Synonyms are both logical fallacies—no two words can be identical—and artistically useful (expedient, practical); synonymic poetics furthers that paradox into history, or histories. Which is to say that though the genres of tragedy and comedy transcend borders, races, and creeds, specific tragedies and comedies do not. The event one people celebrate with a victorious ode another people commemorate with an elegy of defeat.

Poetry that’s old enough, that has justified its age, tends to be credited to that greatest of versifiers, “Anonymous.” Let’s summon that God, for a moment, to bless the following scraps, translated into the neutrality of English:

How will you fill your cup
On the day of liberation? and with what?
Are you prepared, in your joy, to endure
The dark howling heard
From skulls of days glittering
In a bottomless pit?

And:

We survived much death. We defeated forgetfulness and you said to me: We survive, but do not triumph. I said to you: Survival is the prey’s potential triumph over the hunter. Steadfastness is survival and survival is the beginning of existence. We persevered and much blood flowed on the coasts and in the deserts. Much more blood than what the name needed for its identity, or what identity needed for its name.

The first fragment is a stanza from How? written in 1943 in the Vilna Ghetto by the Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever. The second is from In the Presence of Absence, one of the last collections of stray sentences in paragraphs by Mahmoud Darwish, perhaps the foremost Palestinian poet of last century (published in Arabic in 2006, and this month by Archipelago Books, in a translation by Sinan Antoon).

That these two texts spring from a shared poetics can be denied only by those who read prejudicially, who judge books by covers of their own creation: When you oppress a people, when you beat and rape and kill them, the literature they write will inevitably resemble the literatures of other peoples who’ve been beaten, raped, and murdered (unless you’ve stumbled upon a happy tribe of masochists). But this shock must be admitted: The same poetics has sadly marked the literatures of Jews—not just Israelis—and Palestinians, in the same century—a poetics that fled Europe and hid, until it found another shelter.

***

Al-Birwa was a tiny olive, grain, and watermelon village in Western Galilee, Mandate Palestine. Darwish was born there to a Sunni Muslim family in March 1941, the same month and year the Nazis’ extermination camps became fully operational. In 1948, with war ended, war began: Darwish’s family was forced from their orchards by the nascent IDF’s Carmeli Brigade; they fled to Lebanon, to Jezzine and Damour. Later, they illegally returned to Israel—insofar as one can return to a different country—settling in Deir al-Asad, which had been renamed, in Hebrew, Shagur. (Darwish spoke fluent Hebrew.)

In 1970, Darwish, then a communist, briefly attended university in Moscow before migrating to Egypt and then to Lebanon again. There he joined the PLO, for which he coauthored the Algiers Declaration. When the PLO was expelled from Lebanon, Darwish went to Cyprus. Stints followed in Tunis and Paris. For his work in the PLO, the poet was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize, originally the Stalin Peace Prize, which he accepted as idealistically as he’d later reject the Oslo Accords (which occasioned his break with Yasser Arafat).

It was Oslo, however, in its slight easing of restrictions in the Occupied Territories, that gave Darwish a temporary reprieve: In 1996, now a poet with an international reputation and a major cardiac condition, he finally received Israeli permission to settle in Ramallah. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, major infarcts had led to major surgeries. Though his literary heart was strong, his literal heart was weak—so went the global obituaries. In August 2008, while undergoing treatment at a hospital in Houston, he died. He’s buried in Ramallah, atop a hill called Al-Rabweh, “the hill of green grass”—a small snatch of his childhood Galilee transported to the dusty West Bank.

So do not reconcile with anything except for this obscure reason. Do not regret a war that ripened you just as August ripens pomegranates on the slopes of stolen mountains. For there is no other hell waiting for you. What once was yours is now against you.

And:

I am already quite scarce. For years
appearing only here and there
at the edges of jungle. My awkward body,
camouflaged by reeds, clings
to the damp shadow around it.
Had I been civilized,
I would never have been able to withstand.
I am tired. Only the great fires
still drive me from hiding to hiding.

Let’s avoid turning this survey into an exercise in perversity, a childish game: I’ve chosen to quote Darwish in his prose-poems, and the others, the original Others, enjambed. The man “already quite scarce” is the Israeli poet Dan Pagis. The source for the excerpt above is a poem called The Last Ones. The initial circumstance is the language, then the name and title, and only then, the poem. Bad poetry wants for forewords, good poetry, for afterwords, whereas Pagis’ poetry, like Darwish’s, needs a more encompassing apparatus—it necessitates experience.

Continue reading: A political coup

It’s a telling textualization of Judaism that it’s not a sacrifice or magical act but the embalmed formality of Yizkor—“May God remember the soul of my father/mother, who has gone on to his/her reward”—that has become the primary communication between a living person and his or her deceased. Talmud tells us that the soul, though eternal, is subject to conditions that can be bettered—death cannot be worsened—through two responsibilities undertaken by a surviving heir: charity and righteous deeds. Yizkor enacts one—prayer as deed—while promising the other: “I shall give charity on my father’s/mother’s behalf.”

Zealous in our memory, we should be equally zealous with regard to our memorious technologies. By which I mean we mourners assembled to pronounce this rare prayer should be more charitable toward the fate of the book from which we read it (the word for that book is Mahzor, meaning “cycle”). The quasicyclical scroll was cut for the supersessionary codex, or book, whose materials have been sliced free, into omnimateriality, for screens (whose ancestor, the parochet or “veil,” screened the offerings of Judaism’s first worship). For modern Judaism, however, the codex—which began mass production in the late 1400s, the period of Europe’s most extensive Jewish expulsions—must be the terminant technology, unless electronic tablets, on which all information is egalitarianly accessible and divinely transitive, are to be raised above the congregation.

Keeping faith with the consolations of cycles, of recurrence (Mahzor’s root is chzr, meaning “return”), is the last ritual practice of a Judaism that has abandoned the Sabbath and dietary strictures, God and afterlife, etc. Such a belief, solely in the regulating merit of belief, is embodied not only in the Jewish books—read septennially, annually, monthly, weekly, daily—but also in books in general, if they are read not as commodities, rather as enduring resources (that timeless calendar, the canon).

Only last week, avoiding shul for Rosh Hashanah, I reread Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, Buber’s letters, read the Internet. What did I find? The Death of Books! The End of Books! Today—if you read what is written today—all books seem to be “memory books” (“yizkor buch,” which is Yiddish, indicates a volume memorializing the dead of a particular shtetl or region ravaged by the Holocaust, e.g., the Sefer Marmarosh, which catalogs the names of my cousins in an area including Hungary, Romania, and Ukraine, or the Sárospatak Book, which lists the names of closer relatives from Hungary).

Remembrance, at every instance, threatens an ultimate recursion: We remember so regularly until we’re only remembering we’re remembering. It’s not just the Internet. Recent print media seem to consist entirely of pieties about the death of print media and the inevitable ascension of the digital. Just as our prayerbooks seem to consist entirely of prayers that—though they’re said to be, should be, dedicated to saving our and our relations’ souls—spend the preponderance of their sentences and stanzas mortifying man and praising God. Unwilling to praise or mortify, incapable of salvation, following Rosh Hashanah I wrote the following Yizkor for bookery. Epigraphs as epitaphs, they comprise a page to print and slip between the relevant pages of your Mahzor—for when memory becomes too painful because too rote, or too remote from Yizkor’s words (just as all contemporary words have become too remote from their inscribing).

***

May there never come a future in which a secret can be hidden in a book.

May there never come a future when a child will have to search for what a book is on the computer. For what a book was.

Once books go and with them, covers, may we still find meaning in the words binding and bound.

May we still find comfort in the margin.

Consider the archaic English: boke. As in Chaucer, at the conclusion of Canterbury Tales, disavowing “the boke of Troilus, the boke also of Fame, the boke of the five and twenty Ladies, the boke of the Duchesse, the boke of Seint Valentines day of the Parlement of briddes.” It’s like book, only in past tense.

Blessed is the page, for it is more fraught than the screen. Reading a page, you always know there’s a page you’re not reading just on the other side.

Blessed are the bookmarks: (personal) envelopes, pencils and pens, an ermine’s baculum, my father’s/mother’s expired driver’s license, a scrap of a dead neighbor’s ex libris on which I scribbled the word bibliothanatos, (historical) Mao had bookmarks produced featuring his sayings, “Be serious, be active,” bamboo bookmarks from Nepal, cornhusks from Czechoslovakia, American bookmarks manufactured as advertisements for Heinz in the warty shapes of pickles. Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) first popularized bookmarks. The term now characterizes a computer function that holds a webpage detailing the life of Elizabeth.

Consider Revelation, the last book of the New Testament. Leave it to the goyim to end with Apocalypse. Moses and YHVH—our earliest professional writers of fiction—and even the deity’s amateur “son,” who only wrote once, one illegible word dug into sand (John 8)—would never have allowed it.

Reward with a girlfriend my friend H., a junior librarian from a fine family of Los Angeles. His recent email mentions his databasing nearly 30 books called “The Last Book,” or a variation on that title.

Grant the justice/splendor of the smell of books, which is merely the smell of dust. This, like all sameness, instructs in mortality. After the book is composed, it decomposes. That (and other reasons) is why there are multiple copies.

Grant the meek/radiant feel of books (haptics is the current term): the texture, the heft in hand. Note for posterity that if you closed your eyes and ran your fingers over a page you could tell which parts of that page were blank and which held ink. Words were palpable, words felt palpable, until the advent of recycling and digital printing (blot forever the 1990s).

Find repose among the taste of books. Find peace from, in a singularly impractical coinage, their “mannaism.” It’s said that monks poisoned the pagetips of forbidden books to punish their readers. It’s said that rabbis placed honey there at the tips to encourage students to lick and go forward. To lick and proceed. Consider however that when the lesson was finished and the book was shut, the honeyed pages would stick together. Consider however that such slavish adherence to factuality would be our own destruction. Woe to the generation that cannot tell stories. Woe to the generation that cannot be told stories.

Yitzhak Laor was born the same year as Israel: 1948. He has written stories, novels, plays, essays, and journalism, and his poetry has been recognized as among the best—if most controversial—of his generation. In 1972, Laor became one of the first Israeli Defense Forces soldiers to refuse to complete his compulsory military service in the territories captured during the Six Day War, a decision that earned him a brief prison sentence. Today Laor lives in Tel Aviv, where he edits the literary magazine Mita’am.

Issue 12 of n+1 magazine features six of Laor’s poems, presented both in the original and my translation. Here are three—from radically disparate periods in Laor’s career. What unites them are biblical allusion and a doubting of language’s capacity to effect political change—a crisis marked by flares of rage and humor.

To read more of Laor’s work, you can purchase the current issue of n+1.

Take Care, Soldier

Don’t die, soldier, hold the radiophone,
don your helmet, your flak jacket, surround
the village with a trench of crocodiles, starve
it out if need be, eat Mama’s treats, shoot
sharp, keep your rifle clean, take care of the armored
Jeep, the bulldozer, the land, one day it will be
yours, little David, sweetling, don’t die, please.

Keep watch for Goliath the peasant, he’s trying to sell his
pumpkin at the local market, he’s plotting to buy a gift for his grandkid,
   erase
the evil Haman whose bronchitis you denied treatment, eradicate
the blood of Eva Braun by checking on the veracity of her labor pains,
   silence her
shriek, that’s how every maternity ward sounds, it’s not easy
having such humane values, be strong, take care, forget
your deeds, forget the forgetting.

