See: http://www.aau.edu/WorkArea/
Sunday 22 December 2013
Boycotts and Divestments
Now that there is a growing call for boycotts, divestment and other ostracizing of Israeli academic, I must pin my colors to the mast and say I am an Israeli citizen though living abroad. It will be a great honor to be boycotted etc by nasty people and organizations.
See: http://www.aau.edu/WorkArea/ DownloadAsset.aspx?id=14859
See: http://www.aau.edu/WorkArea/
Wednesday 18 December 2013
Communications in an Electronic Age
I had a friend once who wrote his thesis on the value
of oral testimony when writing about modern history—you have to understand this
was a long time ago, perhaps thirty years or so: the external examiner did not
pass the dissertation because he said the candidate used too much oral
testimony. It did not matter that what
the witnesses said provided information that was not recorded in published
documents, stored in government archives, or been collected by interviewers
asking people to answer specific questions or tick boxes on a list. The ebb and flow of conversations as they
opened memories, raised old angers, anxieties, enthusiasms and interests, none
of that mattered to the great professor brought up in the old school. The arts of analysis and interpretation
simply did not take into account the compilation of long recordings, allowing
elderly people to ramble from what they thought they were being asked to say
into re-entering the worlds of their youth and their prime, creating patterns
of revelation and barriers of denial and distortion. There was no way, this pontiff of historical
method asserted, for consideration of hesitations, changes in the tone of
voice, self-corrections or attempts to cover over delicate points, various
versions of the same incident told at different times in the recording.
It all seems so obvious now. But then we have the contemporary debate over
the value of the internet both as an instrument of scholarship and a source of
information. The arguments against
usually fall into one or some combination of the following: there is no
editorial control, anyone can put in his or her opinion, can make up whatever
they like, ridiculous combinations or conjunctions of topics are created which
make only superficial—or no—sense together by way of rational logic,
chronology, or psychological rules. But
these supposed faults prove to be highly provocative, pregnant virtues. Outside the official methodologies of academe
the online researcher is able to put things together in new exciting ways, to
discover facts that usually fly or float below the radar of what is considered
important by the establishment, and opinions about the world people usually
hide from official audiences are expressed—and it is good sometimes to study
the nature of prejudice, enthusiasm, anxiety and fear. Of course, once you start to locate
information on the internet, you can begin to locate other evidence to verify
these possibilities, to adjust current paradigms to a wider range of facts and
opinions, and to identify people, events, and places mentioned, and to read
books mentioned or alluded to.
One of the opportunities opened up by the internet for
me lies in the vast number of books, articles, images, and recordings that is
otherwise available to someone stuck at the bottom of the world and in an
obscure corner of it. While not
everything is there in the dark reaches of cyberspace, there are sufficient
hints for me to try to find books in libraries, to prowl used bookshops and
book fairs, to contact people whose existence was not conceived of before—or at
least to have access to their addresses. Especially now that I am retired from the
university and no longer have students to talk to, colleagues to meet, and
research funds to travel overseas, the internet and the email are lifelines to a
somewhat imperfect but still important intellectual world out beyond the
horizon.
On the other hand, when I read about the increasing
attempts by bigots and fools to take over academic associations, to engage in
unseemly campaigns of boycotting Israel, to close-down debates and shut
visiting speakers up with loud, unruly demonstrations, to substitute political
correctness for free inquiry and discussions, well, then I am quite happy to be
no longer connected to that scholarly universe. The scholarly profession just ain’t what it
used to be.
Instead, except for writing a few books every year or
so, and a small number of essays and book reviews that get printed in journals
whose editors I respect and vice versa, this Blog seems an acceptable
substitute. I wish there were more
responses, but at my age perhaps it is best not to have too many engagements of
that sort. Seemly discussions are
preferable to heated arguments at my age.
Sunday 15 December 2013
Pompous Courses for the Epistemiologically Challenged
University of Pipi-Tipi-Woo-Hoo
THE DEPARTMENT OF POLITICALLY
ABSURD CULTURE[1]
INTERDISCIPLINARY COURSES (1976)[2]
08.104 The Clyde Dam[3]
Clearing away
the bull shit. Agreements never agreed
to. A study in government mismanagement
and judicial repression. Open to all
first year students.
17.322 University Administration
Designed for chemistry majors with a flair for radioactive sherry. This course will examine topics such as:
suppressing letters, hiring under false pretenses, investing salary funds
etc. Not suitable for political science
lecturers.
01.213 Cancer Labs as Lunch Rooms
How
to increase your body weight by training your cells to grow free, at the same
time as you study Goethe, Schiller and other Romantic poesy. A variety of metathesizing nodes of personal
growth. A must for all German and
journalism students.
98.213 The Papist-Masonic-Jewish Plot
Taught by trendy lefties, Palestinian guerrillas and Jansenist
mystics. This course will trace the long
history of al chemical intrigue that led up to the declaration of Western
Samoans as New Zealand citizens. Open to
all second rate students.
36.36X Basic Laziness
All
members of the university join in this special physical fatness program,
which will meet weekly in the library toilets.
No special preparation required.
Bring an awl to open notches in your belt.
77.777 How to
Close a Teachers College
Units in rumor, subterfuge and back-stabbing will be taught by a
panel of experts flown in on cancelled Air New Zealand flights to the South
Pole, including the Monster of Education, the Under-secretary of Price Gouging
and the Prime Minister’s ex-tea lady.
Closed to all students.
43.133 Enzymes
and the Empire
Fiscal
responsibility with a human face; eczema for fun and profit; neuro-surgery for
the backyard amateur. Essential for
psychology majors; may be substituted for any seven regular first year Deviant Psychology
Courses.
