Posthumous Fame

More Fun Than A Barrel Full of Monkeys

In the preface to the reader in Machado de Assis’ Epitaph of a Small Winner (Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, 1881) the fictional narrator writes, “When we learn from Stendhal that he wrote one of his books for only a hundred readers, we are both astonished and disturbed.”  He then goes on to say, “The world will be neither astonished not, probably, disturbed if the present book has not one hundred readers like Stendhal’s, nor fifty, nor twenty, nor even ten.  Ten?  Maybe five.” In a sense, this reduction of possible audience is part of the spoof that signals the satirical intentions of the novelist, as are his claims to have antecedents in Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy or Xavier de Maistre’s Journeys Around My Chamber.  Books like these—and one can well add Apuleius’ Golden Ass, Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel, Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Heller’s Catch-22: that is, satire in the sense of satura, the supersaturated spilling or leaking out of story, characters and ideas from the supposed framework of an adventure or well-made argument. 

Classically-trained readers, like naïve or innocent audiences who have missed out on the niceties of literary tradition, may find themselves confused by these works of fiction, and it is no wonder that Stendhal, Machado et al. fortify themselves for long periods of poor sales and oblivion when launching their  hearts’ delights into the world.  Of course, in due course, should the writer manage to survive into his own posthumous fame, there will be more than ten or twenty or even a few hundred readers.  Those audiences in the know, as it were, pass on the good news that this kind of “diffuse work,” as Braz Cubas (Machado’s persona in Epitaph for a Small Winner) terms it is a great deal of fun, more than a whole barrel full of proverbial monkeys; and part of the joy comes from the pretense that you are part of an elite of special readers able to join in the joke, whilst everyone else stares from the outside wondering what the grin is for on the faces of all these people with their noses inside what are presumed to be ponderous tomes of incomprehensible pedantry.

Hopefully the joke will not be closed off from everyone who should be able to enjoy it because our schools and universities dare not break the code of political correctness by teaching classes that literature is not only fun and games, but also that much of culture is best understood as games of deception, masquerade and naughty innuendo.  Dictatorships of all stripes have a moralistic streak that fears to let its citizens and subjects become aware of the secret—and the techniques for readings closely, in context, and with a sense of ironic, sometimes mordant wit, so as to see through pretentiousness, speciousness and overly orotund self-righteousness.  Prudes, prigs and prats have a deep aversion to encounters where their claim to perfection and power can be put in question.  Hence the obvious danger of confusing social science jargon and the tweets of the self-proclaimed celebrity with the oblique and subversive texts of wide-thinking and deep-feeling persons. 

One day, lamenting the poor showing of my own books on the amazon.com best seller lists—some of my books now rank around eleven millionth in sales while others hover in the category of three-to-five millionth, occasionally dipping below a million should there be a particularly fruitful week when more than five copies are ordered by my loyal and living fans—a friend pointed out that in his day Nietzsche could barely sell twenty copies of his now famous (but still usually unread) tomes, and other great writers forced to peddle their labours among friends in their cafes of Paris, Berlin, London or New York. 

On the other hand, for there are many of these to be found, as you will see, another colleague-in-arms, when I asked her how she could be sop successful with her many books, revealed to me that she had to pay a publicist, keep a stable of assistants to help her respond to every speck of criticism in the reviews, and keep pushing herself forward in every conference or convention she could afford—or not afford—to attend.  Fat lot of good that does me stuck at the bottom of the world and eking out my retired existence on a pension (or superannuation, as we say down here). 

Still, on one of these other hands that are always ready for manipulating the minds of my dear potential readers, there is the eventual wearing down of resistance among what Milton calls “fit audience though few” when emails and ordinary letters provoke reviews in small journals, purchase of a few volumes every few weeks, and rarely received but always welcome responses on Facebook or some similar social network.  The goal is not to make money—something I gave up on many books ago or thirty years ago—but two other little things.  On the one hand, the pleasure of being read and entering into dialogue with the faithful few; and the other, stimulating just enough sales to encourage publishers to accept my next book.

Does this sound like whining or special pleading, at a time of the year when pop stars of screen and other media congratulate one another on their latest chart-breaking achievements and garnering a few hundred thousands—no, a few millions of dollars and oodles of publicity?  Sour grapes?  Raucous raspberries and jealous gestures?  Perhaps. 

Quite clearly the corner grocery has a turn over each weekend of more than almost every writer not on the top one hundred lists will make in a lifetime or a blue moon of lifetimes.  So, yes, to be frank, Machado’s or Braz Cubas’ complaint or Stendhal’s lament or boast of one hundred books put in circulation sounds very good sometimes, or an impossible dream.  Yet still another hand to turn in: just how many monkeys are in that barrel who are having so much fun?  Maybe it is better that there only be a dozen or less. 

On being a Jew in a non-Jewish World, Part 3

Seeing through the Haze

It is never easy to be a Jew in a non-Jewish world, especially in places where there are so few Jews that the rest of society has no way of recognizing you for what you are and, when they do, it is through a haze and filter of caricatures and hostile clichés.  Sometimes, it seems, you have to tell people why it is that they feel uncomfortable in your presence, what makes them misunderstand what you are saying to them, and why they mistake your appearance and way of arguing with them.

Even when you are not trying to express your own Jewishness in any particular situation, it comes across to them in a form that can be unexpected—they think that you are fooling them about what you really think is going on in the encounter, they assume it is a joke, a form of mocking irony, or that you are crazy; then they look at you with disbelieving eyes or with a blank stare.  If you are showing them a book you have written—a pamphlet of poems, a collection of stories, a scholarly study of some literary figure—they hold it in their hands in the way they would receive a piece of dog poo or rubbish, shocked, their nose curled up, and try to hand it back at once and nervously, for they cannot imagine you have created something interesting or had any ideas worthy of their serious attention.

Sometimes, though, when you tell them you are Jewish, they stop for a moment, then hold out their hand to shake yours, to congratulate you for this remarkable and unexpected achievement, and say something about how wonderful it must be to belong to the Chosen People.  Then they ask you what you think of Jesus Christ, whether Jews have their own Church, and ask why your people are so intelligent. If your answer comes in the form of your own real feelings or thoughts, they are confused, frightened, and back away.  That’s not what they meant.  They do not want to know what you believe or what you really think about their religion. They want you to convert or to go away. 