That thy days may be long, that the days of thy children may be long,
   that one day
they shall hear of thy deeds and shall stick fingers in their ears and
   scream
with fear and thy sons’ and thy daughters’ screams shall never fade.
Be strong, sweet David, live long unto seeing thy children’s eyes,
though their backs hasten to flee from thee, stay in touch with thy
   comrades-in-arms,
after thy sons deny thee, a covenant of the shunned.
Take care, soldier-boy.

שמור על עצמך, חייל

חַילָּ, אָל תָּמוּת, לְמִי יש כֹּחַ לִשְכוֹל
רַדְיוֹפוֹניִ, חֲבֹש קַסְדָּה, לְבַש שַכְפָּ”ץ, הַקֵף אֶת
הַכְּפָר בִּתְעָלָה, מַלֵּא אוֹתָהּ בְּתַנּיִניִם, אִם ישֵׁ, הַרְעֵב
אִם צָרִיך לְהַרְעִיב, אֱכֹל אֶת מַמְתַקֶּיהַ שֶל אִמָּא, אַל
תָּמוּת, צְלֹף, מַלֵּא מַחְסַנּיִּוֹת, נקֵַּה את הָרוֹבֶה הַטֶּלֶסְקוֹפּי
שְׁמֹר עַל הַג’יפּ הַַמְּשֻרְיןָ, עַל הַדַּחְפּוֹר, שְמֹר עַל הָאָרֶץ
יוֹם אֶחד תִּהְיהֶ שֶלְךָ, דָודִ קָטָן, מָתוֹק, אַל תָּמוּת, בְּבַקָּשָׁה מִמּךָ.

הִזּהֵָר מן הדְּלַעַת של גלְָיתַ הַפַלָּאח, הוּא מְנסֶַּה לְמָכְרָהּ
בַּשּׁוּק הַקָּרוב, לֹא מֵרָעָב, לִקְנוֹת לְנכְֶדוֹ מַתָּנה הוּא זוֹמֵם, שְכַח
את הָמָן הָרָשָׁע שֶמָנעַתָ טִפּוּל בַּבְּרוֹנכְִיטִיס שלוֹ, מְחַק את דִמּוּמָהּ
שֶל אֶוהָ בְּרָאוּן, כְּשֶבָּדַקְתָּ אִם זיִפְָּה צִירֵי לֵידָה, דוֹמֵם את צִוחְוֹתֶיהָ
כָּכָה נשְִמָע כָּל חֲדַר לֵידָה, הֱיהֵ חָזקָ, לֹא פָּשוּט לַעֲבוֹר מָה שֶאַתָּה
עוֹבֵר, בֶּטח לֹא פָּשוּט עִם עֲרָכֶיךָ הָהוּמָניים, רָק אַל תִּתְבַּישֵּ
)הַצָּרפָתים בְּאַלְג’ִירְיהָ לא הָיוּ יוֹתֵר טוֹבים(, שְׁמֹר על עַצְמְךָ, שְכַח

אֶת מַעֲשֶׂיךָ, שְכַח אֶת הַשִּׁכְחָה, שְׁכַח אֶת שִׁכְחַת הַשִּׁכְחָה
לְמַעַן יאֲַרִיכוּן ימֶָיךָ, לְמַעַן יאֲַריכוּן ימְֵי בָּניֶךָ, לְמַעַן יוֹם אֶחָד
ישְִמְעוּן עַל מַעֲשֶׂיךָ ויְתְִקְעוּן שְׁתֵי אֶצְבָּעות בָּאֹזנְיַם ויְצְִוחְוּן
מִפַּחַד, צְוחָה אֲרוּכּה אֲרוּכָּה, וזְעֲַקַת בִּנךְָ/בִּתְךָ לא תִדֹּם לָעַד.
הֱיהֶ חָזק, דָּודִ מָתֹק, והְַאֲרֵך ימִָים, רְאֵה את עֵיניֵהֶם של ילְָדֶיךָ
עָרְפֵּיהם יחֵָפֵזוּן לִבְרֹחַ מִמֶּךָ, שְמֹר עַל קֶשר עִם חֲבֵרֶיךָ
לַנּשֶק, אַחֲרֵי שֶבָּניֶךָ יתְִכַּחֲשוּ אֵלֶיךָ, בְּרִית בֵּין
הַמְּנדִֻּים. שְמֹר עַל עַצְמְךָ, חַילִַּיקוֹ

Continue reading: “Shut Door.” Or view as a single page.

The long roofs of the platform, stretching into the distance, removed to the last degree the spectacle of the snow falling on the tracks. At such a distance, it seemed that the snowflakes hung in the air almost without moving, slowly sinking into it the way bread crumbs fed to fish sink into the water.

Beyond the opening of the window, by which they lay with their heads thrust forward, spread a flooded area with no beginning or end. Somewhere a river had overflowed, and the waters of its side branch had come up close to the railway embankment. In foreshortening, brought about by looking from the height of the berth, it seemed as if the smoothly rolling train was gliding right over the water.

The fleetness of such observations calls to mind film, especially early silent “motion pictures,” and their antecedents in zoetropes and the Lanterna Magica—any of those old devices that arrested a train’s progress and instead spun shots past a static eye. Each of Pasternak’s train windows is a frame; each sets a small scene. Taken together these scenes form a whole that seems alternately to be a film script and a film itself: Some scenes are fleshed only briefly, while others receive the full treatment with makeup and wardrobe.

Whichever it better resembles however, this new Zhivago—the first translation of the novel in 50 years—is far more psychologically subtle than that kitschy Hollywood vehicle for the emoting of Omar Sharif and Julie Christie. This post-Soviet Zhivago is the work of that tireless translating couple Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. In the last two decades they’ve rendered into English all the major novels of Dostoyevsky, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Gogol’s Dead Souls and Complete Stories, a few dozen stories by Chekhov, in addition to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, War and Peace, and The Death of Ivan Ilyich. One pities poor Turgenev—poor genius Turgenev—who awaits his reincarnation at another’s hands.

***

Pasternak himself, born in 1890, lived a tragically cinematic life; in a biopic a younger Martin Landau would have played him with wonderful pathos. Pasternak’s father, Leonid, was a portraitist of Tolstoy and the first Russian painter to engage Impressionism, while his mother, Rosa, was an acclaimed pianist. Pasternak took after her, studying composition with Alexander Scriabin, whose synesthesic theories (colors have sounds) influenced his pupil’s later poetics. Lacking Absolute Pitch but not absolved of ambition Pasternak abandoned music for philosophy, studying briefly in Marburg with Hermann Cohen, founder of Neo-Kantianism—which school marked philosophy’s re-rationalizing, or return to logic after a half-century of metaphysics and materialism—and the foremost Jewish thinker of his age. Another mentor was Russophile Rainer Maria Rilke, with whom Pasternak corresponded. Poetry came easily but prose did not, and Zhivago took nearly a decade a write. Obviously impossible to publish in the Soviet Union, it was smuggled to Milan, where it was issued by the communist but influential Feltrinelli Editore in 1957.

Max Hayward and Manya Harari’s English translation appeared the same year, rife with elisions and lacunae. Besides being more complete than that 1957 version, the Pevear-Volokhonsky Zhivago is linguistically more wild, often complex, sometimes complicated, self-consciously moderne—annexing the epigrammatic wit of Blok and Mayakovsky to the vast prosaic stretches of the 19th-century Russian novel. What in the previous translation was clear and focused has, with a turn of the lens, come into a warm blurriness, a gauze. It is as if Cold War America required clarity—moral transparency requiring transparent prose—but after the fall of Sovietism our verbiage can be just as muddled as our politics. Each is obviously the appropriate Zhivago for its time.

In Hayward-Harari the passage I quoted at the beginning of this review—narrating the Zhivago family’s journey east into Siberia, fleeing the 1917 Revolution—has been smoothed into a placid, pristinated English, as if Pasternak’s original has been covered with a layer of cleansing, conciliatory snow:

The falling snow could be seen only beyond the far end of the roofs; seen so far away, it looked almost still, sinking to the ground as slowly as bread crumbs thrown to fishes sink through water.

The second passage is even more starkly abridged:

Through the opening in the window they could see the country covered with spring floods as far as the eye could reach. Somewhere a river had overflowed its banks and the water had come right up to the embankment. In the foreshortened view from the bunk it looked as if the train were actually gliding on the water.

When comparing two translations without the ability to read the source, that source can serve only as an ideal in the critic’s mind—and this ideal is a fertile metaphor for Russia. That country that once sprawled over 11 time zones might not exist except in the various traductions of its interpreters. Zhivago, written as a solace throughout World War II, both embodied and contradicted the two dominant schools following World War I: Tsarist and Communist, the Whites and the Reds. While Revolution foments, Yuri Zhivago, apolitical son of the bourgeoisie, an erstwhile physician and poet, flees Moscow—factual Moscow—for Varykino, a fictional town in the folkloric Urals (one can’t help but note the word kino—“film”—buried at the end of that name). From idyllic privation he’s abducted by Bolshevik partisans to serve as their medic, loses his family to emigration, begins another family with his fated love Larissa Feodorovna, loses her, keeps house with a third woman, writes poetry, dies.

round and round by ratterrell / Robert Terrell; some rights reserved.

Certainly if this book is read as one gazes passively through a train window this can all founder on melodrama, Slavic soul rendered in Technicolor—huge pans across landscapes, ridiculously contrived coincidences (people who appear later always turn out to have been met earlier on trains; wives and children show up when characters both least and most expect it; people presumed dead have merely changed names and gone underground)—but the active gaze discerns a radical artwork held together through motion alone, sheer velocity. There is nothing sophisticated in Zhivago; not the philosophy—which loves nature as only a Russian loves nature, and loves Jesus as only a Russian Jew loves Jesus (Zhivago is not Jewish, though Pasternak was)—and not even the examples of Zhivago’s poetry, which are elegiac in translation but nothing more. Rather the simplicity of Zhivago suggests just how closely related popular cinema is to the folktale: Both are committed to pure narration; neither feels compelled to reason or explain. A partisan leader who falls from favor shoots himself in the head, and the clumps of blood and exploded brain he leaves in the snow are described as appearing like frozen rowan berries. Pasternak zooms in tightly, holds the shot long. If the folktale is oral lore, the cinema is visual lore—the former is the prehistory of art, while the latter is our living tradition.

***

In 1958, following the novel’s success abroad and Khrushchev’s condemnation, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, an honor he initially accepted—“Immensely thankful, touched, proud, astonished, abashed,” read his first telegram to the Swedish Academy—but four days later was persuaded, or forced, to refuse: “Considering the meaning this award has been given in the society to which I belong, I must refuse it. Please do not take offense at my voluntary rejection.”

Three years ago a literary critic named Ivan Tolstoi published a book in Russian—The Laundered Novel, not yet translated into English—alleging that Pasternak’s Nobel win was a CIA complot. Apparently Langley headquarters was aware that Nobel bylaws require all books under consideration to have been published in the language in which they were written (the reason for this rule being to ensure that the awarded words are the author’s, not a translator’s). Tolstoi maintains that the CIA intercepted the airplane delivering the manuscript to Italy, forcing it to land in Malta. With passengers waiting on the tarmac, agents photographed the manuscript page by page, then had the novel published in Russian in America and Europe in a limited edition, of which a few copies were presented directly to the Swedish Academy. No other explanation is so convincing as to how Russian Zhivagi surfaced on two continents almost simultaneously, and how a handful found refuge in Sweden with such expedition.