06.546 The Gran Chaco War
Jointly
taught by members of the department of Gherka studies and Hysterics. This course will deal with a blow by blow,
day by day, hillock by hillock account of the war that shook the world in the
1930s. Field trips, re-enactments,
casualties. Loads of fun. Bring a picnic lunch.
99.333 Normal
Occurrences
Here
physicists and philologists study everyday things. Find out why chalk dust makes you sneeze;
thrill to the revelations of how pencil sharpeners work; discover the mysteries
of whisper campaigns; and delight in the satisfaction of knowing how to make an
elevator work. For flunking graduate-students
in Business Studies only.
87.225 Making the Best of Your Overseas Leave
Not given in 1983, 1984, 1985 etc
[1] This was actually written more than 25 years ago, at a time when,
still somewhat youthful in my daring, I would leave copies around the tea-rooms
in the university for the delectation and shock of colleagues, who suspected
but never quite guessed who was doing it.
[2] Again I attempt to
update or at least explicate the nature of the intellectual and aesthetic
problems to be tackled in these spoof seminars.
[3] This was once a big
issue in New Zealand. Now it is all but
forgotten. But then both here in the
Antipodes and upstairs in the real world there are many more, equally contentious
if not more absurd projects to be studied.
Choose your own.
University-Level Courses for Idiots
University of
Pipi-Tipi-Woo-Hoo
THE DEPARTMENT OF POLITICALLY ABSURD CULTURE[i]
COURSES FOR A SUMMER SCHOOL
98.101 Introduction to the Self
Each student will be given a small hand mirror and told to stare in
it each morning. At class, cellophane
cut-outs of characters from popular novels, television drama and
twitter-messages are distributed and students pass them around until each one
has identified with at least three of the characters. The cut-outs are then
pasted on the body. Everyone guesses who
he or she is supposed to be. The winner
may run for president.
98.102 Impacts and Constructivist Aesthetics
A course in pointless personal art and literary appreciation. Second-rate poetry and short stories are
hoisted into an aerial balloon above a large stadium or administrative
office. The books are dropped at
random. Students showing the greatest
impact then express their emotions. Only
jargon and neologism may be used.
98.103 Literature and Anal Bromides
A
special course for future ministers of education, members of associations based
on BDS principles, and dysfunctional family heads.[ii] Teams are chosen among students who read out
long lists of clichés, commonplace and platitudes. The first team to fall totally asleep is
forced to have lunch with the vice chancellor.
98.201 The Sincerity of Nature
A tearful reading of all the minor poetry in Palaver's Golden Trashery. The entire second term will be spent mooning over the inanities
of Coventry Patmore, William Wordsworth’s later sonnets against railways and
canals, and the complete political writings and other vacuous speeches of
B.H.O.[iii]
98.202 Irony and Dish-Water
A
unique course offered at no other university.
This presents intending nuclear physicists and grave-diggers with an
opportunity to discuss the subtleties of dish-soap commercials. An historical perspective is given by
constant reference to the Abyssinian Talmud.
98.203 Shakespeare's Double
A reading of all the plays in the pseudo-Shakespearean canon
attributed to Bacon, Marlow and Christopher Robin. By dialectical analysis of Two Bumbling Locksmiths in Vienna,[iv]
it is shown that Shakespeare was someone else of the same name, that his mother
never served spaghetti on toast and that Ann Smith fell off the second best
bed. A silent film of the entire oeuvre may be submitted in lieu of a
research essay.
98.207 Hypochondria
and the Familiar Essay
Intensive
study of four unwritten essays by the leading thinkers of the early
Renaissance: Anonymous, Incomplete, Rob Muldoon and Chidiock Tichbourne. Only available on the Scilly Isles and in
Gigglesworth in England.
98.305 The
American North
Out of the sweeping history of the Dakota badlands come the searing
novels and poetry of America's best known authors. Why bother with women, blacks, Jews,
intellectuals when you can sit back, light up a 5¢ seegar and enjoy the full
repertoire of Farrago and Bismark.
98.311 Early
Literature
A thoroughly footnoted, nose-wiped and arse-licked course in the
kindergarten writings of major authors.
Thrill to William Blake’s infantile ramblings. Weep with Henry Miller as he pees on the
floor. Tremble as Keri Hulme begs for her mummy to cook her salty porridge. Or you may choose any unknown, forgotten or
inane winners of the Nobel Prize for Litter, the Man-Booger Prize, the Bullet
Surprise, etc.
98.505 Graduate
Research: Strategic Forgetting and Political Lies
A close rhetorical, structuralist and post-deconstructionist study
of vice-presidential memos, leaked documents from the KGB, or the Unpublished
Speeches of Yasser Arafat. All lectures
will be held in the lift in B-block, accompanied by stereophonic bagpipe music.
[i] This was actually written more than 25 years ago, at a time when,
still somewhat youthful in my daring, I would leave copies around the tea-rooms
in the university for the delectation and shock of colleagues, who suspected but
never quite guessed who was doing it.
[ii] This can be adjusted in
your own mind to fit whatever country’s bureaucrats (tischenkopfs) you feel
appropriate.
[iii] Perhaps no one under
fifty will recognize these names and I dare not attempt to wrack my brain for
allusions to contemporary authors I have never read. Suffice to say that when I was an
undergraduate studying 19th century poetry (which I loathed) the
professor would have the same questions for each person: Was he (there were
never she’s) sincere about Nature?
Saturday 14 December 2013
Fragments of a Memory
The Old
Man on the Stoop
In this yellowing and
blurry photo, taken sometime in late 1943, before he was too ill to go outside
any more, my grandfather Moses is sitting on the stoop in front of his brick
house. He is wearing a winter coat and
hat, so that we know it must be November or December. He sits on the left of the steps, leaving a
space, and I think there was another companion piece to this picture that
showed me sitting next to him on that day.