On the other hand, there are non-Jews whose attitudes and beliefs are quite different, and with them a Jew can do more than just live in a tolerated, relatively safe way: it is possible to enrich, expand and deepen one’s sense of Jewish identity and cooperate in making the world a better place too.  Here it is useful to think of the bravery of wives, those converted and those not, who when their Jewish husbands were arrested by the Nazis not only objected and petitioned for their release, but put their own lives on the line in order to rescue them; not successful in most cases, they nevertheless stand as among the Righteous among the gentiles for their efforts.  One who succeeded was the elderly French novelist Colette whose husband Maurice Goudeket managed to survive his interment by the collaborationist government.  There is also the case of Gustave Kahn’s wife who when, during the Dreyfus Affair saw her husband being vilified in the press and attacked in the streets for his defense of the Captain’s innocence and the call for a retrial, converted to Judaism herself and changed her name to Rachel as an act of solidarity with him, a defiance of the anti-Semites, and manifestation of her Jewish soul.  In less drastic circumstances, many shiksas, to use a Yiddish term for non-Jewish women who supported their husbands, have helped guide their families in a Jewish direction, urged their children to become knowledgeable in rabbinics and show loyalty to Israel, and in their own lives, whether they chose to undertake formal conversion or not, created kosher homes. 

Sometimes those who have dug their heels into the ground or stiffened their necks against the compromises and softness of their environments have seemed to be the best representatives of the Law.  Perhaps not.  Perhaps they have forgotten or denied the dynamic ability of Judaism to challenge the world through imagination and creativity, and thus lost their souls in the filthy mud-pits of pilpulism, hysterical ritualism, and contradictory dogmas.  They have started to worship mezzuzahs and tsitsit, mumbled their way through prayers and meditations without consideration of their meanings, insulted so many people who have tried to keep up and thus brought the Name into disrepute amongst the nations, and alienated their own children and neighbors. 

It has never been easy to be Jewish or Hebrew or Israelite—historically these terms have meant slightly different things and geographically they also mark diverse cultural situations—in a hostile, unjewish world, and, while it is admirable to adhere strictly to the Laws of Moses and rabbinical traditions, there are often periods in which we live and places where we find ourselves for no particular reason when this principled stand would require sacrifices too great to ask of most ordinary men and women.  Nevertheless, Judaism has survived and learned to recreate itself not only because of a few willing to go the extreme of Kiddush ha-Shem, but also on account of the larger numbers—who dares say a majority, or what size the minority of troubled souls taking this option might be?—who have sought ways to accommodate themselves to the realities of the world without totally giving in to paganism, idolatry and epikorist cynicism and skepticism. 

Sometimes for several generations—hundreds of years even for this is the probably the real miracle of our history—Jewishness seems to fade away but then, when circumstances have transformed into more amenable terms, Jews have re-emerged from out of the darkness, families and communities have reconstituted themselves by means that make no rational sense, and the people of Israel prove their durability, resilience and flexibility.  It goes against all logic.  It makes no sense.  It cannot be explained by the usual historical paradigms.  It doesn’t fit with what religious leaders want us to believe.  

Differences and Generations, Part 5

 The Music Goes Round and Round and It Comes Out Here

One of the oddest things in the absurd world that now almost completely surrounds me is the way pop music has filled every nook and cranny of entertainment, news and culture, as though there were nothing else but this vile clanking-clunky sound—well, except also for sports which has replaced the news and vacuous actions that fill up big and small and even tiny screens.  When I was young and more self-righteous than I am now, even arrogant in my adolescence, it made no sense to me that my coevals or contemporaries (they are not the same thing since the first is made of  people of my own age and the second of everyone who happens to be alive at the same time as I am) should define themselves and their relationship to one another and to the world generally by the music they liked, that is, the what they listened to on radios mounted on their shoulders and blaring into their ear holes or the 45 rpm they purchased as often as possible and played in their rooms over and over until the grooves were worn down.  This phenomenon struck me as odder than trying to memorize all the members of teams in the baseball teams people rooted for as though their lives depended on it, or the way my classmates and street pals could identify every make of car that passed by and passed judgment on the kind of people who drove such vehicles.  More than cars, teams and everything else was the madness of crooners, recordings and radio DJs. 

Not that I had no attachment to music or didn’t like singing.  My mother was a pianist, told me stories about how she used to give concerts and would have been a professional if my birth hadn’t forced her to leave Juliard Academy before she graduated.  When I was old enough not to be a total pest, she started teaching the piano again, something she did until she had a stroke at an early age and thereafter could not stand to listen to classical music, or almost any music at all in the house.  Yet she did allow me to choose my own instrument so that I would have an understanding and appreciation of music: I chose the trumpet.  It seemed noisy enough to limit my parents’ toleration for hours of practice, had only one line of notes to read, and seemed nice enough to dream of a future in some big band of orchestra.  There were two drawbacks for me: first, I was not able to memorize tunes and needed written scores to read all the time, so the world of dances and other popular entertainments was out; and second, I was not good enough to be more than first trumpet in my high school band and orchestra, as I learned when confronting the really top performers at try-outs for all-city and other orchestras. There was not much to hear in the house and not much I wanted to listen to elsewhere, especially as that would involve participation in social events with girls and slick boys who talked about things I had no interest in.

The songs in the family and the house were not like what was taking over on the radio, school dances, and background to movies.  My grandfather would sing three songs: “Ida, sweet as apple cider” because his wife, my Grandma Ida, had the same name; and “Good-bye, my blue belle, farewell my sweet” because that was popular when he was a young lad in the 1890s.  Sometimes, too, he would sing the George M. Cohan “I’m a Yankee-Doodle-Dandy” on my birthday, because I too was born on the 4^th of July and therefore “ a real live nephew of my Uncle Sam.” 

There was an old songbook in the piano stool in our living room next to the baby grand with long green-tasseled cover my mother stopped playing on after she became sick, but which I took up to my room and played on the trumpet as a relaxation from my music lessons and schoolwork.  These included lyrics I could sing along to in my head as I worked out the notes on the horn.  They set a model and a standard for songs to which no other—or hardly no other—lyrics could ever achieve.  Why they are not heard these days, I would tell myself, remains a mystery and can only be because the world has lost its taste.  Thus I would play and sing along to “The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo,” a text whose meanings took many months for me to understand.    Or I would repeat many times a day and almost every day “Who Put TheOveralls In Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder,” the absurdity of which tickled my fancy to no end, and still can today, if the melody pops up into my conscious memory. 

In school assemblies, on days when we didn’t listen to recordings of the William Tell Overture and everyone bounced their way to the Lone Ranger theme or sang along to The Blue Danube Waltz the mnemonic lyrics every class passed on mysteriously over the generations so that we could identify this masterpiece as by “Strauss the Louse who lived in the house of Mickey Mouse”, on those days we learned to sing world-favorites such as “As We Go Marching to Praetoria” and “Kukabura Sits in the Old Gum Tree”.  Above all, there was “Barnacle Bill the Sailor” who was admonished by his lady-love when he returned from the sea to announce that “It’s certainly me” and she insisted “If you love me, say it’s I.”  Or we chanted in excited and passionate unison the “Finnicula Song: finicula-finiculi” or we stomped our feet rhythmically to “Give me some men who are Stout-Hearted Men and I’ll Soon Give You Ten Thousand More.” Then to help us learn a little French we would all sing “Vie la, vive la, vive l’amour, vive la compagnie.  Success to each other and pass it along, vive la compagnie” and many dozens more of the same ilk.

