Jewish Soul on Ice
HOROWITZ, IRVING LOUIS
Jewish Soul on Ice Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number By Jacobo Timerman Translated by Toby Talbert Knopf. 164 pp. $10.95. Reviewed by Irving Louis Horowitz Hannah Arendt...
...Perhaps nothing better illustrates Timerman's predicament that the recent statement of Adolfo Perez Esquivel, winner of the 1980 Nobel Peace Prize, on the occasion of one of the largest human rights demonstrations held in Argentina since the military assumed direct political power...
...It was Timerman's great misfortune to be an old-fashioned liberal...
...And it will learn how to be happy...
...Such charges are a litmus test of the paranoid style...
...Embassy...
...Indeed, his final assessment is that Argentina cannot be viewed in political terms because it remains fixated in a pre-political stage of barbarism...
...On action: "Being is more important than remembering...
...At this level, the book raises issues far beyond its capacity to resolve...
...It is a measure of Timerman's continuing loyalties that despite the humiliation and denigration he suffered, despite every effort to deprive him of an Argentine identity in a ceaseless attempt to demonstrate that being a Jew is antithetical to national allegiances, his closing remarks reveal him to be an Argentine patriot: "I know that the Argentine nation will not cease to weep for its dead, because throughout its often brutal history, it has remained loyal to its tragedies...
...It was inspired by the centrality of anti-Semitism in mobilizing Right and Left alike...
...His interrogators want everything about Timerman to make perfect sense...
...This barbarism-whether it be private or governmental, civil or military -must obviously be eradicated before it is possible to enter civilization...
...Indeed, the fact that whatever the outrages perpetuated against his mind and body under incarceration, Timerman at least had the right to personal suffering, marks him as a man who fortunately did not experience the kind of impersonal mayhem committed against millions in Germany between 1933-1945 and in Russia between 1929-1952...
...Their participation has been largely restricted to the economic realm...
...Underlying the autobiographical is a liberal irreverence for quasipopulist politics...
...It is difficult to imagine anti-Semitism becoming part of the public discourse, particularly when the actual history of the Jews in Argentina is taken into account...
...Had Castro supported Timerman, that would have been news...
...It is throughout a description of a man's ordeal that at the same time is an accurate representation of a political catastrophe: the failure of Argentina, God's country, to evolve in terms of the great expectations with which it began this century...
...Too often, reality is ensconced rather than enhanced...
...While Timerman'sconcerns are correct, the quiescence of the Buenos Aires Jewish community stems precisely from the set of conditions he himself describes as characterizing the nation as a whole...
...Timerman himself is deeply troubled by the behavior of the Jewish community of Argentina...
...On dictatorship: "The chief obsession of the totalitarian mind lies in its need for the world to be clearcut and orderly...
...He has a sharp eye for detail, plus an unflinching capacity to name the names of his tormentors...
...When an agreement for his release was reached between hard-line military and legalistic government factions, it provided that he be stripped of his Argentine citizenship and sent abroad...
...A lifelong journalist, editor and publisher of the newspaper La Opinion and founder of two magazines, the author is a writer who was imprisoned, not a prisoner who discovered the power of langugage...
...As a result, he writes in an uncompromising way about a militarized state where the factions can only be described in terms of fascism of the Left and fascism of the Right...
...In telling his own story Timerman documents Argentina's persistent revolutions of falling expectations...
...This is a march for Christian peace...
...On April 30, 1981 the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo were told by Esquivel, "We are here in solidarity to find a just solution to this problem [of accounting for anywhere from 6,000-15,000 missing people...
...For Timerman, the problem in Argentina is less one of Left or Right forms of terrorism than of the near-complete displacement of civility by barbarism...
...I believe that the reminder of Jewish tragedies, punctiliously invoked by the Jewish community against its adversaries, has been futile in overcoming the paralysis and panic than envelopes it...
...It took a translator to explain to Timerman the "conspirator" that he was going "home...
...He repeatedly alludes to the fact that its leaders preferred to negotiate in silence, through low-profile diplomacy, rather than make the issue of anti-Semitism a public debate...
...Which branch of the Jewish conspiracy did I belong to-the Israeli, Russian, or North American...
...I know that it will succeed in overcoming the paranoids of every extreme, the cowards of every sector...
...Jacobo Timerman's repeated assertions to this effect blur the distinction between genocidal totalitarian systems and the considerably different bureaucratic-authoritarian system that exists in Argentina...