I was a little more than three years old and my father had gone away
into the army, not to return until late 1946.
Or perhaps, if you think about what the world was like then, someone
else had been there with him, one of the grown-ups who loved him and wanted to
give him comfort that afternoon, knowing it might be the last time he could
enjoy the sun shining directly on him.
Or maybe it was no one at all and he placed himself apart, making room
for someone to walk up or down the stairs.
Or perhaps in a different version of this context to the photograph,
without his will to do so, he kept that space open in case one of his lost
relatives returned, his first wife, his son already virtually disappeared into
the military, or some more distant cousin or parent whom he had left so many
hears before in the Old Country where already the Final Solution had probably
already swallowed them up.
There are many questions I have about this
photograph. It is almost too painful to
look at. Everything about the time and
place is shrouded in sorrow and grief.
My grandmother, my mother, and everyone else who might have been in the
house at that time is gone. Other
friends and relatives of the family could have provided some of the necessary
background information. But now no one
is left for me to ask about it, except myself, and I was so young then it would
be foolish to trust my memory. What I do
know is that we, that is, my mother and I, had moved into my grandfather and
grandmother’s house on 48th Street on the other side of Old New
Utrecht Road, across the street from Pershing Junior High School, when my
father went into the army. Before that
we had lived upstairs from a dress shop on 53rd Street, where 13th
Avenue converges with Old New Utrecht Road, so that the El passed right by our
window.
My
mother and I lived in that brick house with her parents, and then only her
mother, until a year after the war ended in Europe and in the Pacific when my father returned from the war and he
bought our big house on 47th Street.
Aside from a faulty memory, there are a few of these old photographs, at
once warmly redolent of the world I have lost—not one of the people in these
pictures, as I have said, remains alive,
except myself—and that lost world is frustratingly peopled by persons I cannot
recall and buildings I can only vaguely identify. Soon anyone looking at the pictures, even my
own children, will see them as a complete stranger would: just old phot0graphs,
like those you find in a tin box in a junk shop, curiosities of times gone by, nothing
personal left to them.
My grandfather Moses Herman was ill virtually the whole
time I was aware of him. However, he was
still working a little as a cloth-cutter and tailor, so that, when my father
started to wear his military uniform, I was given one also. Then Grandpa stayed at home all the time,
sometimes working in the small backyard where he grew roses, sometimes sitting
on the front stoop to catch the sun, but more and more he stayed indoors the
more ill he became, until it seemed to me he was always lying on the window
seat in the front parlour and was dying.
I cannot recall when he actually passed away. It just happened and I never saw him again.
He was a short, very gentle, quiet man.
There is nothing I can remember that he ever said.
What I have subsequently learned about him is little
enough. He came originally from
Hungary. When he arrived in America
shortly before the First World War, he had a European wife who bore him one son
named Bertram. I never met him. Nothing
can be discovered about him except that he was old enough to have joined the Navy
during the Depression. He was, my mother
always said, in Pearl Harbor when the Japanese attacked the US fleet in
December 1941. Bertram disappeared,
missing in action. He may or may not
have been aboard one of the ships that were sunk. My mother used to write to the War Department
to find out if they had news, but they never did. This was one more thing that made her always
sad. If she saw someone in a sailor
uniform years later, she would tremble and often when she realized it was not
her brother she would faint in the street.
Probably there is no one in the whole world now who remembers who he was
or knows what happened to him.
After his first wife died, Grandpa Moe married my Grandma
Molly, who was from Romania, and she was a widow with one son, my Uncle Jack
Goldner. Molly came from a family of
great rabbis who lived in northern Romania and the border area of the Ukraine
nearby, perhaps from the city of Czernowitz.
She claimed he was the Grand Rabbi of Dorohoi, so that when Queen Mary
of Romania visited New York in the mid-1930s, Grandma was invited to have tea
with her. She had aristocratic
pretensions and passed them on to my mother, who always felt she deserved more
from life than she received and should.
It could be that my mother was the one taking the photo. That does not seem right, though; she was
never able to deal with machines of any kind.
Maybe, instead, it was my grandmother, although that, too, when I think
of it, seems improbable, for though she was likely to have been agile enough to
work a camera, she might have deemed it below her dignity. Obviously it was not me: not only was I too
young but I was in the missing companion piece taken the same day and close in
time. Like so much else in my past, as
recorded in my child’s memory, the answer is elusive, the concepts beyond my
intelligence and experience at that time, and the resolution gone with all the
people who may have enlightened me at any point in the last seventy years. Photographs were taken and later developed,
rarely were they annotated with dates or names of the people and places they reproduced. The pictures were put in boxes. No one looked at them from one decade to
another. When one person died, they were
passed on to another, and so on, until they came to me. For many years, I could not bear to look
them, as they recorded a world of nostalgia and meaningfulness that had
disappeared. Now, more recently, as I
approach the end of days, one or two can be lifted out of the box, laid on a
table, and looked at, their mysteries all too evident. Either nameless people in unknown settings,
or one or two familiar faces in rooms or near scenes that I vaguely recall, but
not the specific occasions that would let the experience fill up with memories.
There are a few photos of Grandpa Moe, some of my Grandma
Mollie, but nothing at all to indicate that Bertram ever existed. Yes, there are images of Uncle Jack, his
step-brother, and also of my mother.
Even the wedding of my parents has the whole mishpucha there, including an unidentified young woman, but again
no Uncle Bertram. What do you do when
there is no one left to ask about him?
Perhaps there could be documents somewhere, if all that was needed were
the kind of positivistic data one fills in a genealogical tree with; while that
would confirm what he was—the son of Grandpa Moe and his first wife—it would
tell us nothing about him, what caused him to run off to join the Navy, or why
he was never heard of again. How many
ancestors whose names and vital dates can be placed on a chart remain totally
without personalities or substance as living persons?