Yet these are not like the songs my wife and I would sing when we were on long car rides from one place to another.  Surprisingly, on some of those strange radio shows that take calls from old folks in rest homes or living on their own, some of these are requested and records are found to play over the air.  Who can ever forget “K-k-k-Katie, beautiful Katie, you’re the only g-g-g-girl I ad-d-d-fore.  When the m-m-m-moon shines over the cowshed, I’ll be aiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door”?  Or the long version of “Be sure it’s true when you say I love you, it’s a sin to tell a lie:” which segues into a recitative narrative of “Took a little girl out on a date last night, next to her Gravel Gurdy would have looked all right”  before it comes back to the melodic bouncy “it’s a sin to tell a lie.”  Or the clever and evergreen “Marsy dotes and doesy dotes and liddle lambs eat ivy, a kiddly dotes too, woodenoo ” that slows down, explains itself, and then runs out in its jumbled words when you knew that it “mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.  And a kid’ll eat ivy too, wouldn’t you?”

So it should be clear why that neither Elvis Preslie nor the Beatles or any of the other bizzarely named and cacophonously sounding singers could ever have a place in my heart, let alone serve as a compass needle for my ambitions, hopes and dreams.  Yes, at times I was in love with Judy Canova and Dorothy Collins, and wished to be a partner in the chorus for Snookie Lanson and Roy Rogers, yet never would I permit myself to stand in a huge crowd, swaying, my upheld hands swaying to the trance-inducing drumbeats of what passes for music today.  At my funeral, please play “Bananas ain’t got no bonies” or at least “Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon.”

Generations & Differeneces, Part 4

The Professional Lecturer Learns His Craft

When I started graduate school in Saint Louis, I was asked to tutor first year students and in the summer to take on some other classes, and when I was married it seemed important also to  teach night classes to increase my salary—which from my National Defence Fellowship went up year by year from $1500 to $1800 to $2200.  Amazingly, in those days I was able to pay rent, food and occasionally go to the movies, and save something for travelling home to New York  two orn three times a year.

Now a few incidents stand out from my first attempts at teaching. 

It might have been on the very first day I walked into a classroom to confront a class of first year students in English.  The room was a science lab, the front desk a stone table with Bunsen burners, sink and spigots, and some unidentified equipment.  There was also a high metal stool.  Though I began my introduction to the twenty-odd students in this room by standing in front of the long blackboard and writing my name and other information on it in very powdery chalk, at some point I found myself seated on the tall chair, perched very precariously above the ground, my feet unable to touch the floor.  As the hour reached its conclusion, I realized that there was no dignified way to get down from my high seat and thus remained in this posture as the young men and women slowly, agonizingly slowly, left the room.  Then one or two walked forward and started to ask me questions, at the same time as I could see the next class beginning to enter the room.  The questions went on and on, and my anxiety and embarrassment grew, until I finally had to take the plunge—literally—and leap off the stool.  A noisy and indecorous descent, to be sure.  Who can remember now whether there were any comments, titters or rumors consequent upon this initial foray into the art of education.

Another incident happened in a night school class.  By this time, though growing used to the give and take of talking to students and careful to avoid strange seated or standing positions, I was nonetheless taken aback by what transpired.  Amongst the students there were many adults, men and women much older than myself—I was probably twenty-two at the time, and they would have been in their thirties and forties: an awkward position, though not in a physical sense.  This situation made me nervous.  Then I noticed something even more strange.  One of the adult students was a man in military uniform.  In a flash, my mind reverted to the really awkward and foolish days in my undergraduate days when I was forced to take ROTC classes and behaved in a most unseemly way—asking stupid and provocative questions, letting the instructors know that my respect for them was nil and even politically hostile, and being a little nuisance if there ever was one, while assuming I was engaged in an idealistic quest for peace and harmony in the world.  At this stage in my career, a few steps towards maturity and therefore of tolerance, and therefore further of embarrassment at what I had done had begun to make themselves present in my consciousness.  So when the officer, whose rank was clearly evident in the bars on his shoulders and the cap he held under his arm, approached, I had the double fear of what was likely to happen, since he was both many years older than I was and having the bearing of someone who might take revenge for all the shenanigans played against the US Army less than four years earlier.  Then when he was standing in front of me, he seemed to snap to attention and look at me intently, saying, “Sir, may I ask you a question concerning the syllabus?”  He called me SIR and I wanted to turn around to see if he actually were speaking to someone else.  He was showing me respect and I could not believe it.  Somehow God knows how I managed to keep from following or stammering and answered his question with all the calmness I could muster, though deep within my whole body was shaking, my stomach rippling and my bowels about to explode.

One more little memory from those days.  At examinations time, the graduate assistants were called upon to invigilate in other departments as part of our job description (though such an expression did not yet exist).  Therefore I found myself in a very large room full of engineering majors all seated in rows of benches and long desks and given the assignment to tell them when to begin writing and then later when to stop, and from time to time, usually on the quarter hour, to write the time on the blackboard.  In between, it was my duty as an invigilator yp invigilate, in other words, to walk slowly and deliberately up and down the aisles and observe the engineers to make sure that no one was cheating and to be prepared should anyone raise a hand to listen to their questions and allow them to go out to the toilet if necessary.  This seemed at once a heavy responsibility and a huge bore since the examination would carry oin for three hours.  The test began, and my duties began, and I so I walked slowly up one aisle and down another, weaving back and forth, trying to time my steps so that I would complete one set of invigilating rounds in time to write the new passage of time on the blackboard.  The room was full of at least one hundred and fifty students, all but perhaps five or six male, the few females appropriately dressed in garments that excited no interest in me.  But there was one young man seated about three-quarters of the way towards the back of the room who kept drawing my attention.  In all ways he looked everyone else in the examination room, except that his left hand lacked a hand.  He had a right arm which extended to his hand and his hand had five fingers.  He left arm, however, ended at the wrist, so there was no hand and no fingers.  As he wrote with the right hand, the left arm and the surgically  truncated wrist rested on the paper he was writing on, and occasionally would rise up to rub on his brow.  An hour and a half into the time allotted for the test, as I walked around and around the room in quarter hour units of invigilation, my eyes came back constantly to the handless engineer.  This is called fascination.  Only when someone at the other side of the room, raised his hand and called for my attention with a sound did I return to my proper duties, allowing him to go out for a quick toilet break.  It is very unprofessional to stare at handless people, yet fifty years later the image still sometimes flashed back int

By the way, as always, your questions and comments on my Blog essays are welcome.

