Under This Blazing Light (6 page)

Decades after the murder of this ‘ancient priest’, the hero of Camus’s The Plague asked how one can be a saint in a world with no God. Reliable witnesses like Beilin and Arieli, and even a clever sardonic observer like Agnon, would reply quite seriously: Brenner was a saintly man in his world without God.

I may be over-cautious, but I would not call Brenner a priest or a saint. Brenner himself, if these friends of his had dared to call him ‘priest’ or ‘saint’ to his face, would certainly have responded with loud, raucous laughter, what he called ‘vulgar laughter’, or he would have lost his temper and sworn in Yiddish or even in Russian. (Brenner made frequent use of inverted commas.) Therefore I should prefer to be cautious, and say: ‘How can one be a saint in a world with no God?’ No. Much less than that. How can one not be a beast in a world with no God? And how can one remain more or less sane in a world with no God? And can one find some sort of inner peace, or repose? These questions tormented Brenner’s heroes despite all the inverted commas, and they tormented Brenner himself like a malignant growth.

(Yes, a malignant growth. We have Brenner’s own admission that he was a ‘sick writer’. He suffered, in his own words, from ‘psychopathic anger’. At this point every healthy person among you is entitled to express a faint disgust or to smile to himself with satisfaction because he is healthy, whereas this great and famous author, after whom we have named streets and buildings and a kibbutz and a literary prize, was not healthy, and indeed was always jealous of healthy people, except, perhaps, in his moments of‘psychopathic anger’, when he despised the healthy and their good health.)

But it was this Brenner, broken, twisted, sick, and so on, who somehow managed to discover eventually a secret passage or door which led straight from that mouldy cellar up to the attic, if not higher, without going through the drawing-room. He literally climbed from the cellar, avoiding the apartments of the healthy and well-fed, to the highest attainable spheres. From sickness to secret sweetness. From despair to the verge of repose. From sin to the edge of saintliness. If only we could attain to that secret sweetness, I say to you, if only we could reach that verge of repose. Just as, in Breakdown and Bereavement, Yehezkel Hefetz sticks out ‘a warm tongue in the face of cold eternity’: if only we could do the same!

And now I have promised to say something about myself and my stories, which have been honoured today with the Brenner Prize for Literature. I can best introduce this subject with a famous sentence from Brenner’s ‘From Here and There’: ‘All the bent and broken men in the world came to Palestine.’

Of course, the clever, healthy ones went to America, while those bent and broken people are, more or less, our parents. And even if among those bent and broken men there are some specimens of mighty heroes, founding fathers hewn of stone with adamantine strength, on closer inspection it is plain that even in those demigods, those heroes of the monumental age, there was something broken and bent. It is not only so in the older literature, but even in the latest Hebrew writing those bent and broken men that we know so well from Brenner’s stories are still abroad, including the type of the clumsy, careless, confused youth, the mystical visionary, the man tormented by lust and sin even though he is incapable of sinning, the amateur intellectual in search of a universal solution, and so on, and so forth. The whole unheroic rogues’ gallery which seized Hebrew literature two generations ago and more, and which has remained there ever since, pulling faces and broadcasting various old-world complaints as if nothing had changed in the meantime, the State, the army, the European basketball cup and so on. Consequently the opinion is gaining ground that Hebrew literature is either fundamentally pathetic or else controlled by gremlins.

Brenner, writing of the beginnings of the Zionist enterprise, says this: ‘A ridiculous miracle was hanging over our heads.’ And even in contemporary writing, sixty or seventy years after Brenner, indeed even in my own stories, a ridiculous miracle is still hanging over our heads.

I am speaking now about literature. I am aware that about real life there are other observations to be made, some of them more comfortable.

Perhaps I could read out the relevant passage from ‘From Here and There’ in full:

A ridiculous miracle was hanging over our heads. Not long since, there came to this distant eastern land certain men, short of stature and pale of face, who claimed that they wished to become farmers, workers, and they gave themselves the title ‘pioneers’. This was apparently very fine of them, there was something apparently heroic and strong-willed about it, it was apparently a fundamentally noble enterprise. But within? Did it have any real foundation? ... And so finally, what dreams and longings they all nurtured, each and every one of them, openly or secretly, of leaving the place ... those drooping little pioneers ...

