Or: Modern Literature by Jews
Lately I have been reading essays about Modern Jewish Literature by
respectable critics, scholars and writers—poets, novelists,
playwrights—themselves. At times I have
a sinking feeling that I have lost all touch with what is going on, both in
terms of the texts themselves and in regard to the scholarship being generated
by increasing numbers of Jewish Literature courses and Jewish Culture
departments in the universities. Either
I have simply never heard of 80% or more of the authors mentioned or those
being discussed are all pretty much of a piece, that is, American Jews from
East European backgrounds who more or less fit into the models set up in the
1950s and 1960s by men and women seeking to find their place within the
contours of a post-War, American bourgeois tradition based on Ashkenazi
Yiddish-speaking backgrounds.
All very fine, so far as it goes…
but I have been away from North America almost fifty years, and my
readings have been elsewhere. When I sit
down, as I used to do when preparing undergraduate and graduate courses in
Jewish Literature, the names I listed then—and would still list now—seem not to
be the same as those about whom these contemporary scholars, critics and
writers considered to be standard,
mainstream and interesting. For
instance, for the twentieth century, my syllabi would always include: Marcel
Proust, Franz Kafka, Albert Cohen and Elias Canetti, and then sometimes names
such as André Suarès, Catulle Mendès, Gustave Kahn, André Maurois, Stefan Zweig
and Joseph Roth.
Probably most ordinary readers in America will recognize the names in
the first part of that list, although they might not guess which ones won the
Nobel Prize for Literature or whose books have been turned into films, but may
not know the authors in the second part—though each of these writers was
praised and influential in their own time, and yet were made to suffer for
their racial/religious identity, forced out of their editorial positions, and
had their titles removed from publishers’ lists, and themselves died under
tragic circumstances or worse during the Holocaust.
What does not appear here in my “dream” syllabus, or actual ones in some
years of my teaching, are the most familiar North American and Israeli names;
nor have I put in the important and influential titles within the category of
“Holocaust Literature.” I have kept them
out here for shock value. By focusing on
European authors whose reputations were once important in France, Germany,
Austria and elsewhere during their lifetimes but who are now mostly forgotten
and whose works have become hard to find in print, I want to emphasize a key
point: that Modern Jewish Literature does not begin with I. B. Singer, Bernard Melamud,
the other Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick and so on, that is, it does not grow out
of, as a conscious or unconscious continuation of Yiddish storytelling and does
not have to be about immigrants, survivors or rebellious anxiety-ridden
adolescents. That many of the authors in
my listing come from non-Ashkenazi backgrounds—Sephardim, Italianate,
Levantine—should act as a salutary reminder that there is more to Jewish
culture than Yiddishkeyt. Think, for
instance, of Elias Canetti growing up in Bulgaria and his parents inducting him
into a wider European culture, not just their own Ladino speaking hometown, but
also German-speaking Vienna. Or Albert
Cohen migrating from a small community of Sephardim on a Greek island to
metropolitan France and then living in Switzerland. Franz Kafka became a German-Jewish writer but
lives almost all his life in Czech-speaking Bohemia, and though an admirer of
Yiddish theatre and a would-be Zionist who studied Hebrew, he is shaped by Mitteleuropa’s multi-culturalism and
multilingualism.
These writers are not just Jewish because they grew up in Jewish
environments and were confronted by a hostile, anti-Semitic world, sometimes
smugly bigoted and other times violently driven by hatred. They often thought of themselves as
assimilated and secular, but always as assimilated Jews and secularized Jews. They were peculiarly outsiders and insiders
both of their own family backgrounds in Judaism and of their cosmopolitan,
sophisticated European civilization.
To understand some of this, I was happily able to read in the memoirs of
Gustave Schlumberger[i]
an account of what happened on the evening when, at least for him the Dreyfus
Affair became real and painful. Schlumberger
was an Alsatian wit family connections also in Switzerland and Germany, but he
grew up in Pau in southern France (where his parents had taken him as a child
for health reasons, and where his father became a leading figure in the
Protestant community there) believing himself to be a true-blue Frenchman, and
devoted himself to the study of its coins, medals and seals, as well as to Byzantine
history, It was in late October 1897 in
Paris at a regular Sunday evening soirée hosted by Monsieur and Madame Emile
Straus. At about eleven in the evening,
Mme Straus called for silence and announced that one of their guests, Joseph
Reinach, had some important news to share with them. Reinach said that he now had proof that the
real culprit in the case of treason and espionage that had led to Alfred
Dreyfus’ court martial and exile to Devil’s Island was Esterhazy. His handwriting had been identified on the
infamous bordereu that had been the
only solid piece of evidence upon which Dreyfus’s guilt had been produced. When Reinach was finished, Schlumberger tells
us that he raised, very courteously, an objection to the certainty of what had
just been said.
