Just As I Thought (26 page)

And so the central dialogues of the book are created. The Law of Moses and the prophets’ dreams are set in opposition to the laws and strictures of the priests. Still we may wonder, the book wonders—was it the moral law or was it the priests’ laws that gathered the Jews up into a net, a net that kept most of them from falling into Rome, Christianity? There were knots whichever way they turned. During the hundreds of years of European Jew hatred, that net must have seemed to be the very fabric of God’s love. The people turned inward, turned their backs to the oppressor, and became fistfuls of men and women in a great dispersion, a people who for almost two millennia created communities that did not engage in aggressive war.

I said dialogues. And there
are
dialogues. This is a very Jewish, constantly talking work. It believes that what happens inside a person’s head is dialogue, not stream of consciousness or third-person reporting. Free association is just right for psychology, but these Jews are made of history and they talk in long, hard sentences, especially to themselves. They
are
the tradition of argument and discussion learned in yeshivas and shuls. In the midst of ritual obedience they somehow keep the adversarial conversation going with themselves, each other, or with the God who has always been pressed to answer questions, to be responsive. What
were
the final plans for Sodom? Should Israel or should Israel not have a king? The prophets themselves often felt unequal to their moral tasks, which occasionally included too much traveling. Why me? asked Jonah, and went in the opposite direction.

But somewhere in Jewish consciousness, sour and sad, is God’s recorded answer to Moses. After so much work and talk on the mountain, Moses longed only to see His face at least once. The answer: “No man shall see me and live.” But finally God gives in a little (as usual). He offers “… while my glory passes by … thou shalt see my back parts but my face shall not be seen.” Thinking of that small impoverished congregation in
Coat upon a Stick,
I remembered that passage. Of course He may have said to Himself, “This is probably not the first Jewish joke, but it’s a good one and should last this disobedient, argumentative people a couple of thousand years at least.”

Coat upon a Stick
seems to happen on the famous Lower East Side, where once-dense populations of immigrants ate, slept, peddled, worked in small shops, picketed bosses, organized unions, made poems for newspapers. A world, in other words. That population has disappeared into the suburbs, the massive tenements of the Upper West Side. The community is abandoned. Here and there blacks poorer than those remnants of Jews appear, house cleaners of slums or customers in the pathetic Jewish shops.

But where are the women in this book? A couple of landladies, a grumpy wife. There are no women in the synagogue’s balcony, no old wives behind the mechitsa. The patriarchal law of the synagogue, the separation of the sexes, has turned to iron. Finally no women come at all, to the daily stitching and restitching of the law.

Also, where is Germany? The putrefaction of the Holocaust which has touched our Western bodies, slaughter and slaughtered. Where is its taint? This book was written in the earliest sixties. The Holocaust, it’s true, had not yet become that last call by aging survivors whose stories their children manage to tear from them even when they don’t can’t won’t talk. Tell us, tell us, the young beg. What was it like to be a Jew in those days in that place? Tell us before you die so we, the third and fourth generations, can be Jews again. The work of research and publication was not yet complete. Perhaps it—the word “Holocaust”—had not yet become its own definition. Still, Carl, the son, is a TV repairman, a job that was born in the post–World War II world, and he travels to his father’s decimated community from the working-class suburbs of Queens.

The absence of the Holocaust, like the absence of women, works to throw the shul and its congregation up up into the timeless air where true magic happens. True magic is always direct, which reminds me of the way in which Fruchter brings the figures of the old man’s past to haunt him. “Haunt” is probably the wrong word, for they come not as dreams out of mist but by true magic. As a meaty rabbit leaps out of a real hat, the wife of the cheated friend (both long dead) visits, sits at his table, drinks tea, jumps youthfully to his kitchen counter, and refuses to leave until he screams, Go! Go! These scenes, together with the long internal conversations, give the book a certain rudeness, a forthright clarity.

