Anamorphosis
and trompe l’œil
Though I.B. Singer was clearly writing in the
mid-twentieth century, using many of the techniques, themes and insights
available to a modernist author, he sets his novel in the mid-seventeenth
century, on the cusp of the orderly and decorous Enlightenment and well before
the gush of Romanticism. His characters
arise from the meeting of Christian Europe’s indulgence in the Baroque, with
all its intricate, ingenious and duplicitous means, and the Jewish sense of
fear and trepidation as the relative security and religious certainties of the
Middle Ages shifted into a new and unknown period of modernization,
secularization and perhaps even tolerance.
Whatever the promises seem to hold in the western part of the Continent,
in the East, where Slavic, Byzantine and Muslim cultures clashed and interacted
with one another, the future seemed anything but bright. The outbreak of the Cossack Uprising
demonstrated amply the fragility of the society in which Jews found themselves,
and the disappointments from Iberia—that once Golden Land of tolerance and richness—mixed
with the dark and twisted events in Mitteleuropa,
so that in the wake of betrayals, disappointments and hopelessness came the
false messiah Shabbatai Tzvi. It was as
though all hell were literally let loose and upset everything at all levels of
the social scale as well as in all modes of religious persuasion: and that
satanic figure and his minions can be seen dramatically in Singer’s novel. His
magical fiction seems to breach the neat boundary of what constitutes normative
possibility and reality in our common sense version of novelistic realism, one
that contains fantasy and the irrational within the interior of individual
experiences, thus forcing it out into the open of collective and public spaces
and making vivid and probable the illusionary and unreal. The substance of the modern fiction becomes
similar to the trompe l’œil trickery
of the ingenious baroque. As in anamorphosis,
where the ordinary perceptions are stretched out of shape, elongated, bent, and
melded into grotesque perspectives, so Satan in Goray shows a version of Jewish
history more as it was experienced than it was perceived, remembered or
normally since then imagined.
Paradoxically, as one may see in such
Crypto-Jewish writers of the same period, such as Aphra Behn[1] in
her Oroonoko, a bifurcated narrative—one discourse in the halting,
fragmented language of a private history
and the other in the artificial, highly literary terms of a romantic and exotic
adventure story—the hidden dimension of reality (what is real for us only
because it is shorn of its rhetorical adornments and structures, as though
plain-speaking were the embodiment of all reality) strikes us as persuasive
whereas the historically accurate reproduction of contemporary views of these
same characters and events comes across as unreal or forced through the filters
of convention and ideology.
Hence,
the myth of the “Dybbuk of Goray” is at once an untrue version of the more
psychologically grounded narrative of childhood abuse, sexual frustration, and
traumatic repression in a time of social crisis and—precisely because the dybbuk—the
migrating and wandering soul of an unquiet spirit, a threatening creature from
the other side—is a manifestation of the secret anxieties, fears and
longings of the men and women of Goray.
This is a part of themselves that they have no other means of expressing
and dealing with—making it also a historically true representation of the
mentality of that time and place when Jews were thrown off balance yet again
and recreated, against millennia of rabbinical argument, a mythic and
idolatrous universe of folklore, superstition, on the popular level, and of antinomian,
anti-authoritarian intellectualism. The
original Yiddish readers of Der Vorwarts having gone along with Singer’s
novel week after week for at least a year, came to know the bizarre yet
familiar, that is, in Freud’s terms, the uncanniness or unhemlichkeit of
Goray, as a community that draws one in sympathetically because they are the
ancestors of the Yiddish-reading audience and also disgusts, repels because
these ancestors are unmodern, unassimilated—and in many ways, too, as yet
untouched by the Hasidism that would transform the shtetlech of Eastern
Europe during the 18th and 19th centuries. For us, though, who come to the novel through
the English version, to grapple then with the last two chapters, in its
pseudo-archaic language, is to realize that modern minds can only to a certain
degree understand the motivations and consequences of the madness that overcame
the people of Goray in a way that they could only stand back in horror and
terror to observe, after the event and in the refuge of conventionalized
rabbinical language. The discrepancy—and
it is neither a rhetorical or literary phenomenon, some kind of tragic or
satiric irony—between the final two chapters, in which Yiddish culture and
mentality appears to be moribund, parochial, and insane, as Wolitz indicates,
and the rest of the novel is only part of the effect, however.
