Old Masters of Suffering

...In the process, he demonstrates how our individual histories follow recurring cultural patterns that ultimately tell us something valuable, even if fragmentary or unsatisfying, about the human condition...

...Steiler has come to see nature uncorrupted by the ills of human society, yet nature remains alternately beautiful and mindlessly cruel...

...entered into the picture...

...Toward the end of his shortened life—he died in a car wreck last December, at age 57—several of his books were finally translated into English, and Austerlitz posthumously won the National Book Critics Circle Award...

...The saint is shown being assaulted by demons that are a terrifying mixture of animal and human...

...W. G. Sebald was clearly influenced by those dark creations of the 1500s...

...These artists, most of whom endured times of extreme conflict, were only too familiar with the horrors they painted...

...He was,' writes Leon Wieseltier in a perceptive Foreword, "a genuinely epic figure...

...ABBA Kovner's Sloan-Kettering: Poems (Schocken, 128 pp., $24.00) is similarly autobiographical...

...To sabotage the Nazis, Kovner helped found the United Partisan Organization and later became its leader...

...A surfeit of wars teaches the hard lesson that civilized people can rum against their neighbors, demonize them and feel justified in their destruction—or else selectively forget the cruelty they saw with their own eyes...

...Grünewald and Altdorfer inhabited the same landscapes Sebald knew in his childhood...

...In After Nature, Sebald recounts part of his autobiography, frequently disguised in chronicles about Grünewald and Steiler...

...the time of the singing-bird has come.' Familiar prayers consecrate certain moments, and toward the end he begins tentatively to say Kaddish for himself...

...Sickness stimulates reflection, whether one wants to remember or not...

...to shake his head over the Enlightenment's pathetic belief in a rational universe...

...the death of his only child...

...This memorable work, explored in detail by Sebald, was part of the great Isenheim Altarpiece, the focal point of a hospital chapel where those with appalling afflictions were treated...

...Here the focus is on the oeuvre of Grünewald (c...

...Relatively little of his work has been made available in English, but this slim volume ought to create an audience for more of his writings...

...When the crew reached what is today the Bering Sea, All was agrejmess, without direction, with no above or below, nature in a process of dissolution, in a state of pure dementia...

...As the Snow on the Alps," a title that remains mysterious until the poem's last line...

...A Jew to his fingertips/ cannot exist/ without meaning," he remarks...

...It is true we are weak and defenseless, but tire only answer to the enemy is resistance...

...Often they chose to reflect on the troubles of the period in Biblical or Classical terms...

...Yet as Sebald shows, we rarely achieve any better understanding of them because we are damaged, and the "truth" of such things may well be unintelligible...

...The poet interweaves the story of Grünewald's life: his unhappy marriage to a Jewish convert to Christianity at a time of intense Jewish persecution in Frankfurt...

...and a reconstruction of the lives of the author's grandparents and parents, who witnessed two World Wars and did not try to understand or react to what they saw...

...Anthony, the third-century desert hermit...

...14701528), an artist best known for his graphic and unflinching portrayals of the dead Christ on the cross...

...Can this not happen to him once more...

...Both W. G. Sebald and Abba Kovner have enlarged their readers" understanding of suffering and enduring, and of the wonders we can perceive along the way...

...As Sebald observes, "pain...

...Kovner's long years of combating adversity here inform the tone of a dying man who recalls his life and musters the energy for one final act of resistance against the dehumanizing side effects of surgeries and radiation treatments that can merely postpone the inevitable...

...and finally, to identify with mad King Lear on the blasted heath...

...They prompt Sebald to recall the visions of those 16th-century painters...

...Lithuanian Jews will be the first in line...

...He assisted in bringing Jewish refugees to Palestine, fought in Israel's War of Independence, and then settled on a kibbutz with his wife, Vitka, also a resistance leader...

...On Poetry Old Masters of Suffering By Phoebe Pettingell W.H.Auden's much-anthologized poem, "Musée des Beaux Arts," begins memorably, "About suffering they were never wrong,/ The Old Masters...

...In many of Grünewald's paintings, there is a comer of intense light: So, when the optic nerve tears, in the still space of the air, all turns white as the snow on the Alps...

...Born in Russia in 1918 and educated in Vilna at the Hebrew high school, he joined a Zionist youth group while a teenager...

...In Kovner's case, he contemplates previous victories in an attempt to make his losing battle with cancer more meaningful...

...His grandmother's disfiguring terminal illness is associated in his thoughts with the invalids Grünewald encountered while working on the Isenheim Altarpiece...

...Some of their masterpieces imagine the Apocalypse with relish, as though their world were crying out for God's refining fires to purge humanity of its evil disposition...

...After presenting the two seemingly unconnected stories whose sole common element appears to be suffering, Sebald threads both into the account of his German family that makes up the third section...

...The Bible and Jewish ritual pervade what in the Hebrew original, as Wieseltier notes, was "a.poema, or a single extended composition in verse...

...Again, desolation stalks the poem...

...His mother watched the bombed Nuremberg burn in 1943, but could not recollect "what the burning town looked like/ or what her feelings were/ at this sight...

...In every Sebald book descriptions of pictures play a vital role...

...Their straightforward depictions of human bodies in the throes of various agonies and degradations were a far cry from the glowing, idealized visions of the Italian Renaissance...

...Particularly difficult is the loss of his voice, eradicated by cancer surgery —a mean fate for someone adept with words...

...Another familiar Grünewald painting is almost more horrifying: a phantasmagoric rendering of the temptation of St...

...He made no attempt to infuse the crucifixion with any hint of transcendence...

...These rather different stories, spanning four centuries, might at first appear unrelated...

