Review
Aharon Appelfeld: The Age of Wonders. Boston: David R. Godine, 1982.
Cynthia Ozick: Levitation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.
Published in Chronicles of Culture, December 1982.
Republished with permission.
If God created the heavens and the earth out of nothing; if He is a holy God, separate from His creation; if one part of his creation, mankind, receives the gift of free will and exercises it by disobeying His commands; if as punishment for this rebellion against His regime, He causes mankind to speak multiple languages, thus dividing them from one another; if He chooses one of those peoples as His own, the ones He marks out as citizens of His new regime; then the divisions between God and not-God, and between the godly and the ungodly, must persist, troublingly. Jews (the very name bespeaks separation of one part of the Israelites from another) don’t `fit in.’ Their God does not want them to. Through the centuries, many have hated them for it.
These books suggest that something more than custom or prejudice separates Jews from the rest of us. Jews struggle with Gentiles, with God, with themselves, but the struggle that scars them deepest here started in Eden: the struggle with nature. Nature in it simplest aspects–brutal and seductive, stubborn and malleable–ceaselessly provokes their fascinated distrust.
Aharon Appelfeld lives in Israel and writes his novels in Hebrew; neither his country nor his language fits into the world. He has learned some of his techniques from this century’s virtuoso of fascinated distrust, Franz Kafka. But unlike the writer he depicts in The Age of Wonders, Appelfeld is no simple Kafka devotee; he uses what he’s learned for a purpose. He has discovered that the Kafkaesque captures childhood, when people come and go, including yourself, and you know something of what’s going on but not enough, so you guess part of it and imagine the rest.
The writer here is the father of the book’s narrator. Father’s devotion to art, particularly Kafka’s art, substitutes for his ancestors’ devotion to Judaism. His esthete’s humanism find its echo in liberal politics; “very close to Stefan Zweig” and, like him, an Austrian Jew, Father shares Zweig’s horror of violence, fondness for political and cultural internationalism. `Assimilated’ as he can be, Father curses Jews and Judaism with the `30s intellectual’s blackest word, “petit-bourgeois.”
Like childhood, the 1930s was an age of wonders. Metamorphoses proliferated, as life imitated Kafka. The narrator’s teenaged aunt suffers a nervous breakdown, converts to Christianity, and dies, inspiring Father’s praise of her “true religious feeling.” A lifelong friend of the family, a sculptor, offspring of a mixed marriage, converts to Judaism, sending Father into a drunken rage against the `loss’ of a fine artist. (“Your father, Austrian by birth, left you land, health, hands fit to carve stone, and you want to exchange this health, this freedom, for an old, sick faith. Take pity on your freedom, take pity on your body, which never ad to suffer a senseless mutilation.”)
More metamorphoses occur. A critics attacks Father’s writings because they concern Jews, albeit secularized ones, “parasites living off the health Austrian tradition.” The critics is Jewish, and Father, after months of living-room fulminations, quietly agrees with the riposte. A young peasant woman arrives from Father’s native village; her presence in the household causes Father and his friends to go on a series of binges. The family adopt an orphan who stays with them until the end, perhaps because he had lost something in our house, that animal vitality that makes men brave.” Mother responds to their increasing social ostracism with “a strange self-denying piety… as if she were purposely imposing hardships on herself.”
Sickness and health, decadence and freedom, fear and bravery and guilt: it is the language of fashionable Nietzscheism. Nietzsche despised the despisers of Jews, but he detested the Christianity that emerged from Judaism and, he said, from Platonism. Christianity, Judaism, and Platonism set inhibiting ghosts above life. Only nature and art, merged into `creativity,’ yield strength. “`I deny,’ thundered Father, `the Judaism others attribute to me.'” In the end that won’t do him any good.
Father, too, metamorphoses. He begins as an `Austrian’ writer “drunk with success,” a novelist, playwright, essayist, and editor of the journal of the Jewish-Christian League. He ends as a pariah who leaves his family for Vienna, hoping to co-found, with a sympathetic baroness, a liberal salon aimed at saving Austria from anti-Semitism. By now it is 1939.
Almost all of Appelfeld’s self-denying Jews hunger for nature but fail either to conquer it or to blend into it. They lust after approval from Austrian men and favors from peasant girls. They drink, lurching after Nietzsche’s Dionysus. They fool no one. An Austrian intellectual confides to Father that he “can always tell a Jew because `the Jew’ looks anxious, while `the Austrian’ “never blames himself or anyone else.” In the end, as the Jews are collected in the town synagogue, awaiting the arrival of the cattle train to the camps, businessmen snarl about “decadent artists,” Mother cries, “Shopkeepers!” and everyone blames the rabbi–who, indeed, called them there without saying why.