Near the end, the old man visits Zitomer and his talking friends in their converted storefront. They, too, are old Jews—union organizers, Communists, bringing unfortunate memory of worker betrayal to the old man. They are no doubt prophets, too, who play chess and offer one another little illuminations of truth and utopian prophecies.

But somehow the old man wants to know: Has he been a good Jew? How
is
one to be a good Jew, a good person? Surely one can be both at the same time. The argument between the prophets and the priests isn’t resolved. For those of us who came after or out of the generation that accepted the Enlightenment, who want to remain Jews in the Diaspora, it’s important to know that these questions are still asked—probably more now than when Fruchter’s book was written.

I last saw Norman Fruchter at a meeting of Brooklyn Parents for Peace, called to inform neighbors of the dangers of allowing nuclear naval carriers into New York Harbor. He came late because he’s a member of the local school board.

The first time I met Norman Fruchter we were in North Vietnam. It was ’69. We were traveling the length of North Vietnam on a dirt road called National Highway 1. He, with a couple of others, was making a film about this journey, the lives of the Vietnamese people and the life of the devastated earth under American bombing. This is what impressed me: brains, anger, wit, kindness.

This extraordinary book had already been written, though I didn’t know it at the time. If I
had
read it, I would have seen Fruchter more clearly—a kind of American-born Zitomer, a Jew that is, who, by definition, had a traditional obligation to be one of the creators of a just world.

The amazing final fact is that, having read
Coat upon a Stick
twice, I find myself talking to it. And every now and then, because it is a work that cannot do without dialogue, it answers me.

—1987

Language: On Clarice Lispector

Clarice Lispector spent the first two months of her life in the town of Chechelnik in Ukraine. This is a small, short fact. The interesting question, unanswered in the places I’ve looked for it, is: At what age did she enter the Portuguese language? And how much Russian did she bring with her? Any Yiddish? Sometimes I think this is what her work is about … one language trying to make itself at home in another. Sometimes there’s hospitality, sometimes a quarrel.

Why did they go to Brazil, anyway? an American immigrant Jew provincially asks. Well, a South African cousin answers, since Jews are often not wanted in their old homes, they travel to distant, newer, more innocent places. My mother’s best friend emigrated to Argentina. There was a letter from Buenos Aires once. But not again.

Unless Clarice Lispector’s parents were linguists with an early knowledge of Portuguese, they must have spoken Russian, as my parents did most of my childhood. It must have been that meeting of Russian and Portuguese that produced the tone, rhythms that even in translation (probably difficult) are so surprising and right.

It’s not unusual for writers to be the children of foreigners. There’s something about the two languages engaging one another in the child’s ears that makes her want to write things down. She will want to say sentences over and over again, probably in the host or dominant tongue. There will also be a certain amount of syntactical confusion which, if not driven out of her head by heavy schooling, will free the writer to stand a sentence on its chauvinistic national head when necessary. She will then smile. There are not so many smiles in Lispector’s work, but they happen in the sudden illumination of a risky sentence. You feel that even the characters are glad.

Once you have stood a sentence on its head or elbow, the people who live in those sentences seem to become states of literary mind—they seem almost absurd, but not in a cold or mean way. (There isn’t a mean bone in the body of Lispector’s work.) But there is sadness, aloneness (which is a little different than loneliness). Some of the characters try desperately to get out of the stories. Others retreat into their own fictions—seem to be waiting and relieved by Lispector’s last embracing sentence.

Lispector was lucky to have begun to think about all these lives (men’s lives as well as women’s) in the early years of the women’s movement, that is, at a time when she found herself working among the scrabbly low tides of that movement in the ignorance which is often essential to later understanding. That historical fact is what has kept her language crooked and clean.

In this collection there are many solitary middle-class Brazilian women, urban, heavily European. There are a couple of black cooks, nannies. I thought at one point in my reading that there was some longing for Europe, the Old World, but decided I was wrong. It was simply longing.

It seems important to say something about geography. First Lispector’s. She lived for an infant’s moment in Russia. Then in Brazil in Recife, then in Rio de Janeiro; then with her diplomat husband in Europe and the United States; then her last eighteen years in Brazil.

