Under This Blazing Light (2 page)

The labours of peacemaking are not concluded once the treaty is signed. Courageous sappers on both sides must start clearing the emotional minefields, the aftermath of war, removing mutual stereotypes created by many years of fear and hatred. Describing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a tragic clash between right and right, I maintain that we do not want a Shakespearian conclusion, with poetic justice hovering over a stage littered with dead bodies. We may now be nearing a typical Chekhovian conclusion for the tragedy: the players disillusioned and worried, but alive. This is not the end of history. But come what may, Israelis and Palestinians will never again have to get past the terrible emotional obstacle of shaking hands for the first time. The cognitive barrier has begun to be broken down.

Let us not forget that even now there are still different sets of clocks at work in the Middle East. The real rift is no longer between Jew and Arab but rather between past-oriented and future-oriented people on both sides. I believe there is a good chance that the future will prevail over the past. Together the Israelis and the Palestinians are today sending a resounding message to every agonised comer of the earth: if we can compromise with each other and turn our backs to violence despite 100 years of sound and fury, is peace not possible between all deadly enemies in the world?

The essays in this collection are mostly concerned with these two themes: the painful route of peace and compromise between Israel and the Palestinians, and indeed the Arab world, and the fascinating story of the revival of the Hebrew language and its literature. This revival can indeed be seen as the most certain achievement of Zionism. A language that for some eighteen centuries had hardly been spoken in everyday life has become in ninety years a language spoken daily by about six million people, a language that is developing with an explosive power comparable to Elizabethan English, with one of the most dynamic and exciting literatures in the world today. The theme of the book is therefore, in a very real and pressing sense, the theme of renewal. While the essays in question were written in the 1960s and 1970s, the fears expressed in them still exist. The hopes they describe now seem a little closer to reality.

(This introduction is an expanded version of an article which appeared in Time magazine on 20 September 1993)

One day in London, in the thick of a smog, when you could not see your hand in front of your face, a man was summoned by phone to a hospital at the other end of town where his child was seriously ill. The man opened his front door and stood in the murky darkness, calling out for help, but there were no cars, no passers-by. Suddenly a hand landed on his shoulder and a voice said, ‘I’ll take you.’ And the stranger did indeed lead the anxious father right across London, unfalteringly, saying confidently from time to time ‘turn left here’, ‘mind the steps’, ‘careful, there’s a ramp’. When they reached the hospital the man asked the stranger how he could possibly find his way through such a dense fog. ‘Darkness and fog do not bother me,’ the other replied, ‘because I am blind.’

The connection between the world of events and the world of words in books is so subtle as to defy definition, and that is why I try to approach it through parables. A writer sometimes has dual loyalties, and sometimes he has to operate like an undercover agent. He is a more-or-less respectable citizen of the kingdom of events, conscientious and law-abiding, paying his taxes and expressing opinions, doing occasional good deeds and so forth. And yet his mind is on the words that could be used to talk about the events, rather than on the events themselves.

The two kingdoms are governed by different and even conflicting laws. In the kingdom of events one is supposed to prefer good to evil, the helpful to the harmful. In the kingdom of words there is a different kind of preference, which I am not ready to name. I shall merely insist that it is a different preference.

In the world of events there are matters that need to be sorted out, problems demanding solutions, objectives waiting to be realised, challenges calling for effort, roles awaiting their hero. The world of words is a place of awkward, lonely choices, slightly ridiculous in their earnestness and anguish, choices between possible expressions created out of pain and remoteness, far away from generalisations. From here all events look rather odd and fussy, ludicrously touching, like a children’s game before dusk. All of this from the window of a witness who is a grouch, a layabout, a peeping Tom, an eavesdropper, who pieces his books together from remnants of the material from which events themselves are fashioned, burrowing among shreds and snatches. Literature, whether it is dealing with a disturbed student who murders a smelly old woman pawnbroker or with the exploits of kings and giants of days of yore, is always in the mixed multitude, in the margins of the caravan.

Of course it is easy to roll out the well-known exceptions, such as Bialik’s ‘In the City of Slaughter’, a poem that gave rise - so they say - to a great historic movement; or Brenner’s stories, from which the men of action drew the phrase ‘long live humanistic Hebrew labour’, by means of which they changed the situation somewhat; or the short story ‘Hirbet Hiz’a’ by S. Yizhar, that branded its mark on the flesh of events, and may even have curbed the men of action to some small extent. But these are only apparent exceptions. There is actually far less and also far more in the poem ‘In the City of Slaughter’ than the organisers of the Jewish self-defence movement found in it. Its main point is not the denunciation of the killers coursing like horses, or the smirched honour of the Jewish people fouled in the flight of mice or the hideouts of bedbugs, but in the protest about the way the world order, the laws that guide the cosmos, are perverted and corrupted. The sun rises in accordance with the laws of nature, the acacia flowers according to its fixed rules, and the slaughterer following, like the acacia and the sun, the laws of creation, slaughters. This is not a specifically Zionist or national complaint, but a metaphysical protest that has only a slight, indirect connection with events. Similarly, Brenner’s stories are not really about the relationship between a generation and events, solutions, etc., but about the relationship between an individual and his own anguish and shame and inaction. Even the short stories of S. Yizhar, if we do not approach them through slogans, are not about relations between Jews and Arabs or between sensitive and insensitive Jews; the real point of‘Hirbet Hiz’a’ is how one young Jew relates to his own tattered soul.

So even in the writings of Bialik, Brenner and Yizhar, which are alleged to have a strong, straightforward connection to the realm of events, the link between words and events is neither straightforward nor direct. Words are connected to a place from which our captious witness contemplates events. This secret foreign agent is such a traitor that in his heart of hearts he is not looking for a formula that will remove suffering, but the right words to describe it.