His
absence, in a sense, defines our family mother cared about him, yet no one else
has left a record of their sense of loss.
I was for a long time too young to be interested in or understand
anything that might have been said in whispered conversations, and later in my
early adolescence had not the wit to question my mother when she passed on the
few dribs and drabs of information I have just told you about.
Yet
when I try to imagine in my mind the ages of the people involved and the
chronology of the events, few as they are, something begins to emerge that is
totally unexpected. Since my mother was
born in 1919, her step-brother Bertram would have had to be a few years older
than her. Grandpa Moe was not drafted
into the Army during the Great War, although he duly registered as a citizen,
and it is likely that there would be a few years between the death of his first
wife and his marriage to my Grandma Molly, even if his son was still relatively
an infant and he felt he needed to marry quickly to give the young child a
mother. Let us therefore guess that
Bertram was born in 1915, making him eighteen in 1933, an age when he might
have decided, for various reasons, to join the Navy. One reason, to be sure, was the
Depression. Another reason could have
been rivalry with my mother’s other step-brother, Jack, the son of Grandma
Molly and her first husband Mr. Goldner.
Jack and Bertram may have been similar in age and the tensions at home
over the poor economy, perhaps exacerbated by Jack’s marriage to Bella and the
birth of a daughter, my Cousin Bernice, around 1922. Probably something else happened that stirred
him into leaving home, cutting relations with his parents, and never contacting
my mother again after he joined up. He
would have been around twenty-six at the time of Pearl Harbour on 6 December
1941.
Sunday 8 December 2013
Some speculations on the Modern Marrano Experience
The following paragraphs were pulled from an article I wrote a year ago but which had to be drastically cut down for the specifics of the anthology it was to go in. Here it is fpr your perusal and comments.
One of the assumed truisms I grew up
with in rabbinical Jewish tradition was that any Jew who becomes a Christian
does so out of external pressure—threats to the individual or the family, to
the community’s continued and its livelihood—or out of selfish ambitions—to
open access to professions otherwise closed to Jews, to escape from an
oppressive family, or to be free of the charges charged against all Jews which
the individual has come to accept. It was
simply inconceivable that a Jew would or could forgo the ancestral religion as
a matter of faith or theological preference.
Such a heretic, however, often remains technically—in halacha or rabbinical law—a Jew, albeit
a bad one who has separated him- or herself from the community or, which
amounts to the same thing, has not taken any opportunity following their
baptism or that of parents or grandparents to return to the synagogue as a penitent,
a baal teshuva. In a more historical setting, this came to
mean that in the case of Iberian or Sephardic Jews who were subjected to
physical, financial and psychological threats by the Spanish or Portuguese
Inquisitions or royal administrations to force their conversions each
subsequent generation of individuals, families and communities must be seen to
face the original question of whether to accept the relief of baptism or to
continue in the new condition of a New Christian.
It
would have been a more complex question in the past or in the present of my own
growing to awareness to have discussed the related question of what as the
halachic or community status of individuals and families of Jews who did not
formally convert to Christianity (or some other religion or organized belief
system, such as Ethical Culture or the Communist Party) but simply faded away,
or the saying now goes who began to move under the radar. During the persecutions of the Middle Ages,
as during the wave of pogroms that were connected with the First and Second
Crusades, for instance, people who wished to escape the need for forced
conversion or Kiddush ha-Shem
(martyrdom) would “separate themselves” from their former lives, move out into
the surrounding society of Christians and away from their previous family ties,
social obligations and religious duties, and for a number of years or for the rest
of their lives adapt a mode of living that was neither that of a Jew (insofar
as they never rejoined the old or attached themselves to a new congregation or kehilla) or made a formal conversion to
Christianity—or even pretended to be a born-Christian from some far away
land. Such persons went from place to
place from moment to moment, as it were, without any specific and continuous
identity; they would be what was needed at any point of crisis—when stopped by
church or civil authorities and asked who they were, where they were from and
what confession they belonged to—and say what seemed most expedient, safest and
non-committal. Nomads they were, in the
sense of traveling peddlers, musicians, dancing masters, criminals, going about
along the roads in amorphous and inconsistent groups. In a sense to be discussed later, these individuals were
Jewish insofar as they found themselves always living apart, peculiar,
sceptical and distrustful of whatever authorities they encountered yet trusting
to a degree in the ultimate justice of the universe, and always questioning
themselves and their place in the world.
They could not rid themselves of the inner baggage of their educations,
formal and informal, based on Talmudic procedures of argumentation and probing
given opinions.
These quasi- or
indeterminate-Jews might, in a romantic way, occasionally attempt to fit in
with one group or another, sometimes Christian, sometimes Jewish, sometimes
like themselves without formal identity, for the sake of sociability, nostalgic
return to childhood experiences, or curiosity about the nature of the “other”
so long as no embarrassing questions were asked. They were therefore more than outlaws with
anti-social tendencies. They only by
circumstance might be considered mentally ill in respect to their inability to
conform to the cultural and spiritual norms of the various peoples they passed
through. They were a very small—a
tiny—number of modern individuals lost in a world that had as yet no categories
into which to fit them—that is, people who did not define themselves by the
group in which they were born or the place in which they chose to live. Unlike many Christians who were eccentric,
emotionally disturbed or cast-offs from their families and communities because
of other peculiarities in their character, appearance or circumstances, these
former Jews could not enter monasteries or convents; they would, if they found
themselves in certain off situations, take on the enclosed religious life—or
more often the archaic practice of the hermit, although that was rare (except in
literature) from the late medieval period onwards—without any true
calling. Men and women from the
surrounding culture would themselves sometimes take on the habit for sincere
reasons of devotion and piety, but many were sent their by their families, escaped
from abusive experiences, and sought the peace and quiet of a contemplative
life for purely intellectual reasons, not necessarily out of an intense
faith. The commitment to a regular life
of prayer, meditation and shared devotional labours would not conform to the
alien needs of those wandering Jews who had detached themselves.