...In the foreground, an unnamed man lies mutely, his body distended and covered with the pustules of Saint Anthony's fire, or syphilis...

...Now, one of his earliest efforts...

...Past struggles with a variety of enemies are very much on Kovner's mind throughout...

...In 1941, when the German Army occupied the Lithuanian capital and the Einsatzgruppen began their killing, he gave a speech exhorting the ghetto's inhabitants to realize that "Hitler is plotting to destroy all European Jews...

...After the War, Kovner was a prominent activist in the East Europe Survivor's Brigade, a Zionist body seeking punishment for the perpetrators of the Holocaust...

...Kovner died of cancer in 1987, following an extended stay at New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center...

...The panic-stricken kink in the neck to be seen in ali Grunewald's subjects, exposing the throat and often turning the face towards a blinding light, is the exti'eme response of our bodies to the absence of balance in nature which blindly makes one experiment after another and like a senseless botcher undoes the thing it has only just achieved...

...an account of Georg Steller, the 18th-century botanist who traveled with a Russian expedition to the Arctic...

...his murky sexuality...

...The explorers are subjected to extreme privations...

...His paintings display the corpse of a man who has obviously suffered terribly for hours before his ignominious death...

...The reader gradually becomes aware, however, that Sebald is always circling around the same themes, and that all of them comment on his development as a writer...

...Also—and here we come to the writer's particular strength—he notes that trying to put details together and calling them "history" or "science" only brings us to further rationalizations of the irrational...

...Captain Bering dies of melancholia as many of his men perish from scurvy...

...He had in mind the Gothic painters of Northern Europe's 16th century, like Mathias Grünewald, Albrecht Dürer, Albrecht Altdorfer, and Pieter Brueghel the Elder...

...John, their faces swollen with weeping, are bowed down with hopelessness...

...Sebald links this with Albrecht Altdorfer's (1480-1538) painting of the drunken Lot lying with his daughters while the city of Sodom blazes behind them...

...The section closes with an image that evokes the blanking out of the world...

...At the same time, he starts to see illness and death as part of a natural process, though this vision is more dark than comforting: In the mountains of Palmyra, when thev had set up the most advanced of radiotelescopes, the planners rejoiced like young goats it was now within their power to scan the uttermost secrets of the universe— today we know the universe is so constructed that its uttermost ends flee and escape far beyond the visual grasp of the most advanced radio-telescope, beyond space— isn't that how cancer sits, microscopically, lurking in his vocal cords hiding from the eves of the doctor concealed from the self-assured rays of the CT...

...Anti-Semitism and its denial, lacunae in the history we cannot bear to remember, senseless natural disasters and malign manmade ones—all reappear from age to age...

...Somehow, the presence of the wracked invalid makes the demons' attack on the saint seem all the more real...

...A reverie induced by strong painkillers evokes the Song of Solomon: "The flowers appear in the land...

...At the foot of the cross Mary and St...

...The opening Grünewald section is called...

...Now Eddie Levenston has translated Kovner's last book from the Hebrew...

...They had seen atrocities committed in the name of religion, and had watched disfiguring, fatal plagues sweep through their countries...

...About to go into surgery, Kovner thinks of the sacrifice of Isaac, and wonders whether God will spare him at the last moment...

...But some of those men and women prevailed and embarked on new lives...

...an abyss fine as a pinhead in ambush, with mysterious patience like the galaxies of emptiness beyond the black holes left behind in space like a fateful seal with no dawn— What may sound like a gloomy or upsetting book actually pulsates with vitality as a brave, stubborn survivor comes to terms with existence at the end of his own...

...Our experience of war or disease is personal and social...

...Petersburg in the 1730s and eventually joined Vitus Bering's Arctic voyage in search of a strait to take Russian ships to the Pacific Ocean and America...

...The artist strives to express a view of nature or conflict or religion that is based on his own experience...

...KOVNER continues to fight his mortality: "Life what is left of it/ is hard to give up...

...Some are feathered and beaked, some have antlers or amphibious faces, or human arms and bird legs...

...When he sleeps propped up to keep the fluids in his lungs from suffocating him, he is trying to hold in memory worse things in order to tell his pains they were not worth anything they should leave him alone for now— Those remembered horrors are mostly from his days in the woods around Vilna, where companions starved or were killed and he had his own brushes with death...

...German amnesia about the atrocities of the Third Reich, and the terrors of war and disease are consistent motifs of the book...

...Manhattan's famed cancer hospital is "a pathless wilderness" akin to the desert where the children of Israel wandered after the Exodus from Egypt...

...Heavenly war is being waged against fiendish illness in a broken world, yet we cannot be sure of victory...

...his apocalyptic view of the violent era he lived in...

...An eminent poet, novelist and essayist, he became the director of the Israel Society of Writers...

...Life went on for the survivors, and now he must face the fact that "the stars/ do not go out when we die," that things carry on without us...

...These verses are dedicated to his comrade Itzik Wittenburg, commander of Vilna's underground forces: OnJuly 16, 1943,he handed himself overto the Gestapo to save everyone else from collective punishment—a sacrifice "of more weight/ than all the days/ at SloanKettering...

...After Nature (Random House, 121 pp., $21.95), is appearing in this country for the first time...

...Let us not be led like sheep to the slaughterhouse...

...The second section concerns Steller, the botanist who left his native Germany for St...

...He lived in England for over three decades, but continued to write in his native German...

...A triptych of biographical prose poems, it offers a meditation on Mathias Grünewald...

...His wasting body reminds him of the skeletal figures, all bones and eyes, in the ghettos and concentration camps...

...It is not surprising that such gruesome works were largely ignored during the idealistic 19th century, but were terribly resonant to many in the 20th...