Brazil is a huge country. Its population is African black, Indian brown and golden, European white. There are landless peasants. There are the Indian people, whole villages and tribes driven out of their forest homes by development. There is the vast ancient forest which, breathing, produces so great a percentage of the world’s oxygen, which, breathing, we absolutely require. There is the destruction of that forest continuing at such a rate that a sensible breathing world might be terrified. Imagine living in, being a citizen of, a country in which the world’s air is made. Imagine the woman, the urban woman, writing not about that world but in it. She had to find a new way to tell. Luckily it was at the tip of her foreign tongue.

—1989

Isaac Babel

When I read Antonina Nikolaevna Pirozhkova’s memoir of daily life with Isaac Babel I realized that I’d known very little about him. Only his death was famous. And of course until fairly recently most of us had that wrong, too. But I did know his work, though not until the early sixties, when the Meridian edition first appeared.

One must begin by telling those who still don’t know those stories that they are unusual in a particular way. That is, any one of them, those in
Red Cavalry
and
Tales of Odessa,
as well as those extracted only in the last few years from bureaus and closets of old Russian friends, can be read again and again. I don’t mean every five or ten years. I mean in one evening a story you read just six months ago can be read a couple of times—and not because the story is a difficult one. There’s so much plain nutrition in it, the absolute accuracy and astonishment in the language, the breadth of the body and the height of the soul. You
do
feel yourself healthier, spiritually speaking, if also sadder—or happier, depending on the story.

Where did those sentences, that language, come from? Babel’s head in childhood was buried in Hebrew, in talmudic studies. His adolescent head was European, full of French. Russian was an everyday matter, clear and crisp, the vowels in an armor of consonants. His grandmother spoke Ukrainian. When he was ten he came to Odessa. It was like every tough city, full of smart talkers; you could listen to that city all day and begin again the next. Some kind of lucky composting had begun.

It was in Odessa, on his way to becoming a real Russian, that the story “Awakening” was made. He was supposed to be taking violin lessons, which would help him become a man like Jascha Heifetz. He would then play for the Queen of England. Somehow he began to never reach his music school but wandered, walking in Odessa, down to the docks. He found, or was found by, a good man, the kind who appears in a child’s wandering time to say, “Go this way, not that!”—forcefully. He taught the boy the names of flowers and asked, “Well, what is it you lack? A feeling for nature. What’s that tree?” The boy didn’t know. “That bird? That bush?” Then he said, “And you dare to call yourself a writer?” (The boy had been daring.) He would never be a writer, a
Russian
writer, without knowing the natural world. “What were your parents thinking of?” But those days were also among his first meetings with the “others”—the wild free Russian boys, diving, swimming, clambering on the boats, the ships in Odessa harbor. He is finally taught to swim. At last he can join them.

Years later, still longing, like most young Jewish revolutionaries (like my own parents) to become a real Russian, he has a harder time with the “others.” The Revolution has happened. The civil war is unending. Liutov (the name he gives the narrator of the Red Cavalry stories) is assigned to the Cossacks of Savitsky’s VI Division. He is billeted with half a dozen other Cossacks who look at the “specs” (eyeglasses) on his nose, are disgusted, and want to look no further. The quartermaster who has delivered him says, “Nuisance with specs … but you go and mess up a lady, and a good lady too, and you’ll have the boys patting you on the back.” There are no women around but the landlady. He’s hungry. He sees the goose, takes hold of it, places his heavy boot on its neck, cracks its head, presents it to the landlady. “Cook it!” “Hey you,” one of the Cossacks calls out almost immediately, “sit down and feed with us.” He’s asked to read them the news. Out of
Pravda
he proudly reads Lenin’s speech and is happy to “spy out the secret curve of Lenin’s straight line.” They slept then, all with their legs intermingled. “In my dreams I saw women. But my heart, stained with bloodshed, grated and brimmed over.”