On Being a Jew in a Non-Jewish World, Part 2

Conversos, New Christians, Crypto-Jews and Marranos yet Again

In a kind of autobiographical novel, Sarah Bernhardt’s fictional father is the author of  a book called Philosophy is not Indifference.  Because so many people still think of philosophy as a purely abstract, unworldly and irrelevant study of pointless ideas or (what amounts to the same thing) Big Ideas conducted by rather naïve and befuddled intellectuals, the book by Prof. Darbois in La petite idole (transaletd as The Idol of Paris,1920) has at least this continuing significance: to be indifferent and to be philosophical are not the same thing.  More than that, just as there are many readers who confuse disinterested and uninterested—as though to have no interest in something in the sense of no involvement in the running of an enterprise or investment of funds in the business or some other vital concern that prevents objectivity and fairness (thus we speak of conflict of interests when a politician votes for a law that gives special advantage to an industry that he is heavily involved with or a judge asked to hear the case of a person she has known as a friend for many years or had a love affair with)—there are those who mistake indifference for objectivity and disinterestedness: whereas to be indifferent is not to care at all about something, its origins, outcomes or effects.  

The kind of Jew who is indifferent about his or her own status as a Jew or the obligations under the Law of Moses or the safety, security and welfare of other Jews, and these days that means more than one’s own immediate family but all of Israel, Land and People, has to be seen as different than someone who worries over choices, actions and feelings all the time.  Historically speaking about the specific terms conversos, New Christians, Crypto-Jews, and Marranos, the circumstances of each may overlap, but the conditions of their relationship to themselves, their original backgrounds, their legal and social status in the world, and even their obligations under the Law are different.  

The conversos or converted Christians in Iberia and its various overseas colonies and European territories could cover both those who accepted baptism under extreme duress and those who went to the font voluntarily; they were Roman Catholics.  But given the paranoia in Spain and Portugal over the sincerity of such conversions and the fear of a large proportion of racially and spiritually different nominal Christians undermining the integrity of the Church and the State, the next generation and the next and the next down through the centuries were still known as New Christians—and as such were always held under suspicion, considered to have impure blood, and therefore restricted in terms of marriage, civil and military service and place of residence.  For this reason, whether the original conversions were carried out for honest intentions of spiritual change or undertaken strategically to save one’s life, fortunes or  social status, the next generations—individuals, families, and sometimes whole communes—had to confront the question of who and what they were, what they believed and how they behaved in public and private.  

Whether they wished to be or not, each new generation of the New Christians had to consider their personal relationship with their Jewish ancestry.  They could attempt to put it out of sight and mind through petitions for certificates of purity of blood and then hope that no relative, neighbour or business rival would denounce them to the Inquisition.  They could attempt to live a double or more complex life as a Crypto-Jew, performing in public all the duties of good Catholics and subjects of their gracious Catholic Majesties, while maintaining in private amongst close and trusted family members an attenuated Jewishness of furtive and symbolic fulfilment of the mitzvoth, so far as they could be remembered and understood with no rabbinical or social institutions to teach, support and provide mutual support.  As this was often a very individual choice, the circle of family members or friends who could be trusted would be extremely reduced, sometimes down to just oneself—and then not always, as a Crypto-Jew might find him or herself unable to bear the tensions and anxieties and turn oneself in to the Holy Office out of a sense of Christian piety or the need to find some relief in the punishments meted out in the dungeons of the Inquisition or on the open plaza of an auto-da-fé.  

When single persons, close-knit families or more extended Jews found themselves in a condition when they could not decide which they wanted to be or felt most comfortable in calling themselves—either their legally professed Catholicism or their internally believed Jewishness—they might consequently choose one or the other at different points in their lives, move back and forth across the borders between the Lands of Persecution and the Lands of Toleration, thus living as one thing here and another there.  Or the family might divide, with some members sent overseas to marry into practicing Jewish families and most remaining behind to look after the business, the lands and the other interests of the group in the more or less nominal role of Christians.  Marranos were those who were either confused, constantly worried about, or enjoyed the tensions, dangers and spiritual excitement of the liminal status.  

Confusion does not mean indifference to the choices to be made, and it usually came about historically because in law—in the various Catholic, Protestant and few almost secular states of the pre-modern period—there was no way for a person to be not a Catholic, Protestant or Jew.  You had to be one or the other, often with very different rights and privileges, taxes and conditions of residency.  Only in our own western world and only for a relatively brief period is it possible to be indifferent, to be neither a Christian or a Jew, neither a Catholic or a Protestant; that is, to claim no confessional identity at all or to make one up out of the air, as it were.  Confusion existed in the mind and the heart, and it usually had to be masked, just as any other choice of religion than that allowed or privileged by the national and local authorities had to be hidden under some form of disguise—or asserted with a great deal of social, legal and physical consequences.

When that confusion bubbled around in the hearts and minds of individuals and those near to him or her who realized what was happening, it created constant states of anxiety or panic.  It was not something one wished to sustain any longer than was possible or practical, and so often led to escape from the points of geography or chronology in one’s life cycle when it was possible to run away or accept the direst of consequences by “outing oneself.” 

Yet there were some Marranos, as individuals and small groups, who found the confusion meaningful in a positive sense.  They could see the anxiety and danger as proof of their individuality, independence, and spiritual worth.  The greater the tensions and the riskier the game, the more they believed they were being purified, rising above the Christian society which persecuted their ancestors and themselves, and above the Jewish communities that nagged them to escape and return to the rabbinical disciplines they no longer believed in or trusted—could not trust because, if the Church had shown itself persecutory and hypocritical by not believing in its own dogma of cleansing baptism and forgiveness of sinners, but rather claiming that Jewish blood was a racial taint ineradicable and perpetually polluting and thus beyond mercy and absolution, then the Synagogue had shown itself weak in protecting its children, muddled in its response to those who had been forced to grow up as Catholics and cut off from Jewish instruction.  Moreover, if the Catholic theologians had nothing but hatred to preach and endless enmity to the very race that had given birth to its Lord and Savior, the Jewish rabbis and teachers seemed to have locked themselves into the darkness of pilpul and irrational or hysterical rituals.  The Marranos, tested by hostile authorities and testing themselves every day in their self-questioning and their refusal to accept easy answers, came to see themselves as purified of hidebound dogmas and superstitions on all other sides.  

However, were these people—Spinoza, Montaigne, Cervantes, for instance, to choose early cases—really Jews, practicing Jews?  This is the same question the bookshop owner asked about Alfred Dreyfus and my old academic friend about Sarah Bernhardt.  At least we can say they were not indifferent about it.  

On Being a Jew in a Non-Jewish World, Part 1

Part 1

Not too long ago on a visit to Australia I went into a Jewish bookshop in the traditionally suburb for Jewish residents.  Looking around at their many religious books, Israeli literature and Jewish history, I got to talking with the owner of the place.  I told him that I had recently published three books on Dreyfus, with an emphasis on Alfred and his wife’s Jewishness.  “But was he a practicing Jew?” asked the shopkeeper.  “Not really,” I answered, “but thanks to his wife’s family and some other relatives, he certainly knew what he was and why he had been falsely accused, tried, found guilty and sent to Devil’s Island.  When push came to shove, he asserted his proper identity.”  The shop owner looked sceptical.  “Dreyfus never begged for forgiveness from the French Army or the Court.  He never prayed for mercy from God.  He always remained loyal to France and to his military professions.  Most of all, he never wavered in his belief in Truth and Justice.”  Not only did the bookshop owner remain with the same unconvinced look—he was after all wearing not just a black yarmulka (skull cap) on his head and a dark suit, white shirt with no tie, but had tsitsit (ritual fringes) dangling from his waist, sure signs of his Orthodox faith; but he never asked for details of my books when I pointed out that he was not displaying them on sale. 