Tolstoi’s investigation makes for fine suspense, and no doubt Pasternak could have engineered a fitting language for it—a style capable of turning an absurd situation into a narrative both representative and timeless; an Eastern Bloc farce into an elemental epic. After all, that was his greatest talent, to neutralize the violent banality of his era by reminding it of eternity—in his characters’ conversational asides, glances, gestures; in scraps of liturgy and peasant song enshrined within his stanzas. Film screen, window, camera viewfinder, the page limited by margin: Such constraints exist to concentrate our perception; they are the visual equivalents of poetic meter. Pasternak’s genius for reminding us of what lies just beyond such frames tells us that without a frame we would be overwhelmed: by nature, by God, by the utter unicity of beauty.

Joshua Cohen’s most recent novel is Witz.

‘Beginning of the Sabbath,’ published by Anton Hohenstein c. 1868
CREDIT: Library of Congress

Shabbat, that microcosm of God’s seventh-day rest, is the subject of Judith Shulevitz’s graceful, erudite new book, The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time (the subject of this week’s Vox Tablet podcast). But the weekly renewal of candlelighting, winedrinking, and the eating of challah is only the most obvious Jewish contribution to the science and history of Time. The division of primeval void into moons and then those moons into meaningful phases; the sectioning of the week to recapitulate the week of Creation; the days themselves maintained by rulings pertaining to work and play as much as by commandments to the performance of hours of prayer—such are just the beginnings of an immense, horizon-sized scroll that also introduced the world to concepts of eschatology and messianism. What follows is a brief, 12-part clocking of Jewish Time, focusing on theology but also widening to accommodate secular theories from the likes of Einstein, Marx, and Proust.

Extra Days in the Diaspora

The Jewish calendar, which is lunar, is a calendar of witness. The Sanhedrin, Jewry’s Congress, met in Jerusalem toward the end of every month to wait for the new moon. Once the moon was sighted—or, rather, as it was a new moon, once the moon was not sighted—the Sanhedrin’s rabbis would declare the beginning of the new month, and fires would be set outside the city’s walls to alert distant Jewish communities. Often, however, these fires were snuffed or obscured, or their message falsified by neighboring sects, and, since only the Sanhedrin could pronounce the new moon (though the sages were aware, of course, that the moon in their sky was the very same moon in every sky, Jewish Law required witnesses and consensus judgment), Diaspora communities were regularly confused as to when festivals and holidays would fall within the month. Though the Torah ordains single-day observances for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Shavuot, and Shemini Atzeret, Diasporites began celebrating them for an extra day as a precautionary measure—in order to better ensure that, regardless of any miscommunication as to which was the first of the lunar month’s 29 days, the festivals would be celebrated for at least one correct day.

Shmita

The Torah ordains every seventh year a Sabbatical Year, as it says in Leviticus 25: “Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the Lord: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard.” This septennial respite is known as shmita, Hebrew for  “release” or “freeing.” After seven of these seven-year cycles, Leviticus declares a Jubilee, a special fallowing during which all debts are forgiven and all slaves must be manumitted—two tenets not currently observed in the State of Israel, though the  agricultural component of the shmita year still is.

Joshua at Gibeon

The Canaanite kings were warring against the Gibeonites, who appealed to Joshua ben Nun, successor to Moses, for help. We are told in Chapter 10 of the book that bears his name that Joshua led his army of Israelites to Gibeon to face the Amorites first and routed them. The four armies of four other kings followed, and Joshua’s Israelites fought every one. However the day of the battle was soon ending. Loath to let the day end without complete victory, Joshua asked God to still the sun above Gibeon and the moon above the valley of Ajalon—effectively extending the daylight of this decisive battle “until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies.”

Hebrew Clock, Jewish Town Hall, Prague

English, unlike Hebrew, is read from left to right—as are clocks. The concepts of clockwise and counterclockwise are universal, irrespective of alphabet. However, Prague’s Židovská radnice or Jewish Town Hall, seat of Bohemian and Moravian Jewry, built in the 16th century and extensively renovated in the 18th in the rococo style, features on its cupola “a Hebrew clock,” whose numbers are represented by Hebrew letters, and whose gears turn the hands counterclockwise. The time of Jewish Prague, then, runs in reverse—into the past. Paul Celan refers to this timepiece in his poem “In Prague,” where he memorializes two lovers, two dreams “tolling / against time, in the squares.”

Hershele Ostropoler

Hershele Ostropoler, Jewish trickster, was perhaps a fictional or composite character associated with the court of Rabbi Baruch of Medzhybizh, grandson of the Baal Shem Tov. It is said that one day, in need of meal money, he pawned his sole possession: a gold pocketwatch. Later that night the pawnbroker was awakened by a noise and went down to his shop to investigate. Hershele had broken in. “Thief!” the man shrieked. Hershele said, “I’m no thief, I just wanted to know what time it was.” “And for this you woke me up?” “I’m sorry,” Hershele said, “but I only trust my own watch.”

Henri Bergson

Henri-Louis Bergson (1859-1941), French-Jewish philosopher, believed that since time was always in motion, the single moment was unknowable. Just as one attempted to grasp an individual moment or thought, it would be gone—not necessarily replaced by another, but lost to the flow of all moments, all thoughts. While physicists of Bergson’s day, which saw the perfection of the microscope and the first experimentation with subatomic particles, observed objects and events in fixed, finite relationships, Bergson invoked a Zeno’s Paradox applied not to spatial or chronologic infinity, but to the mind itself. Bergsonian consciousness, forever eluding mensuration, would instead be characterized by what he called la durée, which has been translated as “Duration,” implying that ceaseless, Heraclitean flux of indivisible experience in which each instant becomes, instantaneously, the stuff of yesterdays, and every yesterday accrues to the account of oblivion. For Bergson it was Intuition (l’intuition), and not any intellection or formula, that would interpret the world, while such interpretation could only be expressed indirectly, symbolically—as memory, or through its practice: reminiscence, or reflection. Bergson’s vertiginous metaphysic, in which nothing is knowable, and in which consciousness can lead only to consciousness-of-consciousness, and so on in a regressus ad infinitum, brings us back to an original garden where memory frolics with fantasy, and where what we know of our pasts is forever being revised by the personalities we are always becoming.

Marcel Proust

In the opening of his vast, sevenfold novel, Marcel Proust (1871-1922), or the narrator “Marcel Proust,” dips a madeleine into his tea, which parlor ritual was a Big Bang for both literature and mind. This dipped biscuit triggers a memory, which in turns triggers another memory, which in turn triggers yet another, until thousands of pages later we realize we have read not only one the great novels of the 20th century but also a grand dramatization of Bergsonian theory (Bergson was Proust’s cousin by marriage). À la Recherche du Temps Perdu explores the world—or merely the memories displaced by the dunking of that teatime treat—through a somnambulistic, or deathly, consciousness, both timeless and without space. One never knows who, where, or when “Marcel Proust” is, what he’s doing or what his life is like while he is telling his story. Childhood experiences are seen through childhood eyes and then, in another paragraph, as if through the eyes of an adult; love is experienced as a teenager experiences love, and then lust is philosophized about in a way befitting a man of experience and wisdom. The gaze of Proust’s masterwork is synoptic, even while the irreducible point at center—the force binding together the novel’s narrator in all his ages and selves, with the writer who, lying abed in Paris, narrates the narrator—remains an insufferable cipher. In Proust, memory becomes modernity’s ultimate and terminal dimension, while the remembrancer himself seems as absent, or as deceased, as God.

Albert Einstein, Hermann Minkowski

For centuries Galilean and Newtonian physics had proved that it was impossible for a body to measure its own motion. By the 19th century Newton’s theories had become Laws implying that no one thing could determine its own velocity or the velocity of another without reference to an exteriority, without comparison. In applying this idea to the entirety of the cosmos, Albert Einstein (1879-1955) insisted that a comparison of velocities could be made with the use of a universal constant, which he would discover in the speed of light, the c—for Latin’s celeritas: a hurtling at 299,792,458 meters per second—of his famous formula that related energy, E, to mass, m: E=mc². Einstein’s theorizing held that there was no one temporally or spatially stationary perspective in the universe by, or from, which all motion could be judged and that because the universe’s only constant seemed to be the speed of light, it could be theorized that space and time were experienced differently—relatively—by bodies in different states of motion. The very constancy of this lightspeed, when taken in the context of Einstein’s abstract conclusions, illuminated a wholly new field of being, an imperceptible alterity previously unexplored outside of esoteric religion or mysticism—a Fourth Dimension, first postulated by Hermann Minkowski (1864-1909), Einstein’s former mathematics instructor at the Zürich Polytechnic. Inextricably coiled within the three normative dimensions of space, which are length, width, and depth or height, was this new (or oldest) dimension of Time, or the superseding dimension of “Spacetime.” It was Minkowski who transmuted the two strands of Einsteinian thought, the physical and temporal, into a precious amalgam that provided the best setting for the jewel of Relativity.

Émile Durkheim

While the Hebrew root kdsh is traditionally translated as “holy,” it actually means something closer to “separate”—to remove something from the context of the everyday being to specialize it, to render sacred by means of occasion or locale. Wondering what it is that makes us conscious of time, Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), a French Jew and the father of sociology, found himself attracted to the study of differentiation, in particular to the palpable differencing of the religious calendar, which serves to separate mundane time from religious occasion and so structures the unconscious life of the community by mediating between holiness observed privately or parochially and the public workaday. Durkheim, who more than any other thinker quested after the societal effects of time-marking and time-management, concluded that the recurrent calendar was the major force behind religion’s survival and that it was so by dint of being religion’s foremost socializer.

Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin

Franz Rosenzweig (1887-1929) of Kassel, Germany, believed not in Jewish history but in Jewish ahistory. In Rosenzweig’s prescription, the ideal Jewish life must seem achronologic—as the religious calendar re-embodies Creation, each year can mark only a new cycle of the same rituals and laws in which progress does not, indeed must not, obtain. Rosenzweig understood that each generation of Jewry achieves its own balance of sacred (specific) and secular (universal) times and that, while creation and redemption are the only two fixed points of rupture along the timescale of any religion, revelation of God’s Law had been addressed to the Jews alone and so allowed Jewry to experience elements of creation and redemption in this world, the here and now. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) of Berlin was an atheist who, toward the end of his life, began experimenting with Jewish belief, perhaps informed as much by his early-century Zionism as by the perils of a war that eventually caused his suicide. One of his later, underdeveloped theories comprised a Marxist approach to Jewish Messianism, or Messianic Time. Benjamin was particularly exercised by memory and nostalgia and considered the past the essential purview of the Jew. Citing Biblical proscriptions against soothsaying, or divining the future, Benjamin instead proposed a sort of permissible foretelling: a before-telling; an inquisition of the past that deprived that hesternal sphere of its historicism, of its entropic sense of momentum and advancement, in favor of asserting time’s eternality and the enduring value of skepticism as a mechanism for redeeming the self. Because the future was so unknowable, or taboo, for the Jew, it acquired, in Benjamin’s thought, an auratic, fetishistic mystery, a fraught potentiality—at any moment the neat, orderly progress of our collective narratives might end, and what Benjamin called the Angel of History, a Messiah previously incapacitated by our political and technological ideas of progress, might finally be actualized, redeeming us from causality.

Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky

Karl Marx (1818-1883) regarded the regulation of time with ambivalence if not suspicion; a position best characterized by his insight that when time becomes decontextualized and so commodified as money, noncommodified time—what we might call personal-time, or family-time—becomes devalued. Marx envisioned a classless future, a mechanized utopia in which historical progress could be measured, and then nullified, only by human equality. The Revolution would come, and all men would be set free in his uniquely profane, but hopefully bloodless, eschatology. But Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) doubted the permanency of Revolution and instead called for “Permanent Revolution.” (Die Revolution in Permanenz was originally Marx’s formulation, though the idea is most closely associated with Trotsky.) Marx thought that a revolutionary class could achieve its emancipation by constantly pursuing its interests through ideological education and occasional resistance, whereas Trotsky believed that one-country socialism was impossible, and that the global proletariat had to seize power over and forcibly dismantle the bourgeoisie, imposing the communist agenda from above in a newer hegemony. Marx’s relationship to Time was traditionally Judeo-Christian: cyclical but redemptive, to be resolved in a future Messianic Era whose inherent egalitarianism would militate against the personality cult of any despotic Messiah; whereas Trotsky’s relationship was one of regular violent Apocalypse as necessary and even salutary.

Death, Afterlife, Messiah

When a person dies he or she is mourned for seven days at shiva (literally, “seven”), usually at the home of the principal mourner, in visits accompanied by food and prayer. For 30 days after the death, the mourner is prohibited from marrying, for 12 months the mourner is prohibited from enjoying public entertainment. Yahrzeit, Yiddish for “time of year,” is the word for an anniversary of a death. One year after burial a gravestone can be “unveiled,” but this is custom only and not a commandment. Jewish bodies must be buried as soon as possible. While the body is being prepared—washed, dried, and dressed—it may never be left unattended. Notions of the Jewish afterlife are disputed. Reincarnation seems a possibility to some, an apostasy to others. In the Talmud, Rabbi Eliezer said the days of the Messiah will last 40 years, Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah said 70 years; Rabbi Hillel said there will be no Messiah, and Rabbi Joseph asked that Rabbi Hillel be forgiven. The prophet Zechariah—the name means “God has remembered”—speaks of two Messiahs.

First published in 1991 as Az angol lobogó, later translated and published—along with a brilliant uncollected text called Sworn Statement—in the Hungarian Quarterly, Union Jack (Melville House) has now been reprinted as “a novella,” that strange summary term for a prosework engineered for psychic impact, to be read not in dutiful daily increments but in a breathless single sitting.

Lacking extras and scenery (Notes from Underground), supernumerary action and subplots (Heart of Darkness), a novella is longer than any story the same author has written but shorter than his shortest novel, and tends to focus on only one thing: one event’s changing (Death in Venice), or one character changed (The Metamorphosis). Henry James called his novellas “tales,” “novelette” remains an antiquated term of derision, a Magyar is a Hungarian—and taxonomy never ceases to bore. Kertész’s Union Jack explodes the extremities of this form, or nonform, as it is both about one thing and nothing at all, and then it is also about everything—everything, however, being circumscribed by Communist Hungary, youth, and frustrated ambition. Kertész begins by announcing not that he is telling the story of the Union Jack, but that he is about to tell the story of the Union Jack—the British flag; that saltired standard of Empire that was also, to a Hungarian under Soviet rule, a fimbriated symbol of freedoms. What follows this declaration, however, is an immediate digression from a digression, an evasion of a lark, as the narrator remembers having told the exact same story at a recent party thrown by former students for his birthday—and so on he goes, remembering and remembering his remembering, by regressus. The single paragraph ensuing flits among the narrator’s—Kertész’s—early career in censored journalism, the operas of Wagner, the verses and sentences (both Nazi penal and prose) of Ernő Szép, and of Goethe and Tolstoy, and the fate of an editorial office superior: “It will come as no surprise to you, mature, cultured people that you are, I said to the friendly gathering, mustered mainly from my former students, which had been continually urging me to tell the story of the Union Jack, to learn where that black limousine took its victim.”

This review will not spoil this book because there is almost no book to spoil: with the narrator’s vexillological intentions vexed, nothing happens besides talk, and the talk says nothing that’s not geopolitically predictable in its malevolence and glorious sadness; still, Union Jack is undeniably a masterpiece. Too often the flaw in Kertész’s previous books was the translation of Tim Wilkinson, a Britisher with tendencies toward both overcomplication and literal rendition. In Union Jack, however, Kertész’s motormouth runs altogether too fast for any translation, with insensible energy outpacing sensible English; and while Wilkinson could have done better at defining different registers of speech, what becomes compelling whether through intention or incompetence is his sheer pileup of clauses:

If I may perchance wish now, after all, to tell the story of the Union Jack, as I was urged to do at a friendly gathering a few days—or months—ago, then I would have to mention the piece of reading matter which first inculcated in me—let’s call it a grudging admiration, for the Union Jack; I would have to tell about the books I was reading at the time, about my passion for reading, what nourished it, the vagaries of chance on which it hinged, as indeed does everything else in which, with the passage of time, we discern what, whether it be the consequentiality of destiny or the absurdity of destiny, is in any event our destiny; I would have to tell about when that passion started, and whither it propelled me in the end; in short, I would have to tell almost my entire life story.

Whither, indeed. It’s a question that could well be asked of Union Jack itself, a book that may be Kertész’s finest, one in which he has finally perfected the vehicle he has been working toward for years: the polysemous monologue.

For all its speechifying, Union Jack propels its reader not toward any rhetorical apotheosis, but rather to Hungary’s 1956 Revolution, and, at the very beginning of what Kertész stages as that rebellion’s random and unexpected unrest, to a single image so potent and intimate it has to have been “real”:

A hurtling jeep-like vehicle suddenly appeared, with the British red-white-and-blue colours, a Union Jack, draped over the entire radiator. It was scudding at breakneck speed between the crowds thronging the pavement on either side when, sporadically at first but then ever more continuously, evidently as a mark of their affection, people began to applaud. I was able to see the vehicle, once it had sped past me, only from the rear, and at the very moment when the applause seemed to coalesce, almost solidify, an arm stretched out hesitantly, almost reluctantly at first, from the left-side window of the car. The hand was tucked into a light-coloured glove, and though I did not see it close up, I presume it was a kid glove; probably in response to the clapping, it cautiously dipped several times parallel to the direction in which the vehicle was travelling. It was a wave, a friendly, welcoming, perhaps slightly consolatory gesture, which, at the very least, adumbrated an unreserved endorsement and, by the by, also the solid consciousness that before long that same gloved hand would be touching the rail of the steps leading down from an aircraft onto the runway on arrival home in that distant island country. After that, vehicle, hand and Union Jack—all disappeared in the bend of the road, and the applause gradually died away.

And so the book fulfills its eponymous promise, almost indirectly, with stealth and concision: In these few swift concluding pages, the narrator is studying Italian at Budapest’s Istituto Italiano di Cultura per l’Ungheria when his fellow Hungarians spontaneously attempt to overthrow the legacies of Stalin and Rákosi (Kertész himself was active as a translator not from Italian but from German, which he learned in the camps; he has translated Freud, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein). Later the narrator glimpses this jeep draped with the British flag hurtling in the direction of the airport—probably an official vehicle, helping to evacuate UK nationals or embassy notables to “that distant island country.” Freedom “disappeared in the bend of the road,” then applause, and with it hope, “gradually died away,” to be replaced by the onomatopoeia of Moscow’s tanks. The End. Kertész, nearly 30 years old at the time of the Uprising, would not be allowed to publish in Hungary for another two decades.

We’ll begin with the discipline with the least modifiers: concrete poetry is poetry whose appearance has been made integral to meaning; poetry whose typography, not always justified to the left margin, is at least as important to comprehension as word-meaning, rhythm, and rhyme. The best examples are the worst classics from grade-school English: the poem about the word “and” in the shape of an ampersand; the poem about a jug shaped like a jug; the poem about a boy’s blue eyes printed in blue font. I’ve fantasized about writing a positive, even effusive review of a book that would be arranged on the page into the outlines of a toilet or to form the word “NOT!”

Of course, concrete poems also exist in situ, or in nature—they can be found, or discovered, and this process of discovery, the founding poets tell us, is the most moral way “to write.” This process gets at not what can be made, but what is. And so, a stop sign says stop but take that sign off a streetcorner and hang it on a museum wall and the meaning has changed with context. A celebrity’s signature is “an autograph,” and is worth something; its provenance gives value, and its connotative appearance means more than the denotative content of that appearance, which is, after all, only scribbled with pen. These fetishistic concerns come into play particularly on occasions for which traditional verse seems inadequate: the most moving tribute I’ve encountered to the victims of 9/11 was hearing their names read over a loudspeaker on a windy anniversary in downtown Manhattan—doomed name after name without pause, the sheer mass and the mass of their different heritages overwhelming; and it’s glib but accurate to say that Auschwitz, that deathcamp that has “inspired”—a terrible verb—so much of the most inferior poetry of the 20th century, is itself a sort of concrete poem (which is to say: a poem in concrete, and in wood and wire).

CREDIT: round and round by ratterrell / Robert Terrell; some rights reserved.

But if, as Theodor Adorno maintained, after Auschwitz poetry was immoral (though he later repented of that statement), what were writers of the 1950s to write? Novels that avoided mentioning anything that happened in occupied Poland? Radio dramas of Nazi apologetics? Tens of millions were dead, cities were razed, and German-language literature was somehow corpse and city at once: a corpus first killed, then looted of its vitals, defiled. Also, it didn’t help that many of Germany and Austria’s finest writers were Jews. In the wake of that loss it became apparent that no ideal literature could reconstitute culture because it was just such literary idealism that had collaborated in culture’s destruction: Hitler was a noted memoirist; Goebbels, a literature Ph.D. from Heidelberg, wrote novels and poetry; and good Nazis were supposed to read Goethe between bouts of Jew-killing under the shade of Goethe’s oak tree at Buchenwald.

The 1950s and ’60s avant-garde decided to aid that destruction by destroying the destroyers, and what that meant, especially, was giving them their say—again. By changing context one changed content, as Bäcker and the writers published by neue texte, the name of the journal he edited and publishing house he led (writers comprising the Vienna Group, including Friedrich Achleitner, H.C. Artmann, Konrad Bayer, Gerhard Rühm, and Oswald Wiener), “wrote” by quotation and juxtaposition. Bäcker called his technique “System nachschrift,” literally the system of writing-after, or after-writing, but a word commonly used to mean “postscript.” His transcript is made only of documents pertaining to the Nazi regime and the Holocaust (other texts, like nachschrift, nachschrift 2, and EPITAPH, occasionally have recourse to visual material). At the same time that Günter Grass was trying to write a future for Germany by repoliticizing the novel, at the same time Peter Handke was denouncing Grass’s outward approach to politics and was instead writing inward, Bäcker invented a terminus for both: the personal and political. His genre, which would be called Dokumentarliteratur (documentary literature), or dokumentarische dichtung (documentary poetry), signaled a formal contribution as original as Thomas Bernhard’s unbreakable paragraphs, but it is as moral contribution that it remains incomparable.

