Under the Shadow of the Sword

...He marshalls Jewish writers encountering the anguish of their collective fate to reveal the ameliorative capacities of art, for "What seems...

...For example, in an otherwise suggestive essay on Osip Mandelstam, "The Poet as Witness," he unexpectedly arrives at Mandelstam's "pressing consciousness of himself as a Jew...

...Alter is most interesting when he stumbles onto his nuggets instead of sifting conscientiously for them...

...The last third of the book, "Fiction and Historical Crisis," contains the sparkling if not entirely achieved essays, "Jewish Humor and the Domestication of Myth" and "Updike, Malamud, and the Fire This Time...

...But no matter...

...The first is a long essay, "The Modem Context," that is the most ambitious—albeit hardly the most successful—in the collection...

...Nothing unreal is allowed to survive.' " The same strand, picked up when Alter writes of Walter Benjamin's "being unable, or unwilling, to accept a reality stripped of its sacral dimension," allows him to counter Hannah Arendt's negative assessment of Benjamin's Jewishness with the perception that the philosopher's "underlying commitment to a vision of life rooted in theological values" was the unlikely soil that produced his radical critique of modern culture...

...This territory is virtually Alter's discovery, and he is masterful as any Robinson Crusoe in showing us around...

...Having earlier identified Mandelstam's characteristically Russian yearning for the Mediterranean, it is strange that Alter would proceed to wrest so dubious an interpretation from the poet who wrote that Jews are "burdened with an inheritance from sheep-breeders, patriarchs and kings...

...it has the quality of a fan's notes...

...He writes, in fact, like a man obsessed, determined to see through a glass brightly from an outpost that is crumbling around him...

...Those who have worshipped at its shrine, the true believers like Flaubert, Proust and James, have had scant energy left for other activities, let alone other devotions...

...The pressure to answer this question, to show that imaginative writing is a "necessary act" in an age seemingly inclined to consider it frivolous, weighs upon each of these pieces...

...it is too impassioned and unrigorous for that...

...Language has had its day, behind it there is nothing more...

...for another, it has been uneasy, more of a truce than an irrepressible attraction...

...One notices here, too, that his inflection is not always his own...

...The recognition of this attitude's pervasiveness, even among wholly assimilated Jewish writers, leads Alter to some of his keenest insights: "It may be that Kafka's ultimate Jewish gesture is his deathbed instruction to Max Brod to burn his writings...

...Yet despite the tentative connection between Jews and the secular imagination, Alter proposes that "the Jew...

...Another problem is that many of the figures Alter has chosen to discuss are not mainsitream, requiring a fair amount of introduction...

...Alter is gambling on nothing short of the ultimate justification of art "under the shadow of the sword...

...Similarly, the short but provocative essay on "Eliot, Lawrence and the Jews" ingeniously locates the seeds of Eliot's anti-Semitism in the same "imagination of exclusion" that generated his poetry...

...For one thing, since they are, as he puts it, "a people preoccupied with getting God in the head" the relationship between them and the artistic imagination has been relatively late-blooming...

...Art, by contrast, has been its own religion, especially from the late 18th century onward...

...The Jews," Alter observes, "have no tradition of aesthetics as an autonomous realm, no historically-rooted notions of the poet as hero and guide...

...But it is useful because it highlights the flaws and virtues of the author's method...

...He fully realizes modern history should have been too unendurable, too violating, for the stratagems of even the canniest artistic response...

...For Jews, the chasm between language as the embodiment of divine communication, as the derivation of the initial revelation, and language as human artifact, as plaything, has been uncrossable for much of their history...

...His examination of the pu-tatively antinationalist bent in the fiction of Amos Oz and A. B. Yehoshua inspires some of his finest writing, and an account of S.Y...

...I am not sure the events of Jewish history and the crisis of the imagination can be yoked together as readily as Alter thinks...

...Defenses of the Imagination is a book bustling with ideas, fertile almost to the point of overpopulation...

...Alter writes a humane prose that, when it is good, resonates beyond mere stylistics, and when it is bad, dips into intellectual bathos, disclosing a fondness for majestic words— "abyss," "inexorable," "chthonic"—and a penchant for slightly meretricious language—"postideological," "post-tragic...