Just a few days ago, another very religious man visited my house, an old friend from overseas, for whom my wife and I went out of our way to make everything kosher—we bought new plates and utensils, pots to cook in, and lots of aluminium foil to wrap the fish we bakes in our oven.  After several hours of friendly conversation, I mentioned a new project I was working on with a local historian.  Since my old friend didn’t ask, I told him anyway that my colleague and I were doing research on Sarah Bernhardt’s visit—actually two brief visits—to Auckland in 1891.” I then tried to explain how this interest arose out of my previous studies of Marrano or Crypto-Jews and my research into Dreyfus’s Jewish background in the late nineteenth century.   And so came the inevitable question: “Did she practice?”  This meant did she keep a kosher home, perform proper domestic and personal hygiene, and celebrate the holidays and attend synagogue.  “Not quite,” I answered.  Her mother’s family were Dutch Jews, mostly wandering vaudeville and circus performers, “which,” I added, “is one of the careers followed by many families who didn’t live in the shtetls (small rural towns and villages) or ghettoes in Eastern and Central Europe.”  My old friend looked sceptical and a little bored.  “Even though her father was not Jewish, Sarah’s mother was, and that at least made her a Jew, a bad Jew perhaps, but a Jew nevertheless.”  Then I could see he was not all convinced.  “Well, here are some little details that make me treat her as an ambiguous, sometimes a confused Jew. This is the first fact.  When she was sent to a convent school by her mother, she was about eight years old.  Only when she was twelve, a few days before she was to take her First Communion, a visiting bishop found out that little Mademoiselle Bernhardt had not been baptized.  Though the great spiritual lapse was quickly rectified at the baptismal font, one has to wonder how (a) her godparents did not see to it as they by definition were duty-bund to ensure that she was baptized and brought up a good Catholic and (b) how the nuns in the convent let this lapse pass for nearly four years. “  I waited for some reaction from my friend.  There was none.  “Well,” I continued, “in itself this fact may not mean anything.  But later during the Dreyfus Affair, Sarah stood up against almost all the intellectuals, artists and theatrical people she knew who were anti-Semites.  They accused her of being a German, a Jew, and therefore a traitor.  Her reaction was to say, fairly explicitly, that when you can show me some Christians who are better than my people, I will consider agreeing with you.’” 

I could see a twitch in the face of my old friend.  So I tried one more little anecdote to win him over.  “There were many critics who did not praise her as the Divine Sarah for her acting abilities and especially her so-called golden voice in the way her public did.  They mocked her appearance and her accented French.  She defended herself by saying that she had inherited her way of speaking from her people’s long history of wandering through the Galut (the Exile and Diaspora).” 

Needless to say, like the bookshop owner in Australia, this man would only define a proper Jew by practice.  I can certainly see his way of thinking, and it is that of many Orthodox and even Conservative rabbis past and present.  It is a legitimate point of view, just as it is legitimate to recognize conversions to Judaism performed by Orthodox rabbinical courts.  However, for me it remains an arguable point of view.  Without going to the extreme of Jean-Paul Sartre who believed that Judaism only continued to exist because of anti-Semitism, both in the way for hundreds of years Jews were isolated into inward-turning communities and could not realize any alternative or in the way in which individuals and families often react to prejudice and oppression by stiffening their necks and being aggressively what their enemies accuse them of being, my belief is that there can be the joy of studying and debating the truths in Scriptures, Talmud, Mishnah Kabbalah without believing everything to be consistently true and absolutely applicable in the contemporary world.

The Judaism that is here being described from my own experience should not be confounded with some kind of Judeo-Christian faith where what one feels in one’s heart matters more than what one does in the real world, the society of history, with its political problems, its wars, its difficulties faced by the poor, the ill and the deeply disturbed.  This is a Jewishness that expresses itself in social actions and public attitudes, in ways that are guided by the precedents and interpretations of the rabbis, that is rooted in a concern for ethics, morality and justice.  My experience and life has mostly been away from the centres of traditional synagogue life, from communities where there are support networks, family ties, intellectual institutions and cultural activities.  It has been a constant effort to make choices, do deeds, and feel emotions that are at several removes from where I would have liked them to be, where I have had to make do through as-if games, trying to convince myself that even though I have been unable and sometimes unwilling to perform the mitzvot, the mandated fulfilments of the Law, to shape my everyday activities around customs remembered from childhood or read of in books, or to express myself openly and frankly as a Jew, I have tried to give meaning that accords with the primal values of Judaism. 

In the many books and articles I have published, though my wife tells me that these scholarly endeavours have been driven by an autobiographical need, I think perhaps it might be better to say that I have come to concentrate my aesthetic and intellectual efforts on persons, events and ideas that are like what I would like to be, do and think. 

Here is where it is important to examine the term Marrano, not as a nasty term often used as a synonym for a Crypto-Jew, or as a specific historical type of Sephardic Jew who was forced to convert and then could neither bring himself to return to Judaism or to accept the baptism sincerely and pass on the new religious identity to the next generation.  Given that Marrano has been sued by several recent historians and political activists to describe the plight of men and women caught between assimilation, conversion and return to Judaism in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth when it was still possible, for a moment or two perhaps, to think that the modern nations of the West and Centre of Europe would become tolerant, liberal and secular, thus obviating the need to make a choice of religious or ethnic identity at all, it pays to consider concept of Marranism as that of ambiguity and confusion, in one sense, but much more of that kind of Angst supposedly characteristic of modernity itself.  Certainly by the trauma World War I and then by the rise of Nazi and Stalinist regimes, the mental luxury of that ambiguity became impossible for most Jews: Angst replaced by outright physical terror and suffering.  Yet after the Holocaust, if there was not a commitment to the new State of Israel and its place in world history, there was only a less secure faith in the tolerance, liberalism and secularism of Europe and North America, an illusion of acceptance that grows harder and harder to sustain in the twenty-first century.  The Marrano stands somewhere between Zionism, anti-Zionism, post-Zionism, Orthodox Judaism, and the mixture of other Judaisms, religious, social and cultural.   It is not indifference, which is something else, a kind of delusion of security and denial of reality.

For those coming online for the first time  or within the last couple of months, this is a reminder that my three books on Dreyfus are still available on amazon.com, barnes&noble, bookdepository, and other regular booksellers.