Here the banality of evil becomes the sublimity of a poem; here Bäcker incriminates by verse:

if jews required to wear the insignia live in an apartment whose owner is not required to wear the insignia, then they are required to have a separate nameplate on the apartment entrance and the insignia immediately next to it
if persons not required to wear the insignia live in an apartment whose owner is required to wear the insignia, then they are entitled to a separate nameplate without the insignia
the affixation of nameplates and insignia is to be completed in such a way that every doubt is eliminated and so that it is clearly evident that

That is a quotation from an announcement “concerning official assignments,” from Vienna’s Jüdischen Nachrichtenblatt of March 3, 1942. Other pages of transcript make more explicit use of concrete, or spatial, properties, such as the excerpts below, which turn the list-poem, that repetitive staple of modern verse, back into the functionally repetitive list, or into something rhetorically between:

auschwitz telephones

no. 18
no. 45
no. 17
no. 33
no. 21

no. 41
no. 76
no. 16
no. 74
no. I
no. F III/2
no. 32
no. 62

no. 315
no. 55

***

7/1 19 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/3 25 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/4 13 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/5 32 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/6 12 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/7 14 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/8 17 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/10 22 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/11 17 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/12 25 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/13 15 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/14 21 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/15 13 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/18 17 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/19 29 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/20 30 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/21 23 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/22 21 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/23 1 prisoner in hartheim reported as having died
7/24 30 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/25 23 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/26 21 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/27 21 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/28 23 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/29 19 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died
7/31 26 prisoners in hartheim reported as having died

Reading this list is arduous but typing it, retyping it for this review, is even worse. If the most moral way to write about the Holocaust is to quote it, perhaps the most moral way to read about it is to copy the quotations, and so Bäcker, like Victor Klemperer, author of The Language of the Third Reich, and like America’s Charles Reznikoff, who performed a similar palimpsest of testimony with Holocaust, might be best understood as a reader who wrote. In my own reading-writing of this passage, I had the following thoughts: do the days skipped, such as July 2 and July 9, represent Sundays, or other “days-off,” and what did the executioners do then? Also, why was only one prisoner executed on the 23rd, and who was that singular man? He had a name, certainly, and perhaps a family, etc. This type of questioning leads to the type of writing Bäcker sought to avoid—we ask, and because the dead are dead we can only, but barely, imagine the answers. Only if we flip to the back of the book, because Bäcker never clutters the pages of his poem with notes, do we find some brief jot—a true postscript—that this list of Hartheim prisoners was obtained from prosecutorial documents in the possession of the state attorney in Linz, dated 1948.

Casual appreciations of Bäcker’s achievement often forgo the terror while embracing technique: certainly there are a number of websites that compare the quotation method—“appropriation”—to the Web itself, and discourse on the ease with which writers today can ape postmodernity with just a click of the mouse, copying ‘n’ pasting “poems,” or arranging Google results into verse. From the pecia system of the Middle Ages, which broke manuscripts into sections, or peciæ, assigning each to a different scribe, to the highlight and drag I’ve used to rearrange the very sentence you’re reading now, we’ve lately arrived in the time of the home use version, the no-muss, no-fuss version, of monkish copying; in which one makes a text one’s own not through holy transcription but by impulsive download. Bäcker was no mere technician, however, and his almost religious transcription was necessary for reasons of renewal: not so much literary as of the soul. Bäcker, born 1925, dead in 2003, was active in the press and photography office of the Linz Hitlerjugend, serving ultimately as a cadre unit leader (Gefolgschaftsführer), and joined the Nazi Party as soon as he turned 18. He spent the rest of his life atoning for this, forcing himself to read his moral failure into every sentence he quoted, into every word he excised from primary sources as if they were his own, his primary, flesh.

I’ve often imagined how this little morality tale would have been turned into a story by various writer-physicians. Dr. Anton Chekhov would have written a subtle but sorrowful account of logical injustice, administering to his pained women the anodyne of peasant humor. Dr. Louis-Ferdinand Céline would have written it louder and angrier, its ironies punctuated with insistent exclamation marks. As it is, in 1924 Céline, then known by his birthname, Destouches, produced a thesis titled The Life and Work of Ignaz Philipp Semmelweiss (practicing in Paris’s impoverished Montmartre, Céline’s specialty was also obstetrics). In the early days of its modernity, medicine was as much science as art, and Céline’s doctoral thesis was as significant medically as it was literarily: it asserted that what we call objective tragedy is just an instance of subjective ignorance, a refusal to recognize our failings.

Situated somewhere between the two, between Chekhovian understatement and Céline’s shocked histrionics, we would find the treatment by Ernst Weiss, a doctor and writer from Austro-Hungary. His Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer, has just been published in English nearly 80 years after its German debut and, in terms of character and plot, it can be read as an extreme transference of the Semmelweissian figure: Weiss’s hero, the eponymous Letham, is such a competent, dedicated scientist that he is imprisoned—though, unlike Semmelweiss, as the author’s subtitle tells us, Letham’s zeal for free research has led him to murder.

***

Ernst Weiss—like not only Chekhov and Céline but also like Arthur Schnitzler, William Carlos Williams and, if we must, Michael Crichton—was a physician and creative writer, and he, more than any of his peers, found a way to integrate the disciplines. The best of his books concern medicine and medical workers: doctors, nurses, patients, doctors and nurses becoming patients, and test subjects both witting and not. Weiss was born in 1882 outside Brünn, Austro-Hungary, now Brno, Czech Republic, and grew up in towns throughout Moravia and, later, in Prague and Vienna, where he obtained his medical degree in 1908. After practicing in Berne, Berlin, and Vienna (in the last under Dr. Julius Schnitzler, Arthur’s brother), he contracted tuberculosis, and went to recover on voyages aboard the liner Austria to India and Japan. In the correspondence of Joseph Roth, a fellow chronicler of European infirmity, Weiss is described as “a man who traveled to the coasts of foreign lands as a ship’s doctor without setting foot on land, and who stayed in his cabin in order to write.”

Upon his return to Prague in 1913, Weiss made an impression on another Empire luminary, Franz Kafka. Here is a selection of Kafka’s diary entries about Weiss:

“Jewish physician, typical Western European Jew, to whom one therefore feels instantly close.” (7/1/1913)

“Artificial constructions in Weiss’ novel. The strength to abolish them, the duty to do so. I almost deny experience.” (12/8/1913)

Here Kafka is referring to Weiss’ first novel, Die Galeere, or The Galley, which concerns a radiologist and is among the first texts, literary or scientific, to link x-ray radiation with cancer. After a wartime career as a military physician, for which he was awarded a Gold Cross for bravery, Weiss settled into practice in Prague with his wife, Rahel Sanzara (a pseudonym for Johanna Bleschke), a dancer, actress, and novelist. In 1921 they moved to Berlin, but Weiss returned to Prague alone in 1933 to tend to his dying mother. Between 1913 and the end of his life, Weiss wrote nearly 20 novels, including Der Augenzeuge, or The Eyewitness.

That book, written in 1938, published posthumously in 1963, concerns a German veteran of World War I, referred to as A.H., obviously Adolf Hitler. A.H., suffering from “hysterical blindness,” is committed to a military hospital. Hitler himself was diagnosed with just such a condition, hysterische Blindheit, at the military hospital at Pasewalk in 1918, and Weiss is said to have had access to Hitler’s medical file, which was smuggled to Paris for safekeeping by Hitler’s wartime psychiatrist, Dr. Edmund Forster. (It is, of course, indecently funny to imagine Hitler submitting himself to Freud’s discipline, that derided “Jewish science.”) It was in Paris that Weiss lived after the death of his mother in 1934. On June 14, 1940, the Nazis invaded, and the writer either ingested poison or overdosed on barbiturates. But, curiously for a physician, the amount he took of either substance was not sufficient, nor was the subsequent slashing of his wrists immediately effective; his suicide was successful only 24 hours later.

***

George Letham, Physician and Murderer is only the fourth book of Weiss’ to be published in English (The Eyewitness, The Aristocrat, and Franziska preceded it), but it is the longest and most characteristic. Its 500 pages tell the story of a man who, in order to end his unhappy marriage and so to immerse himself in research, injects his older, wealthier, well-insured wife with a lethal poison known as Agent Y, then proceeds to botch a cover-up: The man leaves the syringe at the crime scene, and he immediately rushes off to confess to his father, a powerful official in municipal bureaucracy. (It sometimes seems as if all fathers in Austro-Hungarian fiction are “powerful officials in municipal bureaucracies.”) Letham, after being underserved by an inept lawyer, is sentenced to a tropical penal colony ravaged by Yellow Fever, known in the book as Y.F. (Joel Rotenberg’s translation is occasionally disappointingly faithful.) There, as prisoner, he finds the professional purpose that was unavailable to him in civilian life, as he begins to search for the origins of the epidemic. Formerly an isolated technician, in the colony he’s forced to interact with patients, especially with a young beautiful Portuguese girl—in addition to convicted murderers, rapists, thieves and, what’s worse, benign homosexuals such as his cellmate, March. (Georg Letham is notable among period novels for being entirely uneuphemistic in its treatment of homosexuality.)

Gradually, a mosquito—either Stegomyia calopus, or Stegomyia fasciata—is identified as the carrier of Y.F., and by novel’s end that insect is eradicated while the narrator, the wife-murdering Letham, insists on not being credited for his service to humanity. Indeed, as soon as Y.F. is neutralized, the book concludes, and Letham disappears, along with unresolved subplots about rat-catching (rats being the terrene version of mosquitoes, perhaps), expeditions to claim the North Pole, and the malevolence of paternal love.

Georg Letham is essentially an exploration of medical ethics—of what the limits of research can be. Is it ethical to perform experiments on animals? Is it ethical to perform experiments on people? Is it more ethical or less ethical to experiment on prisoners? These questions are not so much implied in the text as sincerely asked; this is a first-person-book, and Letham has no compunction about rhetorically, and even non-rhetorically, stating his concerns. Though writers today have convinced themselves of a greater sophistication than this, and tend to bury their philosophy within the flesh of their narratives, Weiss’s primitive address remains overwhelming: it doesn’t seek to fool or numb us with art; rather, it pushes us to consider and answer these questions, as opposed to just flattering us for having discovered these questions embodied in the characters and scenes of a novel.

Georg Letham itself is an experiment: it wants to investigate how fiction can, like a mosquito or rat, transmit the pathogen of fact; and how art can analgesce man’s relationship to nature. Reading Weiss, we’re reminded that the laws of nature are not the suggestions and insights of literature—natural law is infinitely more stark and remorseless—and that the truths of science cannot be refracted or bent; they can only, per Semmelweiss, be ignored. It was Weiss’ depressive achievement that he took these truths—the truths of infection, and disease—and, recognizing the peril of ignoring them, repurposed them as test cases: to demonstrate, through novels of exceptional directness, how fallibly we humans respond to the ultimate fact of our mortality.

Twenty years after the fall of Communism, it’s clear that two literary styles were created in the Soviet Union: one was the official style of Socialist Realism, the other the Underground response. By order of the State (though those orders changed by decade and by country), Socialist Realist literature in the Eastern Bloc had to be about, and for, the proletariat; it had to depict the daily life of that population; that depiction had to be in a realist style, which is to say it had to be accurate to the ideal of proletarian life, and contain no experiments, or formalisms; and, finally, it had to support, but not independently further, the objectives of the Communist Party (these were the four dictates decided upon at the first meeting of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934). What resulted was a literature of direct language, of direct address—an anagogical, or fabling, literature in which no story could be told without a moral in mind, explicit or implied. The goal of this literature—this literature had goals—was not to entertain but to instruct, to make a new type of man by making a new type of writer: not a poet of inky individuation, but, as Stalin put it, “an engineer of human souls.”

It is this tautology that enabled that other style: a Socialist Realist writer must write about reality in a realistic style, but he must also remain partisan, and at all times reinforce the party line. When these two impulses become contradictory, the writer risks shading into the realm of irony, or satire; and suddenly what had been didactic and simple becomes complex, or “subversive.” This, of course, was the literature of those writers who wrote for oblivion, or for the drawer, for a dimly free future, or for a cynically regarded, because illegal, posterity. The writers of the Underground, who remained (mostly) unpublished under Communism, who, if they published, did so (mostly) in samizdat—a Russian word meaning “self-published,” either copied by hand, or by carbon on a typewriter—comprised the only authentic style under Communism, but only in retrospect. In its day its practitioners were scattered among too many countries, and too many languages, with each responding both to a general Soviet politics and, too, to the particular censorships of their home cultures (it appears to have been easier to get away with writing subversively in Yugoslavia than in Russia, for example).

