Under This Blazing Light (5 page)

Even so, Berdyczewski, also known as ‘Yerubaal’, ‘A Distant Relation’, ‘An Accursed Hebrew’, sat in Berlin and Breslau doing a terrible thing: he described a world that was still alive and breathing (forty or thirty years before Hitler) as though it was dead and buried and as though it was his task, writing as an archaeologist, to bring it back to life from scattered potsherds. A terrible yet fascinating standpoint: erecting a monument to the living; casting a death-mask while his loved/hated ones were still alive. Although he blurred the signs in places, by giving biblical

Hebrew names to the shtetls of the Ukraine: for example my mother’s birthplace, Rovno, is renamed Mishor.

Berdyczewski’s stories are always steeped in longing for something that is always over there, far away, ‘across the river’. He was a keen collector of Hebrew folk-stories which he reworked, although not in the same way as Bialik and Ravnitzky. On the contrary, Berdyczewski tried to produce a sort of anti-Sefer Ha-Aggadah, stressing an opposing mythology that was not ‘Judaic’ but ancient Hebrew. Against the ‘pedigree’ of rabbis, heads of academies, halakhists, Hasidic masters, Berdyczewski attempted to establish a ‘Canaanite dynasty’ of accursed ones, that would shed a different light - perhaps one should say cast a shadow - on the whole history of the Jewish people. They were the rejected heroes, victims of desires, ostracised and excommunicated. He tried to break up the religious topsoil, so as to get at an earlier, wilder, more passionate and carnal stratum underneath. This he did in a generation whose other writers were all devoting themselves to denouncing the distortions of Jewish society and believed, some more than others, in the possibility of reforming the Jewish psyche. Berdyczewski declared: there is no reform, only liberation from restraints. This liberation will bring about savagery, destruction, and death: it is up to you to choose between death by suffocation and going up in flames. ‘I hate the people who persecute the divine Enlightenment and I am the enemy of our great luminaries who imposed upon us the whole system of dead laws and regulations. I am suffocating here’ (‘Mahanaim’).

In Berdyczewski’s stories there are fateful encounters between man and the Devil, between man and the mysterious laws of 
the universe, the world of spirits and demons. ‘There is a Providence’, he wrote in ‘Mahanaim’; ‘everything that happens down here is observed up there.’

Berdyczewski’s passionate pursuit of mythological darkness does not always succeed. There are quite a few stories where, while he rushed to expound the great game between God and Satan, a certain impatience manifests itself in relation to man. In ‘Between the Hammer and the Anvil’ there is a sentence that reveals the limits of his powers of narration, and yet it is a wonderful, unforgettable sentence, almost a miniature epic poem in crystal: ‘Man is the sum total of all the sin and fire pent up in his bones.’

Seven hundred and seventy-seven different definitions have been produced by philosophers and poets down the ages: man is a political animal, a rational being, a fallen god, a refinement of the ape, a restless being, a playing being. But before Berdyczewski nobody defined man as ‘the sum total of all the sin and fire pent up in his bones’. In ‘Without Her’ the hero confronts a choice: whether to be a holy monk or a sinful lecher. There is no middle way. The two extremes resemble one another, because they are both associated with burning, with ecstasy. There is no question of the third way: emasculation, brutishness, the dull routine of a sheep.

Berdyczewski may have resembled, not just externally, the hero of his story ‘Alone’: ‘A short man ... who came here to complete his education. One of those people who suffer torments before they can manage a kiss ... but polish their shoes twice a day.’

He was an autodidact, a refugee from the Jewish shadow state that still existed. He could not live in it and he could not live without it, but always and only over against it. A small man who polished his shoes twice a day and found it hard to kiss, yet who longed for madness because beyond it he spied a chance of height and depth, a short-cut to the heart of the great cosmic drama that involved the stars and winds, the desires, the cycle of nature, the great forces, bursting through the limitations of civilisation to become a beast or a god or both. He was a ghost-hunter, and that is why he was a stranger to most of the writers and the handful of Hebrew-readers of his time, most of whom were devotees of national revival and renewal, and to most Hebrew-readers of our own day too. So much for the introduction: now the discussion can begin.