I, too, am not unfamiliar with those drooping little pioneers. From here and there. One cannot love them without mocking them, but on the other hand it is not possible to hate them without compassion and love. At this point the question widens slightly to take in the ridiculous miracle which has taken place in this country (and in Hebrew letters) in the three or four past generations. A ridiculous miracle, but a real one nevertheless. And so, almost without noticing it, we have started to talk about me and my stories.

(First part of an address on receiving the Brenner Prize for The Hill of Evil Counsel, 1978)

A generation that has grown up in an age of pathos naturally defends itself against every kind of denunciation and indictment with barricades of insensitivity and suspicion. Many of us have a kind of blind spot of depression or hilarity about any raised voice or any platform of preachers. Our reservations and suspicion become seven times stronger when we are confronted not by any old denunciation but by an artistic chastisement that conveys an indictment or a credo in verse, in metre and with poetic imagery. Such complaints are doubly suspect: first, what right has he got to shout at us like that? And, secondly: is this art or is it just smart propaganda? Such is the suspiciousness of our age. Bialik showered us with prophetic fire and brimstone, and then his epigones arrived and got up on their soapboxes and harangued us until we got bored and even started to snigger. So the castigators lost their status, and modern poets all try to whisper their poetry with immense humility. Our suspiciousness is the result of a castigating pose, and it is also the reason for the disappearance of that pose. But my subject is not the change in literary taste; I want to emphasise the greatness and courage of a poet who has not been deterred by this change and who chooses, in this period of suspicion, to adopt the stance of a castigator. Uri Zvi Greenberg writes poems full of religious fervour and roaring chastisements, and he penetrates all the barricades of suspicion, reserve, changing taste, and arouses in us a rare form of excitement and faith. Because he is a great poet. The author of these lines owes him a debt that cannot be repaid, the debt of a reader to works that have helped to shape his mind.

These words do not detract one iota from the revulsion and disgust that are inevitably aroused by Greenberg’s poetry in anyone who cherishes humanistic values.

There is an apparent contradiction here. Is it possible to divorce Greenberg’s poetry from the mythical, dark, fiery ideals in whose name he mounts the rostrum to pronounce his denunciations? Is it possible for that white-hot monolith flashing with fanatical fury to be met halfway? Can one acknowledge aesthetic gratitude while disgustedly rejecting the ideas?

Greenberg himself would no doubt react furiously to such a distinction. He demands that we accept him, his poetry and his views all together, as a revealed commandment. ‘Prophetic fire’, not artistic magic. The poems in Rehovot hanahar (Streets of the River) and an outburst in the evening paper.

And yet...

Uri Zvi Greenberg is both a true poet and a false prophet. Let his admirers fuss as they will, and let him join in their rites as he will, when they push him from poetry to prophecy they are dragging him from greatness to ridicule.

One longs to turn away from this spectacle. Greenberg’s poems are accessible to the reading public, and all the throngs of petty-minded deaf fools that the poet himself is attached to cannot spoil a single letter of them. But maybe one should not turn away, because this kind of thing has happened before in other places and has ended very badly, when distorting propagandists have taken hold of creative writing whose roots are in myth and turned it into a drumbeat until it became an instrument of destruction in their hands and threatened people’s lives. Not only does Uri Zvi Greenberg not fear such a prospect, he seems to welcome it. In his newspaper articles, he himself appears as a kind of foolish reader of Uri Zvi Greenberg’s poems who has found nothing in them beyond heated rhetoric, and then he compares himself to one of his own admirers, and expresses some popular distortion from beyond the political barricades.

For example, sentences such as ‘without Israel, the West will lose its grip on the East’, or (talking about the politics of reprisal), ‘Tying the hands of the army and the people’s commander-in-chief only testify to the perverted inner world of their author. At the same time, thdy express in a strangely exaggerated form certain widespread attitudes. The same article (published in Ma’ariv the day before Independence Day 5722 [1962]) contains expressions that enjoy currency in Israeli political life, e.g. ‘orientation on ourselves’, a phrase that Greenberg did not invent.