Socialist Realist novels were occupied with the outside, the surface: a man is discharged from the Red Army as a hero and returns to his village, becoming a town, currently occupied with its reorganization around a new, nationalized cement factory (the novel Cement, by Fyodor Gladkov)—this is all exterior, a series of events or plot points supposed to demonstrate fate, outlining a life lived by political calling. By contrast, Underground literature—which we should instead call “real literature,” the only true literature of its time and places—was absorbed with the inner life, with the thoughts and so the psychology of characters. Show a Red Army veteran working productively in a cement plant and you have propaganda, but tell us the thoughts of this man and you have an artwork, and a dangerous one at that.

The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain is an anthology jointly produced by a website that focuses on literature in translation, Words Without Borders, and a new press, Open Letter, similarly tasked with publishing translations, based at the University of Rochester. The roster of contributors is immense and impressive, including Mircea Cărtărescu (Romania), Péter Esterházy (Hungary), Durs Grünbein (Germany/East Germany), Zbigniew Herbert (Poland), Paweł Huelle (Poland), Ryszard Kapuściński (Poland), Milan Kundera (Czechoslovakia/France), Dorota Masłowska (Poland), Victor Pelevin (Russia), Vladimir Sorokin (Russia), Andrjez Stasiuk (Poland), and Dubravka Ugrešić (Croatia/Yugoslavia). All these pieces—stories, novel excerpts, poems, essays, memoirs—have appeared before (with the exception of a fine introduction by Keith Gessen), but it is good to have them in one volume, both for purposes of comparison and also because each is so short and potent that when one is finished another becomes immediately necessary.

Kundera exposes the origins of Underground style in Kafka’s response to technological bureaucracy; Pelevin remembers drinking wine under the stars as a teenager, being fascinated by the idea of a collapsed society managing to put a cosmonaut in orbit; Cărtărescu recalls losing his virginity (read: innocence) to a girl who’d later work for Securitate, Romania’s secret police; while Ugrešić offers a manifesto on writing about Communism for the free market—on the commodification of the Eastern experience for the satisfaction of Western readers (and, too, for the enrichment of formerly Eastern writers).

Indeed, Ugrešić’s essay, “The Souvenirs of Communism,” is simultaneously a perfect end to, and perfection of, the style that was the Underground. She writes: “The literature of the post-communist showdown with communism was just as clichéd in its ideological strategies and artistic achievements as the literature of Stalinism had been. And for that very reason, all the more penetrating. The authors of these works managed to find the pressure points in the imagination of the Western reader. It turned out that the pressure points are not the inconceivable absurdities of communism, but simple, understandable things: poor dental hygiene and empty shops.”

One might add to her list: also disaffected, angry scribblers. Ugrešić’s rage at the rude selling of the Eastern narrative is nothing but her disappointment at being denied, in midcareer, her style. Having survived the fall of the Wall, Ugrešić—along with the majority of the writers in this anthology—had only retrospection left. However, it is because she has to chosen to reveal to us not the Socialist Realistic surface of retrospection, but instead its deeper, inward consciousness, that she remains a writer of necessity and power.

Indeed, it seems like the majority of Jewish liturgy not taken directly from the Torah is made of devotions arranged by permutations of letters, and interpolations of sums: for centuries, rabbis have composed acrostic prayers that spell their own names; and any visit to any synagogue on any day of the week at any of the three daily services will tell you that the number of times a text is repeated is just as important as what that repeated text actually means.

The occasion for these thoughts is no religious epiphany, but rather a rereading of French writer Georges Perec, whose 1978 masterpiece Life: A User’s Manual was just republished in a definitive translation by David Bellos. Perec was a member of Oulipo (an acronym for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, “the workshop for potential literature”), a French organization founded in 1960 dedicated to the practice, and publicizing, of new writing techniques. Oulipans, whose ranks included Italo Calvino and movement cofounders Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais, turned research itself into a literary art as they sought to identify novel constraints by which novels and stories could be produced.

Those constraints include, but are not limited to: Anagram; Palindrome; Word Limits; Vowel Limits; Word Replacement (in which every occurrence of a noun is replaced by another noun; for example, if noun = umbrella, then that fragment should read “in which every occurrence of an umbrella is replaced by another umbrella”); Vowel Replacement (in which the word ‘noun’ might be turned to ‘noon,’ the hour, or ‘naan,’ the Middle Asian flatbread, or to ‘neon,’); the Snowball (a poem’s verse or sentence in which each word is exactly one letter longer than the preceding word); and the Lipogram, from the Greek lipagrammatos (“missing symbol”), in which a text is generated that excludes one or more letters. Perhaps literature’s most famous Lipogram is La disparition, a detective story of sorts written by Perec in 1969, translated into English by Gilbert Adair as A Void; its 300 pages omit the letter ‘e,’ as if that vowel—and the book’s antihero, Anton Vowl—was representative of European Jewry, forever disappeared. Further, as the very name George Perec contains more than its share of the letter ‘e,’ the author has effectually self-effaced, having written himself out of his own book. Adair’s translation (which also is without the letter ‘e’) is a virtuosic reenactment of virtuosity: “With a loud and languorous sigh Vowl sits up, stuffs a pillow at his back, draws his quilt up around his chin, picks up his whodunit and idly scans a paragraph or two; but, judging its plot impossibly difficult to follow in his condition, its vocabulary too whimsically multisyllabic for comfort, throws it away in disgust.”

round and round by ratterrell / Robert Terrell; some rights reserved.

Perec was born in Paris in 1936, the son of Polish Jews recently emigrated west; he was related, albeit distantly, to I.L. Peretz, the preeminent Yiddish writer of the 19th century. Perec’s father was killed fighting for his adopted country in World War II; Perec’s mother was murdered, most probably at Auschwitz; Perec himself survived by hiding with relatives and then died too young of cancer in 1982. I invoke Perec’s Judaism only in the way that he did—by scorning religious ritual, and investigating the esoteric aspects, especially the parallels between Oulipian restrictions and the disciplines of kabbalah. It is kabbalah that is responsible for assigning mystical meaning, and numerical worth, to elements of language, and the majority of Jewish prayers utilizing word and letter permutation were composed coevally with the emergence of kabbalah.

Life: A User’s Manual (originally entitled La Vie mode d’emploi) is Creationdom in microcosm, a depiction of the inhabitants of a Paris apartment block at 8 p.m. on June 23, 1975. A curious Jewish character is Cinoc, whose name was originally Kleinhof, then Khinoss or Kheinhoss, changed to Kinoch, Chinoc, Tsinoc, and finally Cinoc. A cynic? Maybe, but also a Jew with a mezuzah affixed to his doorjamb. Perec’s characters from Cinoc to Rorschach to Madame Moreau to the Altamonts are creations entirely of words, and though the author’s prose manipulations might seem to be the most kabbalistic of his accomplishments, they are not. Forget that each chapter’s length is predetermined, that each chapter’s people are predetermined; forget each list of activities, of physical positions, and reading material; what’s most kabbalistic about Perec, and about the best of Oulipo, is not this technical aspect but the transmutation: the magical turning of one thing, a dead word, into another, a living person.

Kabbalistic practice—which, our sages hold, created angels and golems, animals for food and labor in the fields and even, once, in an experiment the Talmud attributes to Rabba, a walking talking human being—became, by the time fiction and poetry came to be written, a cultural act in which letters and words didn’t create life, but merely simulated it. Perec understood this virtuality, and exploited it to present the Oulipian writer—a writer of orders and systems, of cosmogonies and laws given only to be miraculously broken—as a sort of fallen god. Though in his time the new religion was art, or a religion of art, the mysticism underlying all making remained.

Darwish was born to a Sunni Muslim family in Al Birwa in the Western Galilee in 1941, under the British Mandate. He was seven when Israel was founded , and the family fled their orchards to Lebanon, to Jezzine and Damour. Later they illegally returned to Israel—insofar as one can return to a different country—and settled in Deir al-Asad, now known in Hebrew as Shagur.

If this was internal exile, true exile was to follow. In 1970 Darwish, then a communist, briefly attended university in Moscow before settling in Egypt, and then again in Lebanon. In 1973, he joined the PLO, for whom he coauthored the Palestinian Declaration of Independence. His fury seems particularly apparent here: “When in the course of modern times a new order of values was declared with norms and values fair for all, it was the Palestinian Arab people that had been excluded from the destiny of all other peoples by a hostile array of local and foreign powers. Yet again had unaided justice been revealed as insufficient to drive the world’s history along its preferred course.” Such affiliations prevented Darwish from living in his homeland again. However, in 1995 the Israeli government finally granted him and his family permission to settle in dusty Ramallah, in the West Bank—so far from the green Galilee of his youth.

round and round by ratterrell / Robert Terrell; some rights reserved.

Perversely for this poet of great metaphoric heart, his physical heart was weak—that is how the obituaries would frame Darwish’s infirmities and death. He suffered an infarct in 1984; two major operations followed. He died after undergoing intensive cardiac surgery in Houston, Texas, one year ago this month, and was buried in Ramallah, on a hill overlooking Jerusalem—Al Quds.

Author of more than 30 volumes of poetry and eight of prose, Darwish was a conscious but inadvertent polyglot: his model being the French Symbolists via the American Beats. His early career found expression in Classical Arabic, in verse metered and rhymed, but these strictures eventually gave way to what most Arab critics agree—I can only report their findings—was a uniquely protean and oblique utterance, angrily terse but humorous, always multiply meaning. His youthful political associations resolved themselves, as they usually do, into a sadder advocacy of the self, as Darwish once said in an interview: “I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet.”

Just as a critique of poetry might only change the critic. Which brings us to a justification of this essay, though it’s a pity that one should be necessary. I am writing about Darwish for Jewish readers for the following reasons: his was a fiercely sane voice for peace, and he remains a poet of international stature. Also, I should mention that Darwish spoke wonderful Hebrew—something that cannot be said for most of American Jewry.

A River Dies of Thirst is the first publication of Darwish’s journals to appear in English translation. Unfortunately this otherwise excellent edition offers no context for its selection, leaving the reader to assume one of two possibilities: either Darwish, during his short life, only managed to keep 160 pages of a diary, with each a minor masterpiece; or, translator Catherine Cobham has made her selection from a larger, looser corpus, choosing half poetry, half prose.

Whichever, the resulting book is our language’s best introduction to Darwish, as it brings together not only the personal and the political, but also nature writing with city life, exile with tourism, desire with regret.

Here is a prose entry:

If peace is a pause between two wars, then the dead have a right to vote: we will choose the general. If war is an accident on the motorway, then the living have a duty to vote: we will choose the donkey. But the living did not go to the ballot box, not because the snow was falling in big flakes, but because a sudden paralysis afflicted the city’s inhabitants, and when they opened their windows they saw spiders spinning their webs in the snow and went blind. When they tried to hear what was going on, storms arose, whose wild sounds were unfamiliar to them, and they went deaf. The astrologers said: “It is the chaos of existence at the door of the last judgment.” Luckily or unluckily for us, foreign historians, experts on our destinies and our oral history, were not here, so we don’t know what happened to us!

And here is the title poem:

A river was here

and it had two banks

and a heavenly mother who nursed it on drops from the clouds

A small river moving slowly

descending from the mountain peaks

visiting villages and tents like a charming lively guest

bringing oleander trees and date palms to the valley

and laughing to the nocturnal revelers on its banks:

“Drink the milk of the clouds

and water the horses

and fly to Jerusalem and Damascus”

Sometimes it sang heroically

at others passionately

It was a river with two banks

and a heavenly mother who nursed it on drops from the clouds

But they kidnapped its mother

so it ran short of water

and died, slowly, of thirst.