At that point, seemingly out of the blue, Emile Straus said something
very rude to him, and Schlumberger writes that he was startled to find himself
not only spoken to in such a manner by his host and friend of long-standing but
shocked to realize he was being accused of anti-Semitism. He then says all the Jews in the room,
including those who had heretofore prided themselves on their lack of religious
beliefs or racial identities, agreed with Straus. From then, Schlumberger decided he could have
nothing to do with the Strauses and soon found himself also “forced” to
distance himself from all his other Jewish friends and acquaintances, as he
found the Affair to be dangerous to the security of the Army and an insult to
the principles upon which France was founded.
While nowhere in the many hundreds of pages that precede this account of
the events at the salon, pages wherein he occasionally hints at many wonderful,
charming and intelligent people he had known and with whom he had felt
compelled to break off relations because of the sad little Affair, does he
exhibit signs of anti-Semitism, neither in a religious or a racial sense.
However, reading this passage carefully, and several others that follow,
as his Souvenirs detail the events of the Dreyfus Affair, it becomes clear that
all along he has not understood what motivated Jews to behave the way they
do—he rarely and casually mentions some of the old clichés about the tribal
loyalties, the predilection for making money, and the gross lack of civil
behaviour he sometimes see among men and women otherwise respectable and
talented, such as Sarah Bernhardt. Nor
in this instance does he show any sympathy for what has just happened. These rich, successful and influential Jews
in the room, artists, bankers, politicians, journalists, scholars have kept
their silence as the news about Dreyfus was made public and the rising tide of
anti-Semitism in the press, in the National assembly and senate, and in the
streets became more strident. The
accusation against Dreyfus first came in 1894 and it took more than three
years, against all the odds, as it were, since no one wanted to believe that
the high officers and leading politicians had built their case on forgeries,
perjury and sheer bigotry. The
assimilated Jews, as Proust shows in many scenes of his In search of Lost Time,
were biting their tongues and hoping the inevitable would not happen: that
large-scale Jew hatred would make itself felt and they lose their sense of
safety in France. When Reinach broke the
news that the traitor and spy had been found out and that there was no
substantial proof to support the guilty verdict against Dreyfus, the dam burst:
they could express in public their belief in the Jewish Captain’s innocence and
join others in calling for a revision of his trial.
Schlumberger could not sense the anxiety and fear mounting amongst his
Jewish friends for all those years—and the rise of anti-Semitism was evident
before the Dreyfus Affair with the publication of Drumont’s terrible slanders
in France juive or his founding of a
newspaper called Libre Parole to vent
his spleen everyday, as well as in various Catholic newspapers in France and
Italy hurling abuse against modernism and cosmopolitanism and socialism, all
code words for Jew. He also shows no
sympathy for his Jewish friends when they reject his little courteous
hesitations at Reinach’s report. Nor
does he see in his response the animus that
they can sense, and his explicit and implicit comments on their lack of real
French character, their detachment from its soil, its history, and its
religion.
The Jewish writers we introduced at the start of this essay were like
those educated, cultured and assimilated Jews in the home of the Strauses on
the Boulevard Haussmann in 1897. They
often spoke dismissively of their ancestral heritage and denied any belief in
its religious or cultural values, without realizing that only Jews have to keep
asserting that they are not really Jewish in their minds and hearts. Some became quite aware and changed
tack. André Suarès, for one, when he
could see that in the 1930s his intellectual friends on the left were all
making as many excuses for Hitler as they were for Stalin, he wrote against their obtuseness; with the result that publishers
stopped printing his essays and novels. Stefan
Zeig thought he and his wife could be safe in South America, but the news of
the Holocaust followed them across the Atlantic, and they committed suicide
rather than face the lack of sympathy and understanding around them. Elias Canetti arrived in England to escape
from the Nazis and was shocked to discover no one had ever heard of him, let
alone read his books; he refused to write in English, and continued to write in
German, though he knew they could not be published in Germany or Austria. In one of the final scenes of Proust’s long
multi-volumed novel, the people he knew as a young man and who had fought bitterly
on different sides of the Dreyfus Affair could no longer recall whether they
were for or against the Captain. Albert
Cohen in Belle de Seigneur and its
supplements imagines that his protagonist’s elderly cousins from the little
island community he grew up on followed him to Geneva where he was a powerful
figure in the League of Nations, but they are so bizarre he has to hide them—as
he tries to do his own Jewish identity: a wonderful satire on the Jew who tries
not to be one in pubic and only exposes his own foolishness in the process.
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