In the novel’s second part, it is 1965. Bruno, the narrator, returns to his native town from Jerusalem. “For Bruno, everything held a baffling, wondering question.” His father’s life is “the disgrace he had not dared to touch, seething silently all these years like pus inside a wound.” Even in death, Father and sickness go together, and Bruno searches, if not for the cause of that sickness, perhaps for its meaning.
Meaning doesn’t come cheaply for Appelfeld’s characters. An uprooted Japanese student tries unsuccessfully to engage Bruno in a conversation on the subject of life’s meaning. A part-Jewish nightclub singer wonders if there is any place on earth or her; a hack would have Bruno exalt her with a vision of Jerusalem–Appelfeld spares us that.
Instead, we hear of the town, which hasn’t changed, and the people, who have. The Jews are gone, and the people who remain partake of the combined perpetuation and metamorphosis nature imposes. A promiscuous housemaid who had lived with Bruno’s family has stayed, but she has gone to obesity; “of Louise nothing remained and all that sat before him was an old Austrian woman.” Some Jews who had metamorphosed themselves into Christians also survive. Bruno remembers many members of one such family who had the courage to go to the synagogue on that last day; only they, “their strange integrity intact, had chosen death with their eyes open.” “The rest had coveted life, and they had been absorbed by it.”
Life has not entirely absorbed some ex-Jews. In 1939, a Jew named Brum married his housemaid and metamorphosed himself into an imitation Austrian. “H grew taller, his shoulders filled out, and a luxuriant moustache appeared on his face; he sat with his new wife in the cellar of the White Horse drinking beer.” The Jew-haters left him alone. Yet when Bruno finds him, Brum complains about his ex-wife, “a whore.” Woman-as-betrayer: the would-be Austrian relives a story as old as the Book of Genesis.
Whatever they try, Appelfeld’s Jews never quite get inside life, nature. Thinking of the unchanged buildings and trees of this town, Bruno sees that objects survive longer” than people. “They are passive. Otherwise how could they withstand such changes? Could it be said, perhaps, that they lack sensitivity?” Non-Jews, at home with nature, imitate its indifference. They change little, but that change usually amounts to slow degeneration, like natural law of inertia. Austrians, who supposedly never blame themselves or anyone else, gradually started to blame the Jews for everything; decades later, they cannot really face a Jew who returns. Their indifference, itself an imitation of nature’s indifference, is imperfect. They too are sons of Adam.
Irremediably conscious or `sensitive,’ Jews face life with anxiety, but they face death with open eyes. Nietzsche condemns those who exhort men to learn how to die. He commands men to live. Nonetheless, we must notice that the one person in Appelfield’s book who does not change is the one closest to death, Bruno’s step-grandmother Amalia, an observant Jew whose words had a “certainty… forged with steel.” “There was power in her voice: next to her we felt small.” The narrator’s embarrassed parents put her into a sanatorium. Nietzsche’s life ended in a sanatorium, after life had metamorphosed him not into his chosen `Superman’ but into a catatonic–a perfectly indifferent natural object.
Throughout the novel, green is the color Appelfeld associates with nature. Bruno recalls the green light in his wife’s eyes after they quarreled, but he also remembers the violet light in them that he loves. What is that light. If it is sensitivity, sensitivity for what? Ultimately, for God and the God-breathed spirit inside the natural man? After old Brum “hisse[s],” serpent-like, that his hatred for Jews “knows no bounds,” Bruno punches him in the face. The impact of that blow may strike the reader as the divinely-moved punishment of a traitor by a citizen who remains loyal.
Appelfeld’s measured, delicately-shaded style is thoroughly European. Cynthia Ozick’s “five fictions” contain narrative, allegory, history, myth, fantasy, criticism. Exuberant mixing goes well with contemporary America although, notwithstanding this, Jews don’t quite fit in here, either–although here, at least, difference brings down no slaughter. In Appelfeld’s world, sadness overshadows comedy; the death camps beckon. In Ozick’s America, Jews can afford to laugh.
Still, fire burns upward in America as it does in Europe. Nature remains intractably natural, as Ozick’s Jews (and some of her non-Jews) learn. The title story presents the theme.
A husband and wife, novelists, he Jewish and she a convert from Protestantism, throw an unsuccessful literary party (“My God,” he gasps, revealing a kind of religiosity, “do you realize no one came?”). The ambition to host a party to attract “luminaries” (Howe, Sontag, Kazin, Fiedler, Podhoretz, Hardwick–invited, obviously, for the glow of their fame, not for congeniality) mirrors the couple’s obsession: “they were absorbed by power,” Ozick’s narrator tells us, “and were powerless.” They feel “counterfeit pity” for the characters they imagine and, one suspects for the people they encounter. They reserve genuine pity for themselves–he, as a Jew, she, as a woman.