In the first instance,
those who accept baptism under duress or who endure the forced conversion
without seeking the sanctification of the name or martyrdom are known as anusim, those who have been violated in
the same sense as a raped woman. In the
second, the renegades or opportunist converts are treated as though they were
dead and are now mere ghosts walking about the earth. From the Christian perspective, the former Jew
can be called a converso, a neophyte,
or a New Christian, and yet there remains a lingering doubt about the sincerity
of the conversion, hence the use of a term such as Nuevo Christiano even after many generations.
For those New
Christians who seek a kind of compromise position there is the possibility of
living an outward life within the ritual boundaries and public expectations of
the Catholic religion while inwardly—in the closed parameters of the domestic
home and in the confines of individual mental solitude—remaining a Jew. The term Marrano,
with all its pejorative denotations (swine, child of a pig, harlot) and connotations (filthy, untrustworthy,
faithless), is used both by still practicing Jews against relatives and
neighbours who have betrayed the Law of Moses and the bonds of the community,
and by their new co-religionist in the Christian world to mark them as
inassimilable, insincere and demonic agents of a hostile power. However, the name Marrano can also slide into
the domain of Crypto-Jews in which by varying degrees of strategy and species
of cunning the conversos seek to
subvert the categories marking the boundaries between Christian and Jew. To be a Crypto-Jew or secret believer tests
the limits of Jewish law, particularly when the single person or the small
group becomes increasingly alienated from communal knowledge, education,
customs and spiritual directions. A
series of inner compromises, substitutions and rationalizations creates a
condition of ambiguity that can be as creative as it is deleterious and
dangerous to those who inhabit this realm of unrecognized legal identity. I have chosen to use the term Marrano to
designate a form of unstable identity that is different from the category of
Crypto-Jew, insofar as these Secret Jews believe themselves to be sincerely
Jewish in all that truly matters—their faith, their spirituality, and their
ethical beliefs—with their behaviour, appearance, and public professions as
Christians modified by subtle, cunning and coded innuendo and manipulations. For the Crypto-Jew the dangers of being found
out by some slip of the tongue or laxness in action or of being denounced by
close family, friends, neighbours or rivals in the outer community constitute a
dimension of their existence that constantly proves their adherence to the
ancient Jewish faith.
The Marrano, as
individual or as small group, remains ambiguous, unsure of who or what his or
her true identity is, sometimes shifting from external allegiance to the Church
to the Synagogue and back again, within one lifetime or within the living
memory of the family generations. While
this also creates the thrill of living on the margins, playing teasing games
with various ecclesiastical, civil and national institutions, the ambiguity
itself can become a primary component of the way the single person, family or
small group defines and evaluates itself.
This ambiguity will eventually become a hallmark of modernity in
European civilizations but for many hundreds of years has no legal or credible
dimension with which the persons involved can be satisfied.
******
A series of amusing anecdotes from the
Brooklyn (New York) Jewish milieu in which I grew up more than seventy years
ago may bring into focus the existential reality of these dangers and
ambiguities faced by the Marrano. I
start with a story about a conversion undertaken for business reasons. In this narrative, a certain Jake Ginzberg, a
tailor by profession, seeks to enhance his position in English society near the
end of the nineteenth century, and thus decides to become an Episcopalian. He duly begins to attend Church every Sunday
and to stop attending synagogue on Saturdays.
After several months of taking instruction from the local priest, he is
welcomed into the church and is properly baptized. His wife and children observe all this with
some scepticism, but out of respect for the father of the family, they make no
objections. Then the Sunday following
his becoming a member of the Christian persuasion, his wife notices that it is
nearly nine-thirty in the morning and Jake has not yet woken up. “Jake,” she says, shaking her husband, “get
up. Have you forgotten what day it is? You have to get dressed or you will be late
for church.” Jake opens his eyes, looks
at the clock, then hits his hand against his forehead, “Oy, a goyisha kupf!”
The point of this old joke, if we can be so
uncouth as to unpack the problem in explicit terms, is that Jake cannot get
away from his own instinctive Jewish habits of mind, although at the same time
when his wife points out to him that he is ruining his chances of being
accepted into the Christian community he has made the effort to join through
his formal conversion, he now objectifies his new identity and blames his
forgetfulness on the reputed stupidity of gentiles. He has thus been transformed and not been
transformed. He is estranged from the
very persona he has wished to take on
as his own. There is never a question,
of course, about readjusting his beliefs or attitudes towards the spiritual and
the religious. Whatever he may have
studied and professed in order to achieve the conversion appears as superficial
at best and meaningless at worst. In a
sense, his wife, who has not been a party to this experiment in identity
change, is more aware of the need for Jake to adopt new modes of behaviour than
he himself.
In another Jewish anecdote,
this one set somewhere in old Ukraine, there is imagined to be an aged Jewish father,
Mendel Faigenbaum who, feeling himself reaching the end of his days, calls his
three sons together to his bedside and announces that he plans to convert, and
asks the sons to bring the local Orthodox priest as soon as possible. Though grumbling and reluctant to go the
three Faigenbaum boys do as they were bidden and bring Father Dimitri to the
house. The sons look puzzled and demoralized. Mendel sends them out of the room, and
explains to the young priest what is wanted.
The cleric is delighted to think of baptizing a Jew, so immediately goes
out to bring the appropriate materials to carry out the ritual. He asks no questions and gives no
instructions: the prize is too valuable to risk being lost. The next morning Father Dimitri returns,
along with a young boy carrying censor and a small satchel with crucifix, a few
consecrated wafers. and a vial holy water.