I have thought of writing the lives of some great artist—Shelley, Manet, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Chopin, Keats, Sappho, Emerson, Nietzsche, Redon, for instance—directly from a complete inhalation of and meditation on their work without any regard to the facts. Wherever the known facts conflict with my mythus, I shall reject them or flatly deny them. It would be a fascinating undertaking—the lives of Shakespeare, Chopin, Verlaine, for instance, as I conceive them to have been from their faces and work alone.

Such an endeavor would take considerable egotism, and that Benjamin De Casseres was possessed of that quality is no “mythus” but verifiable fact. The paragraph above is an extract from his voluminous, life-spanning diary that no one reads, and that, perhaps, no one will ever read. In this essay, we will try to be more responsible, though the sources are obscure. Despite Shakespeare dying centuries ago, the dates and important events of even his contested life are more thoroughly available than those of De Casseres, who wrote regularly for newspapers and magazines in the most public city in the world, New York, during the heyday of the most public century before ours, the 20th.

It is regrettable that for a man who wrote so much, so little is known, and so little is the desire to know. There is hardly any scholarship about De Casseres (he’s mentioned in a handful of doctoral dissertations regarding interwar New York literary society); none of his books are in print; and the manuscript of his thousand-page diary, Fantasia Impromptu, reposes in the basement of the New York Public Library, where I might have been the first person to read through its pages since they were interred there by De Casseres’ widow, Adele “Bio” Terrill, following her husband’s death in 1945.

Benjamin De Casseres was born April 3, 1873, in Philadelphia, to a Jewish family of Sephardic descent. And so, an outsider: This man so vocal about his Manhattan credentials was born out of town, in the sixth borough; not Ashkenazi like the majority of American Jewry, he was a nonimmigrant from comparatively exotic stock. The family name derives from Cáceres, the ancestral capital of the same-named Spanish province, and De Casseres himself liked to speculate that he was related to a hero of his, Spinoza: one Samuel De Casseres married Spinoza’s youngest sister, Miriam, became a rabbi and scribe, and offered the funeral eulogy for his teacher, and Spinoza’s excommunicator, Rabbi Saul Levi Mortera of Amsterdam.

De Casseres moved to New York by the turn of the century, began losing his hair, smoking cigars, drinking to excess. Physically, De Casseres writes of himself: “I am strong meat; false teeth and babies, lay off! Fat and Jewish; bedroom eyes; voluptuous flesh.” Surviving photographs by Arnold Genthe show a paragon of sly dissolution, tempered by self-seriousness, in precarious pince-nez, dark worsted suit and patterned, probably colorful, tie. (Genthe’s nitrate negatives, dating from 1925, are obviously in black and white).

However, the most telling autobiographical detail might be that of the outsized ambition De Casseres did his narcissistic best to conceal. If the man was, as he weekly reminded himself in print, the equal if not better of any writer who ever lived, then he was so unwittingly, as if against his will. He was, he said, like Rip Van Winkle of the Catskills, in that he “grew famous while [he] slept. I slept all day and worked on a New York newspaper all night (1900 to 1920), and almost precisely at the end of twenty years I was astounded to find out that I was famous not only in my own country but that I was being translated into French by no less a person than Remy de Gourmont, who was writing about me in the Mercure de France and La France.”

From his backrooms at 11 West 39th Street, a building that no longer exists, De Casseres mass-produced articles for dozens of publications: to begin with, The American Spectator, The Bookman, The Boston American, The Chicago Examiner, Fra Magazine, Gay Book Magazine, The Greenwich Village Quill, Haldeman-Julius Monthly, The Los Angeles Examiner, Metropolitan Magazine, The New York Evening Post, The New York Herald, The New York Journal-American, The New York Times, The New York World, People’s Favorite Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philistine, Reedy’s Mirror, The Revolutionary Almanac, The San Francisco Examiner, The Smart Set, The Sun, The Washington Herald; he wrote for Alfred Stieglitz at Camera Work; at the American Mercury he was edited by H. L. Mencken. De Casseres also provided ad copy for, among other concerns, cheesecake manufacturers, and graphomaniacally ghostwrote radio commercials: “With a genius that is profoundly Latin to my latter atom, I have been accepted and printed in various magazines in an Anglo-Saxon and puritan country. I am a one-call salesman. If I don’t succeed at first, I never try again.”

Not just columns on literature syndicated by the Hearst Service and interviews with the likes of Charlie Chaplin. De Casseres amassed reams of drama, and fiction: “And some days I love to write lines for poems I’ll never write.” His books and booklets include: The Adventures of an Exile; Anathema!: Litanies of Negation; Black Suns; The Book of Vengeance; Broken Images; The Chameleon; The Comedy of Hamlet; The Communist-Parasite State; The Complete American; Don Marquis; The Eighth Heaven; The Elect and the Damned; Enter Walt Whitman; The Eternal Return; Finis; Forty Immortals; I Dance with Nietzsche; The Individual Against Moloch; James Gibbons Huneker; The Last Supper; The Love Letters of a Living Poet; Mars and the Man; Mencken and Shaw; Mirrors of New York; The Muse of Lies; My New York Nights; The Overlord; Robinson Jeffers, Tragic Terror; The Second Advent; The Shadow-Eater; Sir Galahad: Knight of the Lidless Eye; Spinoza: Liberator of God and Man; The Superman in America; When Huck Finn Went Highbrow; Words, Words, Words. One of his most personal preoccupations was editing The Sublime Boy, a volume comprising poems by his younger brother Walter, a depressed homosexual who committed suicide at the age of nineteen by hurling himself into the Delaware River. (Poet Edwin Markham, in a letter to De Casseres: “I am touched by your brother’s failure to fit himself to this tragic existence, touched also by the pathos of his fate”; other of the surviving De Casseres’ correspondents: British sexologist Havelock Ellis, French writer Maurice Maeterlinck, science-fiction writer Clark Ashton Smith, paranormal investigator Charles Fort, Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht, poet Edgar Lee Masters, novelist Damon Runyon, and Nietzschean Oscar Levy.)

But De Casseres’ posterity mainly rests on a single poem, Moth-Terror, first collected in the Second Book of Modern Verse in 1919, edited by journalist colleague and correspondent Jessie Rittenhouse. The poem was subsequently recycled into numerous reprints and subanthologies that proliferated in schools, colleges, and book clubs even after World War II (which should tell our writers of today that if they intend their work to live for tomorrow, they should make friends with anthologists):

I have killed the moth flying around my night-light; wingless and dead

it lies upon the floor.

(O who will kill the great Time-Moth that eats holes in my soul

and that burrows in and through my secretest veils!)

My will against its will, and no more will it fly at my night-light

or be hidden behind the curtains that swing in the winds.

(But O who will shatter the Change-Moth that leaves me in rags —

tattered old tapestries that swing in the winds that blow out of Chaos!)

Night-Moth, Change-Moth, Time-Moth, eaters of dreams and of me!

All these elements of a life—the journalism, the interminable pamphleteering of poesy, the feverish letterwriting to more celebrated contemporaries—can be bound between two covers that don’t exist: De Casseres’ Fantasia Impromptu, subtitled ridiculously “The Adventures of an Intellectual Faun.” Unlike the preciously polished texts of the chapbooks and broadsides De Casseres self-published, sent around to friends for free and offered for sale to the general public for 50 cents apiece, this daybook—and, often, latenight book—could never be collected into finished form. Excerpts last appeared in an unedited 1976 Gordon Press Selected Works reprint of a privately subvented 1935 Blackstone edition (Blackstone seems to have been De Casseres’ own venture). “I can see the standpoint of the American publishers: an American thinker must be a fakir of some sort because fake is a national trait. They simply will not believe in the possibility of my existence—as an American. They can, and do, conceive me as a Spaniard or a Frenchman, but as a Philadelphia-born original—Jamais!”

Begun in 1925, soon extending to multiple volumes, De Casseres’ diary was dedicated “to the thinkers, poets, satirists, individualists, dare-devils, egoists, Satanists and godolepts of posterity”; the introducing author continues, on the manuscript’s frontispiece: “This book will be continued to the end of my life—a new volume about every two years. Please read carefully and to the end to get full flavor of book. It is all spontaneously set down, and all literally my self.” De Casseres kept making random undated entries into older, mentally weaker age; le prosateur was going on 70 when he noted that the world had never appeared so threatening: “This jealousy of likeness, that is at the bottom of the German persecution of Jews today,” and, “Adolf Hitler is as personal, private, and peculiar to the German people as my morning bowel movement is to me.” Toward diary’s end, just before his death, the physical evinces and affects as much as the written: Not only is De Casseres writing letters to God, but he’s writing letters as God, too, to himself; the paper gets cheaper, thinner; typewriting gives way to handwriting, a shaky agitated scrawl.

Interleaved with metaphysical whimsy, racism, and misogyny (“God couldn’t possibly be a female, for He keeps so well and so long the profoundest secrets of life”), along with a loathing regard for his own Judaism, is to be found a trove of the most startling epigrams our country has ever known — the work of an American La Rochefoucauld or Lichtenberg, a Karl Kraus or George Bernard Shaw. Indeed, these stacks of incomprehensible, often insipid pages could be edited down to a one-hundred page book of surpassing aphorism; but because I haven’t yet received that commission, and not everyone has the time for a library visit to pile through the archives, I offer the following—a De Casseres Chrestomathy, as Mencken styled his own collection of a career’s worth of the miscellaneous but brilliant:

A practical man should have knuckles in his eyes; a poet should have them in his images.

To almost any American “thinker”: the feet of your thoughts are always asleep.

All summits are cemeteries.

Art can only influence artists.

If you have no ideas, beware of your tenses and your grammar.

An emotion has more reality than a nail.

Hope is the promise of a crucifixion.

Whatever we do is a remedy.

Beauty is distance.

Only the ugly are modest.

Identity is partisanship.

The difference between Science and Theology is that Science is evolving ignorance and Theology is static ignorance.

We used to say, “It is raining.” Now (1930) it would be more appropriate to say: “The bladders of the atoms have opened and torrents of electronic urine lave the asphalt.”

Symbol. — I live behind a statue of myself.

Esoteric.— If you swallow your jewels you will have to recover them in your excrement.

Things that intoxicate me. — Gardens; the sea; mountain solitudes; great poetry and great prose; abstract ideas; profound sleeps; twilight; music; God, the sense of Wonder and Mystery; Satan; amorous sports; Bio’s love; the peace of death; wine; fastflying automobiles when I am in one; the voice of little children; the word Shelley; the word Baudelaire; the words Victor Hugo; imaged coitions with ideal women of an impossible beauty; well-buttered lima-beans; spaghetti; the flash of a metaphor through my brain; praise from superior minds; the stars; checks, checks, checks.

Keep the masses happy. Unhappiness should be the privilege of the few.

To have written a book that no one has ever read is like having a face that no one has ever looked at.

Pleasure has no eyes.

All life aspires to mirrors.

Pasternak’s autobiography, Safe Conduct, was published in English 60 years ago this spring, and has just been republished in an anniversary edition from New Directions; the Russian original of this fragment of formative days was written in 1930, just a year before Pasternak’s first marriage collapsed. And yet there’s no mention of this union with Yevgeniya Lurye, and none either of their son, Yevgeny. The author’s father, Leonid, a portraitist of Leo Tolstoy and the first Russian painter to espouse Impressionism, and his mother, famed pianist Rosa, only make brief appearances; and one would think, from reading for facts, that the only events that ever affected Boris Leonidovich after his birth in 1890 were a mysterious Tintorettan dusk in Venice and meeting the poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky.

