The Enduring Power of Literature
WISSE, RUTH R.
The Enduring Power of Literature A cautionary tale about ‘change.’ BY RUTH R. WISSE The struggle between the Obama and McCain campaigns over who claims the motto of “Change” in the...
...Her latest book is Jews and Power (Schocken, 2007...
...Kafka and Babel involve the reader in their own cognitive, psychological, and moral crises...
...Joy’s eagerness to learn was never in doubt...
...Ruth R. Wisse teaches Yiddish and comparative literature at Harvard University...
...A couple of years ago a young woman came to my offi ce hours after the very fi rst class and introduced herself as a freshman, an African American from an inner city, who knew nothing about Jews and had studied very little literature in high school...
...When I arrived at Harvard in 1993, I began teaching a course on modern Jewish literature as part of the Core Curriculum for Literature and Arts...
...the Jews are chosen to prove the absence of redemption...
...Well, this was me when I came into the course,” she said: “I was go-gogogirl...
...She said that without the glossary at the back of the book, she would have understood none of the Jewish allusions that popped up in our fi rst work—Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman...
...I was going to change society...
...The student—let me call her Joy— began coming to my offi ce regularly, at least once for each book on the syllabus...
...Would she be able to master the course...
...How is that...
...I had never consciously set out to convey such a teaching, but in one of his books Saul Bellow refers to Leo Strauss’s extraordinary suggestion, “The Jewish people and their fate are the living witness for the absence of redemption...
...Bellow mixes laughter and trembling in combinations that assume greater maturity than most undergraduates possess...
...This, one could say, is the meaning of the chosen people...
...Tevye is diffi cult because the traditional Jew of the title needs a glossary as well as translation to convey his wit...
...During the reading period before exams, she dropped in with a small fl urry of questions, and then told me that she had written her mother saying that this course had turned her into an adult...
...As the semester progressed, these were supplemented by her own interpretations, argued from copies of the books that were stuffed with as many post-its as the pages in between...
...The course proceeds chronologically, featuring twentieth-century works in six or more languages, which let us see how variously Jewish literature interprets history, depending at least in part on the context of the language within which it is written...
...We went over some of the text together and I invited her to come back if she had more questions...
...Primo Levi is the plainest of writers but he guides us into the hardest territory— Auschwitz...
...I was going to change everything...
...When we started discussing the book it turned out that she had understood it quite well, if not in all its details...
...Sammler’s Planet, showed me that I could also change it for the worse...
...Bashevis Singer fears the consequence of having abandoned the civilizing bounds of religious law...
...Well, the course and especially the last book we read, Mr...
...We read works by Sholem Aleichem, Franz Kafka, Isaac Babel, S.Y...
...I tend to fault Harvard students for not asking enough questions, as though they are more afraid to reveal their ignorance than curious to learn...
...I was going to change the world...
...Joy’s fresh encounters with these works made me realize how truly tough they all were...
...I asked in astonishment...
...Agnon aspires to encompass all of Jewish experience, synchronic and diachronic, in a single work...
...Core courses are designed to provide a “general education” for the unspecialized student...
...At fi rst, she would arrive with a list of written questions about the works and the lectures...
...Each in his way, the writers in the course reinforce this insight, and pursuing the logic of their writings, Joy had arrived at the same conclusion...
...Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Primo Levi, and Saul Bellow...
...This is not to say that she intended to give up her hopes of changing the world, but that she would do it knowing how many hopefuls had changed it for the worse...
...It gave me great pleasure to follow Joy’s progress through the course, but nothing prepared me for the reward of her last visit...
...The Enduring Power of Literature A cautionary tale about ‘change.’ BY RUTH R. WISSE The struggle between the Obama and McCain campaigns over who claims the motto of “Change” in the current election campaign brings to mind one of the brightest moments in my university career...
Vol. 14 • October 2008 • No. 4