Confronted by failure of their modest power-venture, they return to the surer territory of being victims. For the husband, this means speaking to his guests of “certain historical atrocities” committed by non-Jews against Jews, culminating in the Holocaust. For the wife, it means listening to these stories and seeing her isolation: “It seemed to her that the room was levitating…. She felt herself at the bottom, below the floorboards while the room floated upward carrying Jews” elevated by “the glory of their martyrdom.” She has another vision, a vision of “the goddess.” Giving every evidence of having read Robert Graves, she regards the Madonna, Venus, Aphrodite, and Astarte as successive incarnations of “eternal” nature, of nature’s fertility, eros, and solidity. “Lucy sees how she has abandoned nature, how she has lost true religion on account of the God of the Jews,” who inspires “morbid cud-chewing,” talk of “Death and death and death.”
One need not take Lucy-the-female-Lucifer’s conclusions too seriously. (She resembles a lapsed Catholic more than a lost Protestant, anyway). Ozick has presented comically the same contrast Appelfeld presents sadly. Jews levitate, non-Jews luxuriate (or wallow, depending on their upbringing). the nature that seems to satisfy much of humanity most of the time cannot satisfy Jews.
Ozick explores this in each of her fictions. In “From a Refugee’s Notebook,” we read an essay on Freud, who “lust[ed] to become a god absolute as stone” by imposing his psychoanalytic paradigm on nature. As Moses invented the Sabbath, that interruption of nature, Freud invented “a Sabbath of the Soul,” a rationalistic attempt to capture, to conquer, the irrational. The essayist sees the problem: this conquest, attempted by rational means, owes its origin to a fascination with the irrational; “it may be that the quarry is all the time the pursuer.”
The same “Notebook” also contains an account of life on the planet Acirema, an America turned inside-out by feminism, where “the more sophisticated females” attempt to conquer nature by a novel means of birth control. It doesn’t always work, and the women learn that the resultant children, raised communally in this “community of philosophers,” interfere with adult “self-development.” Children, the future, are discovered to be regrettably “anti-progressive.” Although undeniably “central to the community,” “morally and philosophically, they had no right to exist.” Acirema’s civilization, such as it is, gradually crumbles under the weight of this contradiction, as the neglected children, the only ones who reproduce prolifically, take over.
Nature teaches its most painstaking, and pain-giving, lesson to Ruth Puttermesser, a liberal Jewish lawyer who appears in a short story and a novella. We meet her at age 34, leaving a Wall Street firm to work in city government, and “looking to solve something, she did not know what.” She has a sensible, private vision Paradise, consisting of a tree to sit under (shade of the Book of Micah, perhaps) and an inexhaustible supply of books and chocolate; “if she still does not know what it is she wants to solve, she has only to read on.” She also imagines an uncle who tutors her in Hebrew; “America is a blank, and Uncle Zindel is all her ancestry.”
In the novella, twelve year in the City Hall bureaucracy have induced her to envision a more grandiose Paradise. (One imagines this must have been during the Lindsay Administration). Demoted, then fired during a political shakeup, she dreams of making a golem–a humanoid shaped from clay and brought to life, in mankind’s parody of its own creation by the hands of God–knowing that learned Jews have occasionally resorted to golem-making in times of danger. Her golem, a female, wants to be called Xanthippe, on the grounds that Socrates’ wife criticized even Socrates, the arch-critic who built a Paradise in words, re-forming the corrupt Athens of actuality. (To be a critic, one should note, is not unprecedented among literary golems. I once heard the great scholar Hugh Kenner describe Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein monster as “the first Romantic critic.” Kenner may have been remembering that the monster, a decidedly goyish golem, forms his taste on Plutarch’s Lives Goethe’s sorrows, and Milton’s Paradise Lost.)
Puttermesser’s golem rids the city of corrupt politicians by installing her maker as mayor. Mayor Puttermesser fulfills the liberal reformer’s dream, replacing the pols and incompetents with idealists. The dreamers finally have power, and New York becomes “a rational daylight place,” orderly and pleasant–Plato’s republic conceived by John Gardner. But nature, driven out by the golem, stubbornly return. The golem lusts after Puttermesser’s former lover; eros “enter[s] Gracie Mansion,” a decidedly ungraceful thing for it to do. The golem tells Puttermesser, “I want a life of my own. My blood is hot.” What the golem did, the golem undoes, and in the end Puttermesser understands that “Too much Paradise is greed. Eden disintegrates from too much Eden. Eden sinks from a surfeit of itself.” She has learned what Ozick’s photographer learns in the book’s most intriguing story, “Shots.” A photographer can save truth by arresting its attacker time. But, possessing truth, she cannot become truth. She remains outside of it, taking pictures. That goes for writers, dreamers, and politicians, too. It puts a limit on any wayward ambitions of self-deification. As for Ozick herself, she aspires someday “to drill through the `post-modern’ and come out on the other side, alive and saved and wise as George Eliot.” With Eliot and Appelfeld, she already understands the separation of Creator from creation and some of the limits that hierarchy imposes.
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