The three sons stand alone in the next room waiting for the ceremony to
be completed. They hint to one another
that their father must be crazy, but not one of them has the courage to stand
up against the old man’s wishes. Half an
hour later, the priest departs with a huge smile on his face, brushes past the
boys, and returns to his church. The
sons enter the father’s bedroom. “My
sons,” Mendel whispers, his whole appearance looking more pale and weak than
ever, “I will be departing this world very shortly. Before I go, it is better I
explain to you why I have taken this extraordinary step of becoming a
Christian.” Each son starts to object,
each bites his lips, each remains silent.
“Do not worry,” the father says.
“I have not lost my mind. Mishuggah I am not. I am going to pass away very soon, if not
today, then tomorrow or maybe the next day, God willing.” The tears come to the eyes of the three sons. They almost stammer out their
complaints. “Shaa, shaa,” Mendel says.
“Look, it’s a hard world, nebech,
and haven’t we Jews suffered enough for such a long time? Now when I die, so what? Better one of them than one of us.”
The whimsical turn here
can be seen in the playing off of the sons’ concerns that their father has gone
mad through his conversion and the sudden reversal of expectations wherein the
old man plays an ambiguous trick on the gentile society he has pretended to
enter at the crisis point of his death.
At such an extreme moment of spiritual decision-making, when a person is
supposed to slough aside all concerns for the here and now and turn his or her
attention to ultimate things, the disposition of the soul and the eternal
placement of consciousness, Mendel Faigenbaum seems to place his attention on a
final insult to the religion that has insulted him and his people throughout
his own life and through all of European history. In a bizarre manipulation of words and
concepts, he presents his action as rescuing his own Jewish soul from death and
instead adding to the list of dead among his enemies.
A perverse variation
can be seen in the character of Dr. Heinrich Bodenheimer in Sholem Asch’s
Yiddish novel of the 1930s The War Goes
On. Bodenheimer is a Jewish
intellectual who takes delight in writing essays and pamphlets on the virtues
of Christianity as the means for universal peace, Judaism having become, since
the Fall of the Temple, a useless nuisance in the world:
And
yet Dr, Bodenheimer refused to let himself be baptized! Certainly this was partly out of respect for
the family tradition and out of fear of his dead father and willingness to hurt
the feelings of his mother. But there
were other grounds also for his fidelity to the faith of his forefathers. People must not be able to to say that a Dr.
Bodenheimer had required baptism to aid him in making a career! In spite of his great learning he had not
been offered a chair at any university, though certain Christian circles in
which his writings were highly regarded had hinted delicately that he could
easily get a chair if he would only be baptized.[1]
His reluctance to convert to
Christianity to honour his dead father’s memory and his living mother’s
feelings are common motifs even today, while the wish to maintain faith with
his ancestors has taken on a stronger intensity for those who were born on the
other side of the Holocaust. But there
is also personal pride involved, beginning with Bodenheimer’s refusal to be
seen as someone dictated by the expediency of professional ambitions. The reasoning that follows takes his position
into the perversity of a self-hating Jew, albeit the narrator claims the motive
is unconscious.
Still
another consideration moved him, though he was unaware of it: what would
Professor Bodenheimer become if he consented to be baptized? Merely another converted Jew! One among multitude, a drop in the
ocean. Himself an unbaptized, Dr.
Bodenheimer held up Christianity as the only refuge for a doomed civilization;
himself an unbaptized Jew, he proclaimed Christianity as the highest moral
power in the world, and asserted that whoever remained outside its fold
remained outside human society.
This paragraph, punctuated with repetitions
of the word baptism instead of any
synonym and with many exclamation points, exposes the irony of the
self-justifying, self-congratulatory heretic, and reveals that the narrator
here is paraphrasing Bodenheimer’s own voice, as well as making explicit what
he keeps hidden from himself. This is
made more emphatic in the italicized word that follows:
Thus
spoke an unbaptized Jew! There was something original and
unprecedented for you; not everybody had the courage to do that!
Though he is addressing himself in his
own inner-speech, the you mentioned
here is the whole world, including Christians he wishes to impress and Jews he
knows he will cause to blush by his vaunting, and the primary Jew he is
addressing here is himself.
Those who Separate Themselves
The Crypto-Jews and Marranos should also
be distinguished from those Jews who assimilate so far as to lose touch with
what any rabbinical community would recognize as specifically Jewish. The ambiguities can be seen to pitch in with
those men and women who, though their parents had them baptized without always
sharing in the ceremony or they converted themselves for a variety of
reasons—cultural and social ambition, to be sure, but also a strong desire to
“fit in” to the intellectual and milieu to which they feel drawn by temperament
and spirit—remain identified as Jews by those around them, both friendly and
hostile, and thus feel the sting of exclusion more or less throughout their
lives. While they remain apart from
their ancestral communities and seem to take no interest in its history or
beliefs, whenever the voices and violence of anti-Semitism raise themselves,
these people feel compelled to come to the defence of their ancestors and
contemporaries. Once we move beyond the
concept of the Marrano as a specific geographical and historical person in
crisis—the Sephardim who were forced to convert by the Inquisition—we can think
of marranism as a kind of Jewishness in itself, not always as ambiguous to the
Marrano him or herself as to the outsider whether a practicing halachic Jew or
a member of the dominant non-Jewish society. In other words, ambiguity in
itself may be a desirable factor, even when it is painful to experience,
because it creates a series of situations in the individual’s life, that of the
family to which he or she belongs, and the community that basically thinks in
terms of either/or choices—a series of situations that are creative insofar as
they cause reflection on who one is, what one is supposed to be and do in the
world and how one finds meaning in this tension-filled condition;
reconsideration of the formal categories as valuable determinants of
individual, communal and national identity; and reassessment of decisions
already taken by one’s ancestors and oneself in regard to spiritual, customary
and psychological relationship to what—if anything—lies beyond the material
self.