Is my aim to proclaim over the whole world of literature that

I tell of myself, that is all I can tell of,

My world is as small as the world of an ant?

No. Not always. Not in every sense. True, while the caravan is passing these men of words merely bark or howl. But sometimes the caravan loses its way or its strength and comes to a weary halt. Then the blind man may be able to lead the sighted. The wordsmith’s anguish, his mockery, his darkness, suddenly become a landmark. Reality itself, the realm of decision and achievement, has moments when it tries to get back to its original source, to the darkness of desires and fears and dreams from which it comes. At such times the blind man, the sniper of stragglers, the man of words, can take events by the arm and say ‘Here. This way.’ Or ‘Look out: a chasm.’ Or ‘Stop. Rest.’ And thus he can lead the way through agony, loneliness and darkness, which he knows backwards, with his mental map of the pathways. May we only need these books to broaden our minds. May all our actions succeed. Even so, it is good to have them there, in the comer, on the shelf, against a rainy day.

(First published in 1966)

For Nurit Gertz

Do not expect me to reveal all sorts of creative secrets, or to work alchemy, or take you on a guided tour of the kitchen, or whatever. On the contrary. My aim here is to express some very simple thoughts about one or two things to do with contemporary Israeli writing.

On the threshold

You’ve guessed: having said ‘contemporary Israeli’ I am actually going to lead ofF with totally other places and times. I believe the greatest creations in world literature have almost always been achieved in twilight periods. This is a rather curious phenomenon, that may be out of line with every social or national ideology. All ideologies like to boast that the arts flourish under their aegis. No ideology can be pleased to acknowledge that it is its decline and fall that favours the growth of literature. It is nevertheless true that, in the lives of nations, faiths and cultures, periods of flourishing success, of dynamic creativity, periods when things are getting bigger and stronger, are not propitious to storytellers. (They themselves may well be drawn into such an embrace, but their stories will wend their way to other times and places.) The greatest creations in world literature have generally been produced in the twilight, or in relation to a period of twilight, when a centuries-old civilisation has passed its zenith and is on the decline, whether under external pressure or under its own weight when an ageing culture is beginning to smell of decay.

The authors of some of the best works of world literature are people who have had divided minds in their own time. On the one hand, the author is himself the product of the decaying civilisation. Its lifestyle, its ways of thinking, its linguistic structures, its social relationships, its private or family or tribal or national memories, all affect him to the roots of his being. Like his contemporaries, and perhaps a little more than others, he is linked by his thoughts, feelings and habits to that complex nexus of emotions, social reflexes, table manners, old wives’ tales, terms of endearment and abuse, trivial beliefs, lullabies, boasts and shames and vanities that are shared by every tribe, in short everything that makes up the swarming mass of a centuries-old civilisation. But on the other hand, the author is also a man who has walked out alone through the gate of his city to the top of the hill and has stood there by himself gazing on his own city from the outside. With a cool, distant eye, with mockery, wonderment, irony, horror and hatred, and, at the same time and without any contradiction, with compassion and respect and a heart torn by anguish at the thought that all this is doomed to perish.

And so these authors create stories, poems, plays and novels, cathedrals of words, and by their writing they deliver the fatal stab, and they also dress the wound, and record the failing pulse and the loss of body heat, and raise the lament, and derive a wicked pleasure, and build a memorial, or if you prefer stuff the skin (like the taxidermist Arzaff in Agnon’s Tmol Shilshom -or even like Agnon himself, in his writing). And while they are doing all this, with love, hatred, regret, arrogance and dexterity, they are already looking around for something new that promises to take the place of the expiring civilisation. They are longing for that new, strange development that is already filling the air, amorphous yet vigorously effervescent, they are both longing and fearful, it attracts and fascinates them and they proclaim its coming while simultaneously warning against it.

And so, in the twilight between a great sunset and the vague glimmering of a new dawn, someone like Dante stands poised between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Or Cervantes and Shakespeare on the threshold of the modern age. Or the great Russian literature of Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, written to the accompaniment of the death-knell of Orthodox, tsarist Russia, borne down by the weight of years, of customs and beliefs, on its cities and villages, its aristocracy and its intelligentsia, its freed serfs and its peasants, this Russia sinking under the onslaught of revolutionaries, ideologues and nihilists, but mainly under the weight of its own years, its traditions and its faith. And the writers, each in his own way, are all the children of this Russia, they are all its lovers, its haters, its crucifiers, its murderers, its gravediggers, its elegists, immortalising it lest it perish and be forgotten. They spy the new forces approaching on every side, at least they discern their outlines, and they are attracted but also filled with fear and loathing. Each in his own distinctive way.

Similarly Thomas Mann, and in a different way Kafka too, wrote in the period of the decline of comfortable bourgeois Europe, heavy with years and old ways and manners and patterns of behaviour and speech and mentalities, and in their differing ways they both knew that this world was doomed not from without but from within, from the weight of its own age and decadence; and its death pained them and yet in their writing they seem to be hastening its end, adminstering the coup de grace, and hurrying in to embalm it and memorialise it in words. Both of them sense vaguely what is going to replace this bourgeois age, and both of them, in their different ways, are brimming with fear and trembling, and with a certain secret hope: let this new thing come, but let me not see it. And similarly in modern Hebrew literature, Mendele, Berdyczewski, Bialik, Brenner, Gnessin and Agnon stand ‘on the threshold of the temple’, not entirely inside, yet not entirely outside either. A great world of faith, tradition, manners, folksongs, jokes, laws and superstitions is collapsing under its own weight (plus a battering from outside), and the Hebrew writers of the so-called ‘age of revival’ put the capstone on it in their writings, while at the same time eulogising and preserving it.

‘In the land our fathers loved all our dreams will be fulfilled’