...Alter's commitment to the real—the fluctuating imperatives of modern life that affect a Kafka as surely as they affect a barber—charges his thought with a missionary-like intensity...

...As a result, his conclusions are sometimes a bit breathless, urged on the page before they are ready...

...has often been an acutely sensitive index of Western culture's disturbances and confusion," and that he therefore will be "centrally concerned with Jewish writers as a symptomatic, if extreme, instance of the predicaments of 20th century literature...

...only in besieged Israel is there truly convincing "evidence of the self-affirming impetus of art in modern literature...

...In comprehending art's tenacious grip, its instinct to spring up even among ruins, Robert Alter is honorably engaged in what Wallace Stevens termed "the act of finding.What will suffice" in scarce times...

...An essay on Gershom Scholem is enlightening but suffers, perhaps, from overabundant appreciation...

...Nevertheless, he proceeds to demonstrate that "the still, small reflective voice, hushed with humility"—the voice, for example, of the poet Charles Reznikoff—continues to speak, to redeem, in Uri Zvi Greenburg's words, the "wound-dark, pain-heavy" of experience...

...This essay intrigues as well by affording us glimpses of Alter's ambivalent response to his own Jew-ishness, particularly in his endorsement of D. H. Lawrence's belief that the "rule of the will" over love is attributable to the Jewish influence...

...it also examines with equal poise the emerging corpus of modern Hebrew literature and the heritage of Yiddish humor in contemporary American-Jewish writing...

...From this point, the debacle begins...

...Hence, this volume is not merely the speculations of the academy...

...Defenses of the Imagination is divided into three sections...

...It is paradoxical, then, that Alter should pick the Jews to make his case...

...He quotes the Viennese Hebrew poet, Avraham Ben Yitzhak Sonne: "Poetry seek* an echo but no longer finds it...

...Hand in hand with the Jewish esteem for learning, evident in the exegetical flourishes of biblical and Talmudic sages, goes a profound distrust of the unindoctrinated creative spirit, a disdain for secular conjurings, no matter how lofty...

...This is particularly true of the "Portraits" that comprise the second section of the book, where the fluidity of Alter's analysis is often impeded by his straining after the Jewish theme...

...other writers obtrude on his discourse, making the rhetoric seem occasionally slack-jawed...

...Judaism is probably the most authority-soaked of religions, wielding its sovereignty in the intricate ritualization of daily life...

...instructive in regard tb the power of affirmation of the imagination against terror in modern literature is that it should occur at all among Jews...

...Writers & Writing UNDER THE SHADOW OF THE SWORD BY DAPHNE MERKIN While other literary critics have decamped to various cerebral refuges, where they produce fiercely private ruminations on the relation of literature to itself, Robert Alter remains a steadfast defender of the humanistic faith...

...The Aura of the Past"—an essay that makes a distinction between the unassimilable, "exposed" critical position of a Walter Benjamin and the hyperacculturated, "protected" position of a Lionel Trilling—is significant for what it says about the options available to Jewish critics of a literary tradition that essentially precludes their own origins...

...This collection of essays (most of which first appeared in Commentary) ranges among figures no less disparate than Gershom Scholem and John Updike...

...Its very capaciousness, though, reflects an awareness that as our disenchantment with the body politic grows, our patience with the uses of enchantment wears correspondingly thinner: What, after all, has the spinning of tales to do with anything that counts...

...Alter's reverence is also responsible for the warblings of Lea Goldberg, Uri Zvi Greenburg and Charles Reznikoff being amplified into impressive songs...

...The rest of the section consists mainly of pieces on Israeli literature, "fiction in a state of seige...

...But his unfashionable habit of seeking in art "connections with all that is not art" isn't assumed lightly: As its title indicates, there is a beleaguered air about Alter's new book, Defenses of the Imagination: Jewish Writers and Modern Historical Crisis (Jewish Publication Society, 262 pp., $8.50...

...Agnon's posthumously-published novel, Shira, shows the critic at his very best...