Shop Talk (11 page)

Roth:
It's possible to think of Schulz's "rootlessness" another way: not as something that held him back from writing serious novels but as a condition upon which his particular talent and imagination thrived.

Singer:
Yes, of course, that is true. If a genuine talent cannot be nourished directly from the soil, he will be nourished by something else. But from my point of view, I would rather have liked to have seen him as a Yiddish writer. He wouldn't have had all the time to be as negative and mocking as he was.

Roth:
I wonder if it isn't negativism and mockery that drive Schulz so much as boredom and claustrophobia. Perhaps what sets him off on what he calls a "counteroffensive of fantasy" is that he is a man of enormous artistic gifts and imaginative riches living out his life as a high school teacher in a provincial town where his family are merchants. Also, he is his father's son, and his father, as he describes him, was, at least in his later years, a highly entertaining but terrifying madman, a grand "heresiarch," fascinated, Schulz says, "by doubtful and problematical forms." That last might be a good description of Schulz himself, who seems to me wholly conscious of just how close to madness, or heresy, his own agitated imagination could carry him. I don't think that with Schulz, any more than with Kafka, the greatest difficulty was an inability to be at home with this people or with that people, however much that may have added to his troubles. From the evidence of this book, it looks as though Schulz could barely identify himself with reality, let alone with the Jews. One is reminded of Kafka's remark on his communal affiliations:

"What have I in common with the Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself and should stand very quietly in the corner, content that I can breathe." Schulz needn't have remained in Drohobycz if he found it all that stifling. People can pick up and go. He could have stayed in Warsaw once he finally got there. But perhaps the claustrophobic environment that didn't suit the needs of the man was just what gave life to his kind of art.
Fermentation
is a favorite word of his. It may only have been in Drohobycz that Schulz's imagination fermented.

Singer:
I think also that in Warsaw he felt he ought to get back to Drohobycz because in Warsaw everybody said, "Who is Schulz?" Writers are not really ready to see a young man from the provinces and immediately to say, "You are our brother, you are our teacher"—they are not inclined to do so. Most probably they said, "Another nuisance with a manuscript." Also, he was a Jew. And these Jewish writers in Poland, who were really the rulers of the literary field, they were cautious about the fact that they were Jews.

Roth:
Cautious in what way?

Singer:
They were called Jews by their adversaries, by those who did not like them. This was always the eternal reproach. "What are you doing, Mr. Tuwim, with your Hebrew name, writing in Polish? Why don't you go back to the ghetto with Israel Joshua Singer and the others?" That is the way it was. So when there came another Jew who writes Polish, they felt not really comfortable about it. Because there came another problem child.

Roth:
I take it that it was easier to assimilate into artistic or intellectual circles than into the bourgeois world of Warsaw.

Singer:
I would say that it was more difficult. I will tell you why. A Jewish lawyer, if he didn't like to be called Levin
or Katz, could call himself Levinski or Kacinski and people didn't bother him. But about a writer they were always cautious. They would say, "You have nothing to do with us." I think that some small similarity exists even in this country with the Jewish writers who write in English and are at home in English. No writer here would say to Saul Bellow or to you, "Why don't you write in Yiddish, why don't you go back to East Broadway?" Yet some small part of that still exists. I would think that there are some conservative writers here or critics who would say that people like you are not really American writers. However, here the Jewish writers are not really ashamed of being Jewish and they don't apologize all the time. There, in Poland, there was an atmosphere of apologizing. There they tried to show how Polish they were. And they tried of course to know Polish better than the Poles, in which they succeeded. But still the Poles said they have nothing to do with us ... Let me make it clearer. Let's say if we would have now, here, a goy who would write in Yiddish, if this goy would be a failure, we would leave him in peace. But if he would be a great success, we would say, "What are you doing with Yiddish? Why don't you go back to the goyim, we don't need you."

Roth:
A Polish Jew of your generation writing in Polish would have been as strange a creature as that?