1.  Alfred Dreyfus: man, Milieu, Mentality and Midrash  Academic Publishers. USA

2) In the Context of his Times: Alfred Dreyfus  . Academic Publishers.  USA

3) Alfred and Lucie Dreyfus in the Phantasmagoria.  Cambridge Scholars.  UK.

Generations and Differences, Part 3

The Mysteries of Life and Literature

Similarly, if you think of when my children grew up in the 1960s and 70s, what could they know of the society that had brought me up in the 1940s and 50s--a continuation of the depression and then the War, the realization of the Holocaust?  They know about such things at second or third hand, through television and film, in history books and sometimes in novels. 

Even my sister, who is only seven years younger, had radically different experiences: I was born before television came into our house, she grew up with it.  When she tells her stories--and she is a professional story teller, you know--they just don't ring true: she lacks something essential and it is hard for me to put my finger on it.  But her purposes of entertainment are different from mine.

In my story, for what it is worth, what cuts to the quick is not so much those great events which loom up out of the people who were alive all around me and still stand like vast clouds of gloom, and also as filters through which the light of everything else is seen and felt; but the little personal details.  They are strange poetic conceits woven into the fabric of my life, probably as much responsible for my failures as for what little successes I have had.  Sometimes I have told these stories, many of them recreated and set within much earlier periods of time than when they actually occurred: stories of intellectual and moral awakening, as though they belonged to a time when I was under ten years of age, when they happened with different characters and in different setting years later at university or afterwards.  The voices become muffled then, too, through the infantile and adolescent squeaks and squeals of what was probably less innocent than it seems.  My own role as bumbling fool or as mischievous imp masks more painful memories—perhaps some that creep through the darkness without my own awareness.

What does something like this stand for?  One night, studying late in my dormitory at the small undergraduate college I went to in the mid-1950s, as I read books and took notes, playfully, unconsciously I dipped my pen into a glass of water; at most I was aware only of the different colors that swirled around.  No one else was there.  Then it seemed I dozed off, awoke in a groggy way, and drank the liquid in the glass.  Looking at the near empty tumbler, it struck me that all those inks would poison me and I would be dead very soon.  Should I try to call for help, ask someone to phone for an ambulance, or attempt to vomit away what I could?  It was some holiday when most people had gone home and for some unknown reason I had decided to stay there and catch up with work.  Instead of panicking, I lay down on the bed, closed my eyes, and hoped the end would come peacefully and quietly.  The next morning, out of habit I did my ablutions, went down to the dining hall, had breakfast and chatted with a few class mates.  Later in the day, the memory of the water glass full of ink came back to me.  The words “good luck” were all that could be thought of.  But that is a meaningless statement.

Or another little event.  At the end of my second year, having made the decision to be an English Major and not concentrate on History as I had always planned to do, I went to a gathering organized by the department of new and old students, held at the home of the professor who influenced my choice.  The room was crowded, noisy, and dimly lit.  As usual, I slid around the edges of the clumps of young men and women who were there, most of whom I recognized but only a few of whom had names I could recall, and listened to parts of their conversations.  As the party broke up, I went back to the dorm alone, walking quickly because there were tears forming and a deep black hole in my consciousness.  Still alone in my room, the tears came out, and the darkness made itself into a hammer that kept knocking me, saying that it was impossible for me to be like those others: they knew so much, had read all the great poets, novels, dramas and essayists, and they just have grown up in families that were literary and cultured, gone to schools that emphasized ideas and intelligent conversations—there was no chance I could ever catch up with them. 

But I had made my decision.  The only thing to do, I said to myself, was try to read as much as possible over the summer months and come back with some small degree of knowledge that would help get me through the next two years of study.  After that, who can imagine?  Though I still and to work in the dress factory in Jersey City, nevertheless I spent as much time as possible going through the authors the others had talked about.  Then when September rolled around and the train took me back to the little rural valley where the school was, I prepared myself for all the disappointments of being too far out of the world these other students belonged to and for the mockery of the lecturers, and so for inevitable failure.  In the first week of term, the head of department called all the English Majors together for some announcement, and so there was another gathering at his house, with tea and cakes and noisy talk.  Yet this time, as I lurked about, standing at the edge of conversations, it suddenly struck me that even the senior student and some of the younger lecturers, at least, were all phonys.  They had read only the excerpts in the anthologies and the few books on the syllabus.  I had spent four months not only reading all of the Spenser’s Fairy Queen, the whole corpus of Shakespeare’s plays, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, and dozens of other long and difficult works, but also many shorter collections of poems, stories, plays and essays.  And I could remember them, with ideas floating up into my mind, even though, the truth is, I could only make conversations in my head or comment on the opinions of the others in imaginary dialogues. 

It would still be a long time before I dared speak aloud, other than to answer specific questions in class.  When I look back on some of the essays I submitted, where the mark received was an A, I am astounded, because if they had been written for me when I became a lecturer, I might give them a C or C+ at best.  To this day, I don’t know what that means.  These are mysteries which confounded and still confound any attempt to measure myself against colleagues  that have come and gone.  For as remarked earlier in these little fragments of an autobiography, mostly the world makes no sense to me.

Generations and Differences Part 2

The Long Sleep and the Endless Noise

As I was born in 1940, my earliest memories take shape around experiences of the Second World War, of the way my mother would watch as young boys who had been drafted would climb the stairs going up to the elevated train station next to our apartment and she would cry because she would say that most of them would never come home, of the way my father left for the Army in early in 1943 and never returned until the last months of 1946, leaving my mother, who was always ill, to cope and moving in her with her mother, and with her father who, it seemed to me, was always dying on the front stoop or on a couch near the window, of the WACs who marched in the junior high school yard across from Grandma’s house and who made me believe that most of the soldiers in the world were women, of the little uniform my Grandpa made for me before he decided to come home and be sick and then to die, a uniform decorated with all sorts of insignia and medals which made soldiers and sailors on the avenue salute me when I walked proudly alongside my mother, of the ration book my Grandmother let me carry for her when she went into the grocery shop, and of all the times my mother would faint in the street and I would be taken home by policemen and other strangers.

My paternal grandfather was a simple man who worked in the fruit and vegetable markets.  My maternal grandfather was a cloth-cutter and a tailor.  Life was hard in the 1920s and 1930s, and their attitudes shaped mine.  A strange mixture of classes, attitudes, and senses of culture.  More than that, when the news of the Holocaust arrived in Yiddish papers and then in the people walking the streets with numbers tattooed on their forearms, what was said didn’t match what was felt at home: at home there was anger and rage.  Underneath, there was the sense that I would have to be at once the replacement for everyone lost and the religious belief they stood for, and the continuation of the rebellion into assimilation, atheism, and left-wing politics.

