A Sackful of Sayings No: 9

It was not just the pizza in Sydney coming close to the elusive tastes and smells of my childhood I have searched for ever since, but it was also the waiters and the atmosphere.  They come from a world all but lost.  Like the conversations with the Jews of Melbourne, with their warm personalities and grief-driven pasts, a reminder of what might have been had I never left Boro Park, had the world not collapsed in the events of the last century, and had not my own self resisted each new environment.  This is the tragic paradox of history.

Two statements in the morning newspapers: (1) “If the pre-school schedule is reduced,” said a frantic working mother, “I will have to stay at home and look after my children”; and (2) “I am sixty-five,” said a hard-boiled journalist on the morning of his retirement, “and do not want to learn anything new.”  Not only could these remarks have been phrased more felicitously so as to mask the impressions of selfishness and willful ignorance, but the underlying changes in the way people think of the way they fit into society could have been made clearer and less aggressive.  It will probably take generations for people to be able to talk about their “issues” without using jargon and catch-phrases, to find a balance between individuality and responsibility, and to appreciate the creative tensions in their ability to create knowledge and take care of their families.  Meanwhile, the rest of us will have to suffer.

The horrid history of the past century has overwhelmed the fantasies of the nineteenth.  Unimaginative men and women did what the most poetic minds could never reach, not even Mirbeau in The Garden of Torments or Poe in his Pit and Pendulum.  Is it therefore true that there can be no literature after the Holocaust or must we take our own novels and verses as the secret places where the imagination has gone to rest and recuperate?

He is now over ninety and every week he walks past the photographs of his adolescent sisters in the Holocaust Museum.  They are beautiful young girls.  He asks everyone he meets there” Why?  My only answer:  “If there were reasons; it would not have happened!”

I force myself to read what the anti-Semites write.  Lies, distortions and slanders to be sure, but nothing in their ravings matches the dutiful and endless lists of deportees to the death camps and crematoria. 

If Socrates had been a rabbi, he would not have said he knew nothing and then tricked his interlocutors into confessing their own ignorance.  He would have shown how his own knowledge was based on his teachers and on his pupils. When his disciples argued with him on this and every other point, basing their arguments on his authority, they would laugh together.

I was not born until five years after Alfred Dreyfus died.  It took another seventy years before his fate touched my own.  He was such a different man than anyone I knew, it frightens me that we might never have become close friends.

At an Eugène Atget exhibition in Sydney I see sepia photographs of Paris, with a grainy play of light and shadow, and slide into a past I never knew.  At first, the only living things to be encountered are sleeping kittens curled up before ancient doorways.  Then shadows appear in the windows, figures lurk in doorways, and someone who looks like me sits inconspicuously in a dark corner of the street.