Singer:
Almost. And if there would be many such people, let's say there would be six goyim who would write in Yiddish, and there would come a seventh one...

Roth:
Yes, it's clearer. You make it clearer.

Singer:
I once was sitting in the subway with the Yiddish writer S, who had a beard, and at this time, forty years ago, very few people had beards. And he liked women, so he looked over and sitting across from him was a young woman, and he seemed to be highly interested. I sat on the
side and I saw it—he didn't see me. Suddenly right near him came in another man also with a beard, and he began to look at the same woman. When S saw another one with a beard, he got up and left. He suddenly realized his own ridiculous situation. And this woman, as soon as this other man came in, she must have thought, What's going on here, already two beards?

Roth:
You had no beard.

Singer:
No, no. Do I need everything? A bald head
and
a beard?

Roth:
You left Poland in the middle thirties, some years before the Nazi invasion. Schulz remained in Drohobycz and was killed there by the Nazis in 1942. Coming here to talk to you, I was thinking about how you, the Jewish writer from Eastern Europe most nourished by the Jewish world and most bound to it, left that world to come to America, while the other major Jewish writers of your generation—Jews far more assimilated, far more drawn toward the contemporary currents in the larger culture, writers like Schulz in Poland, and Isaac Babel in Russia, and, in Czechoslovakia, Jirí Weil, who wrote some of the most harrowing stories I've read about the Holocaust—were destroyed in one ghastly way or another, either by Nazism or Stalinism. May I ask who or what encouraged you to leave before the horrors began? After all, to be exiled from one's native country and language is something that nearly all writers would dread and probably be most reluctant to accomplish voluntarily. Why did you do it?

Singer:
I had all the reasons to leave. First of all, I was very pessimistic. I saw that Hitler was already in power in 1935 and he was threatening Poland with invasion. Nazis like Göring came to Poland to hunt and to vacation. Second,
I worked for the Yiddish press, and the Yiddish press was going down all the time—it has been ever since it has existed. And my way of living became very frugal—I could barely exist. And the main thing was that my brother was here; he had come about two years before. So I had all the reasons to run to America.

Roth:
And, leaving Poland, did you have fears about losing touch with your material?

Singer:
Of course, and the fear became even stronger when I got to this country. I came here and I saw that everybody speaks English. I mean, there was a Hadassah meeting, and so I went and expected to hear Yiddish. But I came in and there was sitting about two hundred women and I heard one word: "delicious, delicious, delicious." I didn't know what it was, but it wasn't Yiddish. I don't know what they gave them there to eat, but two hundred women were sitting and saying, "Delicious." By the way, this was the first English world I learned. Poland looked far away then. When a person who is close to you dies, in the first few weeks after his death he is as far from you, as far as a near person can ever be; only with the years does he become nearer, and then you can almost live with this person. This is what happened to me. Poland, Jewish life in Poland, is nearer to me now than it was then.

[1980]

This interview is condensed from two conversations I had with Milan Kundera after reading a translated manuscript of his
Book of Laughter and Forgetting
—one conversation while he was visiting London for the first time, the other when he was on his first visit to the United States. He took these trips from France; since 1975 he and his wife have been living there as émigrés, in Rennes, where he taught at the university, and now in Paris. During our conversations, Kundera spoke sporadically in French but mostly in Czech, and his wife, Vera, served as his translator and mine. A final Czech text was translated into English by Peter Kussi.

Roth:
Do you think the destruction of the world is coming soon?

Kundera:
That depends on what you mean by the word
soon.

Roth:
Tomorrow or the day after.

Kundera:
The feeling that the world is rushing to ruin is an ancient one.

Roth:
So then we have nothing to worry about.

Kundera:
On the contrary. If a fear has been present in the human mind for ages, there must be something to it.

Roth:
In any event, it seems to me that this concern is the background against which all the stories in your latest book take place, even those that are of a decidedly humorous nature.