Then finally my father came home from Japan and we lived in a big house where he kept his dentist’s office.  Grandma moved in with us until she died just after my sister was born in April 1947.  Other people also seemed to die all the time on the street and in houses we went to visit.  Life was filled with death and with women who ran households, who visited my mother and whispered and cried, while I hid under the kitchen table and didn’t understand.  My father worked in the front of the house.  But it was hard because other people were successful.  By the time I was to be bar mitzvahed he had his first heart attack.  Meantime my mother continued to be sick, to faint and to teach piano—which she did until she had a stroke at a very early age.  I can’t remember any adult ever having a discussion or a conversation with me.  They told me what to do, to think, to eat, to feel and to become when I grew up.  But there were lots of books in the attic, and I read my way through them, books on working-class people, strikes, psychology, history and dentistry (they had grizzly pictures of horrible infections and wounds).  Though I played stickball and stoopball in the streets, I spent many hours curled up in a chair in my room, next to the window, and read and read.  It would take many years before I realized you were supposed to understand what you found in books, and not just look up strange words in the dictionary, with definitions that also made no sense.  Life in general made no sense.

But I learned to play the trumpet and was in the school band and orchestra, and started a dance band with my friends.  I went to Stuyvesant High School and studies as hard as I could. Mathematics not being my best subject, I took many courses in musical theory, history and literature, and French.  Nevertheless the long sleep continued and, though I sometimes got high marks, understanding lagged behind.  Even when I started university, with English as a major—replacing History because of special help from one professor, though I don’t recall ever having read a poem before--and doing as much French and German as possible.  Yet sometime in the second year light began to break through.  Maybe it was because my mother had a stroke shortly before I went back to the little university in September 1960.  Maybe it was just that the time had come (twenty years old may be the right age)  to become aware of what literature and culture meant.

Yet as I was going through university, at each transitional moment, it was always the last time--the last time it was required to study two foreign languages, the last time comprehensive exams took eight hours, the last time such and such a scholarship was offered, etc.  I could see and feel the earth being transformed around me.  When we formed a little dance band in high school, my friends and I were playing  the music of the 30s and the 40s, but we were swiftly shoved off by groups playing rock'n'roll, with saxophones and electric guitars, whereas we had trumpets, bass fiddle, piano, and drums--and we rehearsed music we bought that had been orchestrated for older style musicians.  For me, the new sounds were noise. 

But so was almost everything else almost always mere noise until I entered the last year of my undergraduate degree and applied for graduate school  But that must wait for another day.

Generations and Differences: Part 1

Some Reflections on my Past

Part 1

It is always hard to understand one's own children, as it is one's parents.  In the past, from what we can read in novels, autobiographies and historical works, most people did not make the effort and did not perceive any changes that they did not merely attribute to personalities.  Now we consider that with each generation or two, at the most, there come new cultures, and along with new technologies come differences in the way individuals relate to each other and to the world around them.  Probably this has always been true,  However, as I said, it was not something most people were aware of.

My father was born in 1910 in Brooklyn, New York and his parents were, as were virtually all the people around him, not just products of the nineteenth century, but of Europe rather than America, that is, they were immigrants, Jews from Eastern Europe.  As a boy my father lived through the Great War, the Depression, and then he fought in the Second World War: these were traumatic events, whether as a child he could grasp all the implications.  He also went to university, became a dentist and married my mother.    By the time that I came along in 1940, everything he had once known had changed drastically, and he would have been cognizant of how much he differed from his own parents and grandparents.  

My mother was born in 1917 also in Brooklyn, but her mother had grown up in Romania and her home was that of the Grand Rabbi in Dorohoi.  Her mother, my grandmother, had a nanny and was taught French and was destined to be a refined young lady, insofar as it was possible for a Jewish family in Eastern Europe to do—or imagine.  While she was on a world tour with a companion, there was a pogrom in Romania and her parents and other relatives were murdered; this was in 1909.  She had a few relatives in the New World, but she was cut off from what she half known and what she expected to become.  She married young, and saw her remaining family and that of her husband—my step-uncle as it were, was something of a sharpster—take advantage of her naïveté.  When her first husband died, leaving her with one child, a son, she also had nothing but her dreams of lost horizons, along with a sense of bitterness.  Her next husband the grandfather I knew, was a cloth-cutter from Hungary living in New York.  He was a widower with a son, my other step-uncle, and had one child by my grandmother, my own mother.  This happened during the First World War and at first my mother was raised in relative ease: she went to summer camps, had piano lessons, and hoped for a career in music as a concert pianist.  Then came the Great Depression.  Times were hard.  Nevertheless, because of my grandmother’s pretensions to some kind of aristocratic culture, my mother was protected from the worst hardships around her.

When my father and mother met, courted and then married in the late 1930s, there was a kind of clash of cultures: my father’s side were simple people, my grandfather working in the fruit and vegetable markets.  There was also a strong union influence in my paternal side, with an uncle one of the foudners of the ILGWU—the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union,  Thus uncle was wounded by Pinkerton Men (private security guards and detectives) shortly after the fatal fire in 1911 at the Triangle Building amongst the short-waist girls.

My mother’s family, or mostly my grandmother, tried to maintain upperclass appearances.  In 1936, just before my parents were wed, my mother’s mother was invited for tea with Queen Marie of Romania.  This seemed to confirm her high status, and it was something that rubbed the wrong way with my father’s parents and siblings. 

But my father also had his own dreams and aspirations.  He had wanted to be a physician, but could only afford to go to dental school, and after graduating and opening his practice, he felt an obligation to help his young brother get through dental school as well.,  As for his sister, she was a girl, and she went to a secretarial academy.  She justifiably always felt resentful of this lesser status, and I think she blamed my mother—or my mother’s parents—for the raw deal. 

I can see all these diverse influences crashing around inside of me.  Nevertheless, I grew up in a world different from either set of grandparents and their other relatives.  But that discussion must wait until the next portion of this essay, as must the way in which my own children have come to live lives very different from that I have known.

New Books in the Pipeline

Four books at least are now in preparation, that is, I have managed to disentangle the strands from all the reading I have been doing over the past few years as part of the grand project with trying to save Alfred Dreyfus from his detractors and trivilializers—those who still see him as no more than a dull, unimaginative military engineer and boring bourgeois husband and father.  These forthcoming books are taking shape as follows:

1.    (1)  The fourth in the series on Dreyfus himself.  This will concentrate on recently available notebooks and letters dealing with his service in the Great War, his participation in the salon of the Countess Marie Viscont-Arconanti, his reviewing of books for the Journal historique, and other data on his life between the almost complete vindication of his innocence in 1906m and his death in 1935.

2.    (2) A study of a cluster of Jewish and pseudo/quasi Jewish intellectuals and artists around the fin de siècle consisting of men and women who thought they could safely assimilate into a tolerant, liberal society in western and central Europe but who discovered that neither their accomplishments could ensure them safety or an enduring reputation where anti-Semitism was dominant and increasingly pervasive.  By pseudo and quasi Jews I mean those persons who were mis-identified as Jews because of their associations with and favourable treatment of Jews in their works or who through marriage and conversion actually tried to live, think and feel as Jews in times of stress.