A
blazing original and a faint copy (concluding remarks)

I must reply to one question that has been asked repeatedly, in at least five different versions, something that implies a veiled attack on Berdyczewski, or me, or both of us. The question is: what is his message? Or, as our dear teachers used to ask in the good old days before there were messages, ‘What was the poet trying to say?’ I hate this question, because it implies one or other of the following: either the poet is incoherent, and didn’t manage to say what he wanted to say, and we, the class and the teacher, are poised to extract something clear from his weird mutterings, or the poet is speaking in some kind of mysterious language that we have to translate into human speech (Bialik wrote ‘In the City of Slaughter’ to teach us that when you are attacked you should strike back and not just take it passively - poor man, how he wrestled and rhymed, all because he could not put together such a simple sentence ...), or else the poet is playing hide-and-seek, concealing his message under piles of difficult words, but we are going to uncover it, pale and trembling, and pin it down for ever in ten words.

Now that I have vented my anger about ‘the message’, I owe you a reply. Berdyczewski cannot be classified either as a nihilist or as a desperate writer. On the contrary, he has a certain vein of vitality. In his world there are two possible kinds of experience: there are powerful primary experiences, and there are faint, miserable, threadbare secondary experiences. Primary experiences are always associated with the removal of restraint and the release of pent-up urges: love, hatred, jealousy, friendship, destruction, burning ambition, defiance of fate. On the other hand, there are secondary experiences: making an impression, succeeding socially, knowing how to ‘get on in life’, and so forth.

Most people have an easier life perhaps because they only have secondary experiences. Yet in Berdyczewski’s stories there is a constant fascination in the rushing into the heart of the primary experiences of life - even though the price is often life itself. On the one hand, the masses, stuck in a rut, kindly sheep or greedy hedonists who regard the world as a single great udder one has to elbow one’s way to so as to imbibe the maximum of success, possessions, favours, shallow thrills. And on the other hand, a possibility of a different relationship to the world, like the relationship of the moth to the flame, even at the cost of scorching one’s wings, of being burnt, so long as what happens is real life and not just a faint copy.

(Based on a discussion with members of the Kibbutz Metsova literary groups)

(A talk about Joseph
Hayyim
Brenner)

Brenner was ostensibly a miserable Jew straight from the squalor of the ghetto. One of those bent and broken characters who, having lost God in their youth and set out in search of something else, never reached any promised land: a woman, or love, or ‘national revival’, or ‘success’, or any kind of happy ending. On the contrary, they sank from bad to worse until they died pointlessly just as they had lived pointlessly. Brenner was apparently one of those Jewish outcasts of a former generation, whom the land - every land - vomited up.

What is even worse, Brenner and his heroes had ostensibly stepped straight out of the crudest sort of antisemitic caricature: always the ghetto man, always feverish and loud, always complicated, wrestling with all sorts of physical desires with sweaty remorse, not steeped in sin and yet steeped in miserable self-recriminations, always careless, confused and clumsy and tormented by self-hatred, repulsively inquisitive, extremely ignoble, and all in all - the man of the ghetto who wanders from ghetto to ghetto and finds no redress and no way out. That is apparently all there is to Brenner or to all his heroes. Such an archetypal ghetto Jew. Such a mass of dry bones. A bundle of Jewish sorrows full of sighs and unaesthetic pains.

(Since I have mentioned Jewish sorrows I ought to add in parentheses that, despite everything, we have had and we still have some liberated Hebrew writers, who are not terribly interested in our sorrows. Who says that we all have to write about Jewish sorrows? We’ve had enough of that. We can also write about this. And about that. One can write about the pleasures of love or about the meaning of the human condition in general or about the scenery per se. But after all - how can one? So much for the parenthesis, and now back to Brenner.)

As if it were not enough that Brenner was, ostensibly, such an archetypal ghetto Jew, he was even ostensibly an antisemite. How he hated the father of Yirmiyahu Feierman, how he hated the ‘Jewish heritage’ (which he always mentions in inverted commas), he was not ashamed to scoff at the Zionists’ ‘dreams’ (also in inverted commas), he even constantly mocked himself.