Week by week, as the original
Yiddish-reading audience read Satan in Goray in the 1950s, they were
learning their own history as well as being entertained by a fantastic story of
a time that seemed to be completely unlike their own. Unless they were professional historians or
teachers of history, it is unlikely that they would have known very much about
Shabbatai Tzvi other than some negative comments passed along in family
traditions. They would have to look back
through the nostalgia and sentimentality that had come to coat the reality of
the Old World, both after the immigrants had escaped to the goldene medina,
the Golden Land of America at the turn of the century and after the survivors
of the Shoah had stepped out of that unimaginable and unspeakable hell. Hence, Singer’s novel would be a primary
source of their knowledge of Poland in the seventeenth century in the grips of
the Shabbatean delusion. And yet, because full enormity of the Shoah was just
beginning to sink in, the representation in this narrative fiction of such a
shameful calamity for the Jewish people would be hard to stomach, unless it
were understood as a kind of dream diversion—a strategic nightmare—to protect
one from the traumatic impact of the Holocaust by representing a moment in the
past whose consequences were, in the main, beneficial.
As Yiddish-speakers, whose personal
experiences were imbued with a reality shared with Singer, his family and the
lost communities of Eastern Europe, they would have had an implicit sympathy
with the language and conceptual base of the original Yiddish version—much less
polished and rational, much more iconic in its use of still living memories of
Ashkenazi paradigms of feeling, evaluating and recalling the world of the shtetl. The English version, to which Singer himself
actively worked with his translators to create, is much more blandly American
and appealing to a non-Jewish readership.
The polishing and cutting also create a more focused literary
work-of-art, but in the process the narrative was removed from its essential
context of Yiddish intellectual and emotional life—and so, though it certainly
perceives and represents a view of the Shabbatean movement that is only now
being caught up with in scholarly history, it can no longer embody the mind and
soul of Yiddishkeyt in crisis—in many ways, the very crisis that created
“the world of our fathers”, “the world we have lost”, that formed the essential
personality of those earliest readers of the novel in serial form in Der
Vorwarts.
Putting that great loss aside,
though, and treating Singer and his literature as though they were best in
English and so representative of twentieth-century Jewish culture in America,
however, is like putting aside the memory of the Holocaust—or at the very worst
indulging in a very subtle (and hence even more evil) version of Holocaust
Denial, one that says it doesn’t matter, history is over. For those who cannot read Yiddish, there
still is, however, an opportunity to approach the novel with a sense that there
is always going to be something missing, a profound black hole from which we
must stand back in awe. As one reads
Sloan’s translation, it is important to remember that not only did the author
collaborate in the production of this English version, but that he accepted as
a tragic necessity the covering over of the faces and voices of all those
destroyed in the Shoah.
In closing, I want to suggest that Satan
in Goray is a literary work of art that takes the reader towards an oblique
recasting of a famous exemplary incident in the Talmud. In this aggadah
or narrative illumination of the text, dating to the time of the Roman
occupation and the Bar Kochba Revolt.
Rabbi Akiba once said to his disciples, when they asked him why he was
laughing as he walked past the ruins of the Second Temple and the city of
Jerusalem which the Romans had razed to the ground a generation earlier—after
all, they expected him to weep along with them at such a sight: Rabbi Akiba
said, “I laugh because if there is here tangible proof of the terrible
prophecies pronounced against Israel, then surely we can believe in the
fulfilment of the merciful and beautiful promises of the prophets.” Out of the Holocaust, along with the murder
of millions and the crushing of a whole civilization, came the hope of Israel
and the rebirth of Jewish intellectual life.
Four centuries earlier, in the wake of the Cossack massacres and out of
the Shabbatean crisis came the modernization of Judaism—the reorganization of
rabbinical teaching, the birth of Hasidism, and the opening up of the
Haskallah, the Enlightenment. Our own nervous
laughter at what our ancestors believed, like that of Bashevis Singer’s, is
always tinged with loss and grief. Let
us hope our hold on rationality and science is no delusion.
[1] A Dark Cynical Conceit: The
Masque in Aphra Behn’s The Lucky Chance”
AUMLA 88 (1997) 83-95. I discuss Behn’s Crypto-Jewish background at
further length in my study of another Marrana author writing novels in English
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; see Norman Simms, Crypto-Judaism, Madness, and the Female
Quixote: Charlotte Lennox as Marrana in Mid-Eighteenth-Century England (Lewiston, NY, Queenston, Ontario, and
Lampeter, UK: Edwin Mellen Press ,
2004).
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