This kind of marranism
or ambiguity is seen in a classical sense in Marcel Proust’s character Charles
Swann. After a lifetime of ingratiating
himself with the elites who meet regularly in various Parisian salons through
his manners and conversation and gaining a reputation as a connoisseur of art,
ignoring the whispers of the anti-Semites that encroach on his supposedly safe
assimilation, when the Dreyfus Affair begins, Swann realizes he is a Jew and
withdraws from the places where ridicule and hostility become explicit. It is, however, too late for him to rejoin
the Jewish community, even if he so wished, and thus he finds himself very much
left out in the cold, neither comfortable in his old haunts nor able to commit
himself to the social world he long since departed from. The narrator Marcel in A la recherche de temps perdu feels great sympathy for his older friend
and mentor, Swann, he observes the changes in the man and in the society around
him from a significant distance and watches the passions roused by the
controversy gradually recede as the years pass.
Though Marcel Proust, the author and historical person, a Jew through
his mother’s family, also felt roused enough by the Affair to pay close
attention to its development and to become active in collecting signatures of
intellectuals for the petitions that were circulated after Zola’s challenging J’accuse…, he did not take the
opportunity to do more than note the rising tide of anti-Semitism and to read
books on Jewish history and culture that could provide a degree of depth to his
long novel. Through his father’s
heritage, Proust was brought up as a Catholic, at least nominally. His father,
though a scientist and civil administrator, did not stress religion at home,
and left his son two sons’ education to the mother. She never converted herself
and with her mother continued to live a quietly Jewish life; yet she ensured
that young Marcel received a formal Catholic education and went to first
communion. By halachic law, Proust was
therefore Jewish, but in practice he was not brought up to be a Jew. As a writer, Marcel Proust does not let
religion intrude into his work nor into his public life.
In his one great
achievement as an author, his major themes concern his own identity problems as
a homosexual and as an outsider to the social sphere to which he aspires. However much one may consider the Dreyfus
Affair to be one of the driving forces in the development in the career of the
central characters and the allusions to biblical themes and images as part of
the novel’s essential textuality, Jewishness remains at best a subsidiary
consideration, and it would be a distortion to think of either the novel or its
author as Jewish. Had he lived another
ten years at least, Proust may have found that being a Jew was not something he
could put aside casually.
Though a professed
Jewish writer like the Swiss-French Albert Cohen makes no attempt to hide his
Jewish identity, and in both his novels and essays weaves in comic characters,
situations, and themes, again we cannot call his work more than marginally part
of the modern Jewish canon. Nevertheless, for all the success of his books at
the time of their writing, what reputation he has in Europe has faded, and the
memory of his Jewishness lies dormant. It may well be that his Jewish identity
has ensured that an award-winning novel such as Belle de Seigneur does not resonate with subsequent audiences
because of its minor Jewish characteristics. Similarly, Novel Prize winner Elias
Canetti does not disguise his Jewishness; nor does he parade it as central to
his own personality or his books, even his autobiography. It is there and yet not there. For instance, once he recalls in his personal
narrative that he grew up in Rostok, Bulgaria among Sephardi Jews, he virtually
never mentions his religious or historical identity again, not even when he is
forced to take flight from Germany to England because of the Nazi
persecutions. Even Franz Kafka, for all
his interest in Yiddish theatre in Prague, his dabbling in kabbalistic lore,
and his interest in Zionism, does not speak of his Jewishness in his fiction
and in most of his other writings, and
most commentators and critics treat his Judaism as vague background and
something he moved away from during his relatively short life.
[1] Sholem Asch (Szalom Asz, שלום אַש), The War Goes On, trans, Willa and Edwin
Muir (New York, NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1936); the novel is entitled The Calf of Paper in its UK edition. It was first published in Yiddish as Der Krieg geht weiter.
Friday 6 December 2013
End of Year Message to Readers
After eight months on this Blog--I began on 11 May 2013--I have managed to place almost all the material backed up in my computer's memory, rewritten and expanded on a few of the essays, and even created some new poems, sayings and book-reviews. What I haven't done is to retrieve all the old essays that I published many years ago in now rare or lost journals, newsletters and magazines; perhaps someday I will figure out how to do the proper scanning for that. Similarly, though in the early days of the Blog I inserted illustrations, I soon forgot the method and all efforts since then have failed. Not only can't you teach an old dog new tricks, but once you have there is no guarantee he will remember them.
There was a period when I could post three or or four items per day on the Blog, but now the lapses start to appear. Illness and other commitments get in the way, to be sure, but also the need for time to think, rest and absorb all the books that I am reading.
Very few people have sent in their comments. For those who have, my deepest thanks. One of the reasons for starting the Blog was, in addition to having a place to archive all my old writings and to reflect on ideas that are still churning about in my head after twenty, thirty or more years, is to have some feedback, to enter into conversations with readers--perhaps even readers who I don't already know. Imagine that! a reader who I don't already know, and yes there are a few.
Let me add another invitation to those of you who publish books yourselves. (They can be written in English, French, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese.) If you have review copies sent to me, I will do my best to read and review them. Contact me for a mailing address.
As we slow down for the end-of-year holidays, all best wishes for whatever you celebrate and good luck into the new year of 2014. I will not bother you with predictions about what will happen on this Blog, what new books I hope to complete--at least four or five are in the pipeline to be more or less ready to send out to publishers next year--and what new events will happen that draw me in for comments.
To my one official "follower" and to everyone else, all best regards.
Norman Simms
There was a period when I could post three or or four items per day on the Blog, but now the lapses start to appear. Illness and other commitments get in the way, to be sure, but also the need for time to think, rest and absorb all the books that I am reading.
