Salomon was an endless delight and I adored him...
...Uncle Salomon dressed very carefully that morning, his neat black suit set off by a white shirt he saved for Sabbaths, a four-in-hand, correctly tied, fluttered at his neck in the early morning breeze...
...Isn't that dangerous...
...he said again...
...An image is an image," she said, and he caught the burning of her eye...
...While I do not believe there is any such thing as a Jewish establishment, I think many of us do share certain assumptions about the importance of literature as a kind of conscience of society...
...Her stout neck was encircled by a wreath of very fat pearls — they resembled little turnips — and, though her head was somewhat turned from him, still another fat pearl glinted at the one ear that peeped out...
...Any place was livable if a living could be made there...
...He had the diurnal cycle...
...A woman without a chance...
...Reading him you felt that you hadn't betrayed your heart by abandoning your radicalism, which was suspect anyway, for "the tragic sense of life" and "moral realism...
...but if idealism is only a part of the picture, then messianism must stand in some relation to realism as well...
...He flitted like a wraith, beginning to believe himscll invisible...
...The plump servant smiled to herself, which only incensed him more...
...Trilling could show you the true way to Henry James...
...Time had straightened things out...
...He has published five volumes of poetry as well as his Selected Poems...
...You tribe of cheats and hypocrites," he called them...
...But I can see now, in retrospect, that the editorial style of NAR/AR, which I came to think of as "wise passivity," in which I let the writers instruct me in what the important issues were, came partly from my sense of the age, that of a cultural revolution in which a lot of answers were turned back into questions...
...He had brought two cigarettes...
...Also he had a burning sensation when he urinated...
...The sentence seemed to refer not to the nuns, but to his sisters, the ABCs — were they dead, dying, captive, escaped...
...Even the silence retreated into the corners...

Vol. 7 • November 1982 • No. 10

 
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