Kundera:
If someone had told me as a boy, "One day you will see your nation vanish from the world," I would have considered it nonsense, something I couldn't possibly imagine. A man knows he is mortal, but he takes it for granted that his nation possesses a kind of eternal life. But after the Russian invasion of 1968, every Czech was confronted with the thought that his nation could be quietly erased from Europe, just as over the past five decades forty million Ukrainians have been quietly vanishing from the world without the world paying any heed. Or Lithuanians. Do you know that in the seventeenth century Lithuania was a powerful European nation? Today the Russians keep Lithuanians on their reservation like a half-extinct tribe; they are sealed off from visitors to prevent knowledge about their existence from reaching the outside. I don't know what the future holds for my own nation. It is certain that the Russians will do everything they can to dissolve it gradually into their own civilization. Nobody knows whether they will succeed. But the possibility is there. And the sudden realization that such a possibility exists is enough to change one's whole sense of life. Nowadays I see even Europe as fragile, mortal.

Roth:
And yet, are not the fates of Eastern Europe and Western Europe radically different matters?

Kundera:
As a concept of cultural history, Eastern Europe is Russia, with its quite specific history anchored in
the Byzantine world. Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, just like Austria, have never been part of Eastern Europe. From the very beginning they have taken part in the great adventure of Western civilization, with its Gothic, its Renaissance, its Reformation—a movement that has its cradle precisely in this region. It was there, in Central Europe, that modern culture found its greatest impulses: psychoanalysis, structuralism, dodecaphony, Bartók's music, Kafka's and Musil's new aesthetics of the novel. The postwar annexation of Central Europe (or at least its major part) by Russian civilization caused Western culture to lose its vital center of gravity. It is the most significant event in the history of the West in our century, and we cannot dismiss the possibility that the end of Central Europe marked the beginning of the end for Europe as a whole.

Roth:
During the Prague Spring, your novel
The Joke
and your stories
Laughable Loves
were published in editions of 150,000. After the Russian invasion you were dismissed from your teaching post at the film academy and all your books were removed from the shelves of public libraries. Seven years later you and your wife tossed a few books and some clothes in the back of your car and drove off to France, where you've become one of the most widely read of foreign authors. How do you feel as an émigré?

Kundera:
For a writer, the experience of living in a number of countries is an enormous boon. You can only understand the world if you see it from several sides. My latest book
[The Book of Laughter and Forgetting],
which came into being in France, unfolds in a special geographic space: those events that take place in Prague are seen through Western European eyes, while what happens in France is seen through the eyes of Prague. It is an encounter of two
worlds. On one side, my native country: in the course of a mere half century, it experienced democracy, fascism, revolution, Stalinist terror as well as the disintegration of Stalinism, German and Russian occupation, mass deportations, the death of the West in its own land. It is thus sinking under the weight of history and looks at the world with immense skepticism. On the other side, France: for centuries it was the center of the world and nowadays it is suffering from the lack of great historic events. This is why it revels in radical ideological postures. It is the lyrical, neurotic expectation of some great deed of its own, which is not coming, however, and will never come.

Roth:
Are you living in France as a stranger or do you feel culturally at home?

Kundera:
I am enormously fond of French culture and I am greatly indebted to it. Especially to the older literature. Rabelais is dearest to me of all writers. And Diderot. I love his
Jacques le fataliste
as much as I do Laurence Sterne. Those were the greatest experimenters of all time in the form of the novel. And their experiments were, so to say, amusing, full of happiness and joy, which have by now vanished from French literature and without which everything in art loses its significance. Sterne and Diderot understood the novel as a great game. They discovered the humor of the novelistic form. When I hear learned arguments that the novel has exhausted its possibilities, I have precisely the opposite feeling: in the course of its history the novel missed many of its possibilities. For example, impulses for the development of the novel hidden in Sterne and Diderot have not been picked up by any successors.