...When the Jew is "a man under total suspicion" in a society characterized by aggressive militarism and state terrorism, the tactic of asserting democratic debate and human rights becomes problematic...
...There is an unyielding contempt for a society that cannot distinguish between the democratic and the authoritarian, or the civil and the barbaric...
...The genre has, to be sure, produced some remarkable documents...
...His captors, and occasionally the captive himself, seem somewhat confused by this acknowledged Zionist persisting in his support for Left causes in the hemisphere and throughout the world...
...He knew no Hebrew then...
...Even Jewish martyrs for Argentine democracy, and they are a disproportionately high number of the missing victims, must be draped in Christian imagery...
...Alas, even those whom Timerman chose to back had nothing but anti-Semitic diatribes of their own to register...
...Argentina has been able to absorb every kind of political ideology save one: liberalism...
...Having registered this caveat, let me hasten to say that his book is, as Arthur Miller has noted, "a lyrical outcry, riveting to read and chilling to contemplate...
...in a nation without allies there was not much more that could be done...
...It is not only, as Timerman would have us believe, that the sole point of reference for the Jewish leaders of Argentina was the Holocaust, but that the community had been nurtured to accept its political impotence along with all Argentines...
...they have been denied effective entry into the political realm (according to Timerman, virtually nonexistent) or the military (the preserve of Spanish and Italian ethnic groupings...
...Nor is his book written to enlist others in a cause or influence policy...
...Perhaps God does still live in Argentina-Albeit incognito...
...The relative ease with which Timerman's newspaper empire was dismantled is indicative of this isolation...
...It is their silences and sufferances that make the Jew "a man under total suspicion...
...I f there is a surprising element in Timerman's memoir, it is the intensity of his Jewish conscience...
...The cacaphony of political movements and ideologies, not to mention confusion of goals and policies (well documented by Timer-man), only highlights the dissimilarities between contemporary Argentina and Europe's archetypical 20th-century dictatorships...
...Since the subject of this volume is also its object, the work has to be seen as autobiography...
...After all, it was simple for Timerman to support Castro...
...At the moment of his expulsion he was placed under the supervision of Israeli security officers who knew no Spanish...
...A true dilemma, since I was born in Russia, had traveled to Israel, and was extremely friendly with the U.S...
...Nonetheless, such essays tend to be exceedingly self-serving and self-aggrandizing...
...In a curious way, Timerman owes much to the tradition of Ortega y Gasset and Jorge Luis Borges...
...Any subtlety, contradiction, or complexity upsets and confuses this notion and becomes intolerable...
...I would be less than candid if I suggested that Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Numberentirely escapes these vices...
...There are some strange anomalies in Prisoner Without a Name?-starting with Timerman, who has an entirely Enlightenment notion of civitas, being forced into a captivity where all sense of such civilities had to be suspended for survival...
...editor, "Transaction/SOCIETY" Let me start with an admission: I am not enamored of the species of writing known as prison literature...
...For example, it is dangerous hyperbole to claim that Argentina is in a condition of barbarism akin to the worst days of Hitlerism and Stalinism...
...Timerman is no ordinary political prisoner, but one for whom the pen has always been mightier than the sword...
...For the Jewish community to place anti-Semitism on the public agenda, a positive assessment of social and political forces would have been required...
...Timerman, stripped of his citizenship, finally turns out to be a dedicated son...
...It is hard to imagine Timerman in like circumstances claiming the event to be a march for Jewish peace...
...Most of all, though, this book demonstrates the triumph of human will over tremendous adversity...
...Reviewed by Irving Louis Horowitz Hannah Arendt Professor of Social and Political Theory, Rutgers...
...On politics: " It is a struggle between civilization and barbarism within a country...
...That t his conclusion emerges from a figure systematically tormented and tortured itself demonstrates the extraordinary absurdity of the charges that he is an enemy of the State, a conspirator, an Antichrist, Marxist, Zionist...
...Even the best prison literature, moreover, is Manichean: certain of goods and evils, lights and darks...
...No wonder Timerman, more in despair than expectation, takes Argentine democrats (like Maximo Gainza, the editor of La Pren-sa) to task...
...Argentina is a nation whose political processes are constantly being subverted by an unsteady and unresponsive ruling elite...
...This did not come about simply in response to his police tormentors and their constant emphasis on Christian nationhood...
...It contains so many beautiful passages of transcendent clarity that one almost feels it is unfair to offer just a few examples...
...he speaks with a frankness that helps illumine a national calamity no less than a personal tragedy...
Vol. 64 • June 1981 • No. 11