Very few people have sent in their comments. For those who have, my deepest thanks. One of the reasons for starting the Blog was, in addition to having a place to archive all my old writings and to reflect on ideas that are still churning about in my head after twenty, thirty or more years, is to have some feedback, to enter into conversations with readers--perhaps even readers who I don't already know. Imagine that! a reader who I don't already know, and yes there are a few.
Let me add another invitation to those of you who publish books yourselves. (They can be written in English, French, Italian, Spanish or Portuguese.) If you have review copies sent to me, I will do my best to read and review them. Contact me for a mailing address.
As we slow down for the end-of-year holidays, all best wishes for whatever you celebrate and good luck into the new year of 2014. I will not bother you with predictions about what will happen on this Blog, what new books I hope to complete--at least four or five are in the pipeline to be more or less ready to send out to publishers next year--and what new events will happen that draw me in for comments.
To my one official "follower" and to everyone else, all best regards.
Norman Simms
Wednesday 4 December 2013
New Sayings and Small Essays
In my catalogue of evils I
inscribe three contentious agencies: first, the hypocrites who pretend to be
the guardians of human rights and liberalism, but who rationalize the
debauchers, the violators and the roadside bombers; second, the celebrities and
super-rich in their displays of obscenity and ignorance; and third, the quiet,
the passive and the indifferent who cannot see the evil all around them.
Someone said he had an uncle who
lived in three centuries: born in the late 1890s and died soon after the third
millennium began. But what does it mean
to have lived so long and never risked annihilation? Or to sit in silence counting
the final months come by?
It takes six months or more for
the chicks after hatching to decide amongst themselves who is female, who is
male, and thus who goes out to the dinner table, who stays around to lay and
brood. Until then, they don’t know what they are. It is like that in so many things.
Years ago when I was young and
healthy, the elderly around me seemed relics from another world. Their youths belonged to the nineteenth
century, as they did still. In their
sixties and seventies, they were already decrepit and needed help to get
around. I held one grandfather’s hand to
take him to the doctor, to watch out as we crossed the street—and he had shrunk
in height. The other lay in bed always
dying. Now I have reached their age and
also live in another century.
Every morning I throw Wheatbix out to the birds. Within seconds they gather to commence the
feast. Some days they arrive before I
have completed the service. On days when
I am late, they strut around in front of the kitchen door to admonish me. Other days they send scouts to fly past if
they sense lurking cats in the bushes. After all these years, they still don’t trust
me.
Sunday 1 December 2013
Review of Nancy Kobrin's latest Book
Nancy Hartveld Kobrin,
Penetrating the Terrorist Psyche. Multieducator.com , 2013. 246 pp.
Kobrin's latest book on the
psychological discovery and preparedness to confront terrorists takes the game
to a whole new dimension. She develops her thesis on the relationship between
the mind of the terrorist and the domestic politics of abusive child-rearing practices
along three lines that grow and develop around one another, making the book
both a narrative of her scientific discoveries and history of her freeing of
herself from a mad family and then an abusive husband. Growing up with a father who rejects his own
Judaism for Christian Science and a mother who seems to project her own
vulnerabilty and confusions on to the daughter, and haunted by the painful
memories of a brother who died before she was born but who is taken as the
child who ought to have lived, as well as the ordeal of another brother who
regularly rapes her and twists her attempts to report his actions at home and
school into an allegation of her manipulative and fantasizing personality,
Kobrin gradually comes to realize she herself lived in a virtual next of terrorism,
her bizarre family a version of Palestinian-Islamicist dysfunctions, and her
inability to disentangle herself from this mess—even her compounding of the
victimhood through a poor marriage choice, acceptance of academic and later professional
bullying—as the plight of modern society.
Yet in heroic terms, though much too late in her life for comfort, she
overcomes these problems, emerges with intelligence, strength of character, and
deep psychoanalytical insight into the means of profiling and treating terrorists
and terrorism, without, naturally, making the whole phenomenon disappear.
Using her own childhood experiences
with an abusive father and mother and analyzing her own struggle to overcome
the trauma, she not only sees terrorists as dysfunctional individuals who are
caught in a culture that exacerbates rather than ameliorates the pain and
provides an ideological cover for the public projection of their rage,
frustration and shame. As a psychohistorian, she discusses the organic
trajectory of incomplete and distorted personality development: frightened,
raging mother who seeks to draw from her male child the strength she does not
have but in the process aborts full nerve reticulation and hormonal
connectivities, leading to great deficits in the imagination, capacity to
articulate in words and rational thoughts what then can only be expressed
unconsciously in violent actions.
Like Freud himself who gained most of
his pertinent insights through self-analysis rather than only through the talking-cure
with his patients—and indeed that style of treatment with patients worked best when
he listened rather than talked down or at them—Kobrin’s confessional mode turns
her book into an epic of self-treatment.
Each turning point in her life and career is seen as a powerful
revealing mental image—such as her near-death accident in India; and her
parsing of such images as midrashic conceits to make them yield layer upon
layer of information about the ontology of mental illness and domestic breakdown,
social malfunction and political violence.
Each step along the way, too, is marked by those in authority or trust
who refuse to listen or understand, who deny and turn the charges against her—the
replacement child who does not fit the bill, the daughter who is not a son, the
Jew who is out of place in a mishmash Christian cult, the awkward and shy
student whose attempts to articulate important questions and perceptions are
brushed aside, the colleagues who turn into rivals and tormenters, the husband
who lacks empathy, the friends who walk away in times of crisis—only to find
eventually that she has beaten them all by her success.
Her argument is perceptive, vivid and
convincing. This is a remarkable and valuable achievement. It is a book I highly recommend to all lay and professional readers.
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