What is the nature of this mentality, that chooses to call the Chief of Staff (erroneously) ‘the people’s commander-in-chief’ and to portray him as a kind of bellicose Samson whose hands have been tied by the Elders of Zion with their diaspora mentality. There seems to be an underground vein running beneath the political map of Israel and joining the admiration for the brave sabra who does not give a damn for the gentile world and itches to smite a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass, and contempt for the mentality of the Jewish diaspora, combined with an image of Israel as the agent of the West in the heart of the East, and at the same time as a hated and persecuted nation, and also a desire to breed a race of sweat and blood that will be cruel and ‘non-Jewish’ like the antisemites, not merciful and submissive like the diaspora Jews. In brief, a vision of the State of Israel as a great reprisal for our historical humiliation. According to this sentiment, the purpose of the State of Israel is not to save the Jews but to teach the non-Jews a lesson and vent our rage on them and particularly to show them how tough and warlike and cruel we too can be, and how much they ought to respect us for being as bad as they are if not more so. ‘So they know who they’re doing business with.’

The paradox is that when all the pyrotechnics are over, it transpires that the whole point of the revolutionary, self-righteous manifestation is nothing other than ‘What will the gentiles say about us?’

The cliches are all taken from the old self-pitying stock: ‘Israel are scattered lambs’, ‘a people dwelling on its own’, ‘a sheep among seventy wolves’, ‘a chosen people’, ‘a light to lighten the nations’. Faces to the past: ‘never again’. Facing towards the gentile audience: ‘not as a lamb to the slaughter’, ‘there is justice and there is a judge’. Maybe this is where ‘Canaanite’ disavowal of Judaic alienation meets Uri Zvi Greenberg-type Jewish fanaticism: we are not ‘Yids’, we are a new breed; we are real bandits, we are fierce wolves. The common denominator in this alarming meeting is the hatred of our historic past, the longing to repudiate it. For who, other than one who hates himself, can take pleasure in the vision of the State of Israel as a perpetual armed camp ready at any moment to ‘teach a lesson’ to all sorts of non-Jews? Who, other than a self-hater, would feel the need to protest endlessly that we are strong and cruel and suntanned and we work on the land and love sports and we are bold and warlike? (In other words, we are no longer studious weaklings, full of pity, pale-faced and intellectual, hating bloodshed. In other words, shame on our ancestors, the gentiles must respect us now because we are not like our ancestors, we are like those who persecuted our ancestors.)

Maybe all this needs to be treated with indulgence. There is nothing wrong with the joy that the trappings of statehood afford those who have been thirsting for them for thousands of years. There is nothing wrong in the urge to demonstrate to the world that the inferiority that has been ascribed to the Jews by the antisemites was only the result of circumstances, and not of the degeneration of an ancient people. But when the painful complex of the scars of the past drives people to delusions of grandeur, to the imitation of their persecutors down the ages, when the longing to disprove inferiority and to assert equality turns into a superiority complex, then all the slogans of health and strength are merely an expression of a serious illness. There is a fine but fateful frontier between the understandable human excitement of a Jewish man in this generation at the sight of all symbols of statehood and the sick excitement at the sound of an expression like ‘the Israeli military governor of El Arish’ (meaning, ha ha, the tables have been turned, now he, the non-Jew, will be the downtrodden ‘Yid’, and I, the Jew, will be the gentile and hit out to left and right).

‘It is not the Jews who should be afraid of what the gentiles will say,’ Uri Zvi Greenberg says, echoing Ben-Gurion, ‘but the gentiles who should be afraid of what the Jews will do.’ (How very obsequious and redolent of the diaspora this anti-diaspora attitude is, with its overriding preoccupation with the impression we make on the gentiles.)

But, as I have already said, Uri Zvi Greenberg merely expresses with hysterical openness a certain widespread, hidden attitude that cuts across party-political lines. There is a profound sympathy between Uri Zvi Greenberg’s view of Israel’s political situation - ‘When it comes to Israel, communism and imperialism are hand in hand’ (against us, naturally: after all, they are non-Jews) - and arrogant attitudes (‘Bourgiba, the freed slave’ - whereas we, of course, have been a nation of masters for a hundred generations) and ‘Cossack’-style conclusions such as ‘What we need is a national emergency government that will speak plain common sense instead of all this diaspora cleverness’.