3.     (3) A history of the relationship between Salomon Reinach and his Christian opponents and rivals in the controversy that arose over his publication of Orpheus in 1909, a book which had the temerity to treat Judaism and Christianity as types within a model of comparative religions, and which treated all religions as superstitions, historical constructs and oppressive regimes of intolerance and persecution.  Though many other scholars, clerical or lay, were saying similar things, it was Reinach the assimilated Jew who was targeted for his arrogance and inappropriate disregard for the conventions of Christian society.

4.    (4) A study of how the Jewish Imagination challenges and creates the world through midrash and science.  It is not that the Jewish imagination is completely different from any other, but that its emphases, its nuances, and rejection of certain experiences makes it distinct.  In this book, I will examine closely the various variations in sensual experience—the five senses as they register in a textualized mind, one that thinks in terms of words and intellectual concepts—and the kinds of artistic (aesthetic) forms of expression that are traditional to Jewish life.  In addition, because the Jews entered modern society at a fairly late period and used their intellectual skills to make advances in the sciences, from historiography and other social disciplines through to the hard sciences of mathematics, physics, and so on, I will spend time looking at the way Jews manipulated the technologies of photography, cinema, voice recordings, radio and so on.

On the New Scholarly Discourses

Looking through the Plate-Glass Windows at the Riches Within

One of the things that really bothers me about contemporary scholarly writing—and not just that—is that the authors of these works, though they often do have a sound grounding in the subjects they choose to discuss, seem to come at their material from somewhere way outside the heart of the culture that produced such things—literature, painting, historical documents, drama and music.  It is not just that they feel they must explain what any educated person should know about books, events and people who created the world we live in or that they use terms and concepts that are so far removed from these realities that such expressions miss the point, distort the truth or offer something completely inappropriate instead, but they seem to have no idea what actually motivated such experiences or what the implications are for the way everything has taken on a new complexion because of those actions.  It grates against my soul to see words like “kids” instead of children or “fun” instead of enjoyable in what should be serious texts.  More than that, it disturbs me deeply to find supposedly respectable scholars fumbling to grasp the purpose of classical painting or non-romantic poetry.   

What seems to have happened in the last fifty years, from the late 1960s onwards, that is, the student uprisings in Paris and in many other great cities of the western world, is that political correctness has deemed it almost mandatory for young scholars to approach the great heritage of civilization—and the mixture of the populations that this civilization has always experienced and often encouraged—as though they were “objective” outsiders: poor little victims—for they identify with the outsiders, the immigrants, the aliens, and the down-and-out “minorities”—staring through the plate-glass windows of an upscale (or any) restaurant, looking in, their noses pressed up against the panes, their tongues hanging out, yet their eyes, somewhat glazed and blurry, unable to see clearly what is within—what they think they see are over-stuffed patrons feasting on a rich diet denied to everyone on the outside.  Thus their approach to describing the goods set out on the table, the men and women gathered around that banquet and talking about their experiences comes set within a perspective that is at once blocked by jealousy, envy and resentment, and at the same time cloudy with misconceptions and couched in a language heavy with neologisms, malaprops, jargon and local patois and jabbering.

To be sure, everyone, when he or she comes into the world, comes to grow up in a texture of language, images, rituals and concepts that are in progress, that are, in other words, in the process of transforming from the way they used to be into what they are, as well as reacting, consciously or still unconsciously, to forms of reality that have not yet precipitated out of the flux and therefore have no clear shape or resonance.  But each of had to listen to what was being said around us, watch the way our elders were behaving, and study the books and other forms of cultural productions that expanded and illuminated what we ourselves could know only from our own individuality.  We grew up assuming that we did not know it all and that there was much to learn—much more than any one of us could accomplish in a lifetime; and therefore we had to develop proper skills, study basics, absorb what we could and follow the lead of our betters.  

At the same time, we also realized we had to become critical, questioning and somewhat sceptical of what we were told about the truth and reality, so that we could take in what was there to be learned and keep testing it against our own experience.  There had to be means of coming to trust authorities who knew more than we did in fields where we couldn’t become experts on our own. 

But the goal was to become part of the ongoing culture and civilization to which we belonged, at once guardians of its own historical integrity and expanders of its boundaries and providing increased depth to the total accumulation of this heritage.  Eventually, as we matured and proved ourselves in the system, we would become authorities too, with all the responsibility that honour implied.  All this meant hard work.  In fact, because the goal was so important, we knew it had to be hard to attain.

New Year Message: 2014

Happy New year to all!

It has been a few weeks since I last posted anything on this site, not since before the Christmas and New Year holidays, and here we are well into January 2014.

When I started this blog, as said a few times already, the purpose was to trawl through my backlog of old essays, stories, reviews, poems and miscellaneous pieces, most of them unpublished, some of them printed but in very small and obscure places, and occasionally bring up to date or even create something new.  It had been suggested to me that by doing so I would establish an archive of all this work--some of it going back more than thirty years--which would be accessible in some sort of orderly form for posterity.  Yes, at my age that is something I think about, that, and my posthumous place in the world of letters, should such a world continue to exist in the electronic-digital age, whereas my mind and creative juices remain way back in the literary and print stage.

Assuming that there was actually enough of that old material to keep me going for years to come, in my enthusiasm and naivite, I began to put things into this space not just everyday, sometimes more than that, and in clusters and clumps of three, four and more items.  Then suddenly I realized that what I was dredging was not a bottomless pit at all.  It became harder and harder to find prose, poetry and formless ramblings.  Fiddling with combinations of words, trying to rack my own brain for titles of long lost stories or essays, eventually near the end of last year (2013) I had to admit, the well was dry. 

What I could vaguely recall as written many decades ago was simply not to be found inside my computer's memory system, and probably had never been there at all, since for so long I pounded on typewriters or even handwritten my work before passing it on to some departmental secretary at the university.   The jolly idea of scanning faded, yellowy pieces of paper, in smudgy handwriting or unclear typed versions, just doesn't appeal any longer.  Someday perhaps--big laugh now, please--my future biographers will have to go through the box-loads of papers not yet tossed into the rubbish heap and undertake this labour of love for themselves.

All of which brings up the fact that if there is continue to be this Blog, then new material will have to be written.  At the moment, I am actually doing a fair amount of writing, in the sense of preliminary drafts for three or four projected books to be sent off to publishers, perhaps one this year.  Whether or not to place some of these early drafts on to the blog site does not seem like an easy choice for me to make. On the one hand, it would be a perhaps pleasant exercise in seeking feedback from readers--yet, as there is still only one official "follower" and a vast public of four or five, on very good days twenty, this seems a pointless opportunity; on the other hand, precisely because thesituation of "fit audience though few", as John Milton has said, the idea remains attractive.

So maybe I will and maybe I won't.  If I have any response to this, it will help me make up my mind.