Brenner ostensibly entered the ‘Zionist dream’ in the same way as a cigarette goes through a piece of paper: he almost came out on the other side as soon as he had burnt a small hole. He would have done so, had he not been murdered first by Arabs in what was almost the first organised pogrom to be perpetrated against us in Palestine. And perhaps at his death Brenner was the least amazed man in the whole of Jewish Palestine.

‘Your breathless brother’ - that is how Brenner signed himself in a letter to Hillel Zeitlin. Brenner, that breathless brother of ours, our ugly, miserable brother who wrote, ostensibly, mutilated stories about our ugliness and misery. And who ostensibly hated and despised us and our bloated rhetoric. Yet he himself penned hundreds of fevered pages simply to tell us that it was better for us all to say nothing. And for this paradox he hated us, and also himself.

But, I say to you, all this is only ostensibly true. That is to say, it is true, and yet it is not true.

But here we come to something so subtle that it can hardly be put into words. Perhaps we can try to make it plainer by means of a small illustration. Let us imagine that the charges against Brenner could be drawn up in legal form:

1 The accused is tormented by hatred of his own origins.

2 Moreover, he is a desperate man.

3 Moreover, he mocks at his own words, hates himself, and hates those who are like him.

4 Nevertheless, in some obscure way he is also proud to the point of arrogance.

5 Moreover, he loathes ugliness, yet shows surprising compassion for ugly people.

6 He is a strange man, who exaggerates almost everything.

7 He is also hysterical.

Plainly these items do not necessarily mount up so as to aggravate the indictment, but rather they seem to mitigate or extenuate each other. Or at least they complicate the indictment enormously.

No. I have not managed to explain myself by means of this illustration. Let me try again, and say, with only slight exaggeration: with enemies like Brenner, who needs friends? Or again, with my own private exaggeration, to which I would not like to commit Brenner or any of his admirers, let me say this: happy is the people which can produce an enemy like Brenner.

Brenner’s hatred is a molten mass of passionate love infused with loathing and suffering and savagery and compassion and inner forgiveness and mockery - mockery even of the forgiveness itself - and endless inquisitiveness and despair and something else, something marvellous which I cannot name and which Brenner himself was unable to name, and that is what lies beyond despair.

Aaron Zeitlin calls Brenner ‘A serious soul full of truth’. And he also says, ‘He was at once broken and whole.’

Asher Beilin in his memoirs describes Brenner in the period when he was editing Hameorer, Brenner in London, in the Whitechapel ghetto, at a time when it seemed as though the end had come. The hopes of a Jewish revival were fading. Zionism was dying. Hebrew literature was the peculiar preserve of a few hundred eccentrics scattered in eight or nine countries, and even they were growing tired. Brenner spoke and wrote at that time as though he were the ‘last of the last’. As if it was only an obscure quality of ‘sick’, masochistic obstinacy, a kind of inner compulsion, which forced him to write and print and edit and bind and distribute and put in the post to the scattered remnants of those eccentrics his beloved Hameorer. Beilin writes as follows:

‘One evening, I saw him in Whitechapel bent under the weight of a heavy sack. His face was grim and he could hardly drag his feet along ... He was on his way to the post office. The sack contained copies of Hameorer. I had the impression that he was bearing on his shoulders the burden of all our miseries and woes ... I followed this great brother of ours with my eyes, until he was swallowed up in the crowd. Whitechapel, for all its filth, was holy ground at that moment, as his feet trod it...’

It is worth recalling that the ‘great brother’ described here was at that time aged twenty-five or twenty-six.

The writer J. L. Arieli-Orloff says: ‘As he loved children ... so he hated, in life and literature, everything that seemed at all posed or false. And that gloomy man certainly knew how to hate. To conceal any falsehood from his penetrating eye was impossible. Literary lies or public malice enraged him ... Upon everything which he thought or wrote was imprinted the stamp of the weighty responsibility of an ancient priest, the guardian of the sacred flame ...’