The benefit of memoir is that you can say whatever you wish. In autobiography, one’s life—which is normatively, experientially, a succession of days that all seem the same, that recur weekly, monthly, by the season and by the year—can be revised into those few verses and lines of deep being, of living wholly. Here, Pasternak holds his pen away from any phrase or word that is not exactingly whole, and he appears to have no use for personalities that are not similarly encompassing.

Boris Pasternak

His autobiography is essentially structured around them, or around them as symbols. Safe Conduct begins with a sketch of Russophile Rainer Maria Rilke, another friend of the Pasternak household and a later mentor to the son. Then the young poet—not yet a poet, still a composer and pianist under his mother’s sway—receives a musical education at the hands of Alexander Scriabin; following his forsaking of a music career due to lack of Absolute Pitch, Pasternak gravitates to philosophy, and with money his parents scrape together departs for Marburg to study under the neo-Kantians, notably Hermann Cohen. Homesickness and café disillusion follow, philosophy abstracting into poetry as Pasternak decamps Marburg to tour the Continent before returning to Russia, where he’s nearly met at the train station by the movement called Futurism and its Soviet saint, Mayakovsky.

Such is the formlessness of this book. It is a winding track of memories and poesy that leaves largely unmentioned such negligibles as the First World War and the 1917 Revolution. Readers might be reminded of Rilke’s own faux-autobiography, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, or even subsequent imitative attempts by lesser Russian poets, such as the Precocious Autobiography of Yevgeny Yevtushenko, which flits among light criticism of the Stalin years, expressions of solidarity with an exemplary Socialism, and literary gossip: “Pasternak was as yet unintelligible to me. He seemed to me too complicated and I lost the thread of his thought in the chaos of his imagery.”

But perhaps the best analogy can be found in the other arts with which Pasternak concerns himself. Musically speaking, Safe Conduct is a theme and variations, a passacaglia whose grounding bass is the poetry he would later write. Alternately, one could think of his father Leonid’s renowned portraiture and see in the younger Pasternak’s lifewriting a veritable gallery of Rilke’s rigor, Scriabin’s ecstasy, Cohen’s stolidity admixed with Jewish sentiment, and finally Mayakovsky’s Revolutionary verve. While Pasternak was compelled to live long under Stalin, to be canonized by the regime and yet forced to refuse the Nobel Prize for his dissident Doctor Zhivago, Mayakovsky—the incomprehensible laureate of a newer world, who thrilled Pasternak with his “cloud that wore trousers,” his daring and abhorrence of tradition, his womanizing and conversation—commits suicide too young: “The beginning of April surprised Moscow in the white stupor of returning winter. On the seventh it began to thaw for the second time, and on the fourteenth when Mayakovsky shot himself, not everyone had yet become accustomed to the novelty of spring.”

On the last page of Pasternak’s memoir, Mayakovsky is turned into a symbol of all Pasternak still has to survive, of all that all Soviet artists had to survive—idealism and its disappointments, opportunity alongside opportunity for gulag—and this transubstantiation of a man into an age is worth quoting in full:

Suddenly, outside, underneath the window I imagined I saw his life, which now already belonged entirely to the past. I saw it move obliquely from the window like a quiet tree-bordered street resembling the Povarskaya. And the first to take its stand in this street, by the very wall, was our State, our unprecedented and unbelievable State, rushing headlong towards the ages and accepted by them for ever. It stood there below, one could hail it and take it by the hand. Its palpable strangeness somehow recalled the dead man. The resemblance was so striking that they might have been twins. And it occurred to me then in the same irrelevant way that this man was perhaps the State’s unique citizen. The novelty of the age flowed climatically through his blood. His strangeness was the strangeness of our times of which half is as yet to be fulfilled. I began to recall traits in his character, his independence, which in many ways, was completely original. All these were explained by his familiarity with states of mind which though inherent in our time, have not yet reached full maturity. He was spoilt from childhood by the future, which he mastered rather early and apparently without great difficulty.

Certainly it is more difficult to write well than to pull the trigger, and in his outliving of Mayakovsky, Pasternak found his strongest voice, as well as that estranging sense of living one’s own autobiography that might be necessary to poets in their practice. Pasternak once wrote, “the biography of a poet is found in what happens to those who read him,” but the mystical reversal became truer with time: the biographies of readers are found in what happens to the poets who write for them. That is true of the mad frothing youth that read doomed Mayakovsky. And that is true of the grayer, suffering Russia that called Pasternak her own.

I didn’t, however, think about the beliefs of these disciplines, but about their similar writings—their literatures. Indeed, while the theological differences between Zen and Hasidism appear irresolvably stark—Hasidism believes that the self is effaced by approaching God, whereas Zen holds that a denial of self also must mean a denial of God; Hasidism’s belief in Messianism appears to nullify Zen’s transmigration—the literary relationship between the two seems undeniable.

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“The essence of wisdom is silence. If a word is worth a sela, silence is worth two. When I speak I regret, and if I do not speak I am not regretful. Until I have spoken I am ruler and master over my speech, but after I have spoken, the words master me.”

The above transgression of silence was not transcribed on a scroll by a monk, or delivered to an acolyte by a Zen Master from atop a Himalaya. It is, instead, the 86th section of the Sefer Hasidim (The Book of the Pious), attributed to Judah ben Samuel of Regensburg, known as Judah the Pious, founder of Ashkenazi Hasidism in the late 12th and 13th centuries. That collection of folk wisdom is also responsible for instructing its readers not to write notes in the margins of books—a proscription that covers, one would think, the margins of the Sefer Hasidim—and for forbidding the killing of lice at a table where meals are to be served.

Not just style and subject, however. Zen and Hasidic stories also share a handful of forms: a question-and-answer format reaching its highest expression in the Zen koan, which is a senseful question given an answer whose seemingly nonsensical aptitude confirms the student’s capacity to apprehend a Zen principle; a type of anecdote pertaining to a famous personage—in Zen a Master, in Hasidism a rabbi, known in Yiddish as a rebbe—often related after that person’s death by a student, or relative-disciple; and, most literarily, the miniature tale whose miracles can be taken either at face value, or in a spirit of allegory.

A monk asked, “What is the depth of the deep?” The master said, “What depth of the deep should I talk about, the seven or seven or the eight of eight?”—attributed to Zen Master Zhaozhou, 778-897, China

The Baal Shem said: “What does it mean, when people say that Truth goes all over the world? It means that Truth is driven out of one place after another, and must wander on and on.”—attributed to Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, founder of Russian Hasidism, 1698-1760, Polish Russia

Tellingly, in Zen, most questions are asked by one person to another, by Master to disciple or the other way around, whereas in Hasidism the rebbe tends to ask his own questions to and of himself; this rhetoric should give a sense of the explicit didacticism of Hasidic literature. This is absent from the writing of Zen, which, neither poetry nor prose or catechism, reads as rawer, more naturalistic, or less mediated—and this despite the linguistic distance between Chinese and Japanese and the translations read by the rest of the world.

Another attribute uniting these literatures might be called authority: literature gains authority from its authors, and from the publishing houses and outlets that publish them. But in an oral tradition, authority derives directly from the Master or rebbe. The text is what the text is because the Master or rebbe said it was that; it is up to the disciple to interpret the meaning. Then, when the disciple himself becomes the Master or rebbe, those interpretations will become simplified into primary texts whose meanings must be decrypted by subsequent disciples, and this is the way a tradition works—a tradition, which is continual, as opposed to a culture, which is reactionary.

A disciple told: whenever we rode to our teacher — the moment we were within the limits of the town — all our desires were fulfilled. And if anyone happened to have a wish left, this was satisfied as soon as he entered the house of the maggid [Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezeritch, 1710-1772, Poland]. But if there was one among us whose soul was still churned up with wanting — he was at peace when he looked into the face of the maggid.

The Master [Ryōkan Daigu, 1758-1831, Japan] never displayed excessive joy or anger. One never heard him speaking in a hurried manner, and in all his daily activities, in the way he would eat and drink, rise and retire, his movements were slow and easy, as if he were an idiot.

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While noting aesthetic affinities between the two literatures, it should be remembered that the two languages of Zen’s codification, Chinese and Japanese, have no relation to Hasidism’s Yiddish and Hebrew; and, as if to disorient with obviousness, between them confounds the entire continent of Asia. However, Zen and Hasidic writings were separated not only linguistically and geographically, but also by centuries, nearly a millennium: Zen distinguished itself as a separate Buddhist school in sixth century China, before disseminating to Japan five hundred years later, just as European Jewry was afflicted with the first of the Crusades; while Eastern Hasidism arose in pogrom-ridden Polish Russia in the early part of the 18th century, by which time Zen literature had been widely anthologized.

But their origins bear many similarities. They both began as oral literatures of the peasantry, of the village and town as opposed to the city; they are literatures of the poor and uneducated (Hasidism’s founder, the Baal Shem Tov, was an indifferent Talmudist; Zen’s Sixth and last Patriarch, Huineng, was an illiterate woodcutter when he began studying under the Fifth Patriarch, Hungjen); they both grew out of a revolt against intellectualism, Zen as a meditative response to the increasingly elaborate tenets of Mahayana Buddhism, Hasidism as an ecstatic rejoinder to the rote primacy of scriptural interpretation; they are the oral musings of wandering peoples, or of peoples whose leaderships developed a habit of itinerancy, in order not just to attract adherents but also for the sheer sake of experience. They are both literatures of functional hierarchies: transmitted to novices from teachers serving as intermediaries between a public and the ineffable; and, they are both literatures of peoples politically compelled to withdraw from the world or, better, to create an ideally ascetic world within their own communities, in monasteries and rabbinic courts, and then, failing that, within private cenacles — within their own selves.

About their codifications. The Blue Cliff Record and The Book of Equanimity (also known as The Book of Serenity) were collated in 12th-century China, while The Gateless Gate was compiled a century later toward the decline of the empire’s hyperliterate Song Dynasty—at the time of the fragments of Kalonymos ben Isaac the Elder, Samuel the Pious, his son Judah the Pious, and the latter’s apostle Eliezer ben Judah of Worms, whose Ashkenazi Hasidism, centuries before that of the Russian Pale, was a consequence of the destruction of the Crusades, and the tragic conduct, commerce, and sumptuary laws that followed.

Hasidism’s canonical stories were assembled from their diverse sects for translation only at the turn of the 20th century, however, when the German-speaking Jews of Berlin and the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s three cities, Vienna, Budapest, and Prague, became involved with, because more alienated from, the ethnicities of their ancestors, and were negotiating their returns to the wilds of a modernized Hebrew, and Yiddish. Coincidentally, perhaps, this Jewish dream of a comprehensible patrimony emerged just at the apex of Europe’s interest in the Orient—in the folkways, literature, and esoteric philosophies of that other East.

European artistic penchant for the Orientalistik grew out of the design style known as “chinoiserie,” whose motifs were brought to the continent by emissaries of the Dutch East India Companies in the 17th and 18th centuries. Its manifestations included the decoration of porcelain vases with ostensibly Asian tableaux, and the erection, on British and French and German noble estates, of pagodas of a theoretically Buddhist architecture. In literature, this vogue culminated with Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, the bildungsroman of a boy’s spiritual progress in India during the reign of the Buddha, though its elements resound throughout all of the arts and are evident in the background patterning of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh and Gustav Klimt, and in the use of that imported percussion instrument, the gong, in the First Symphony of Gustav Mahler.

At the same time, Jews of the great European cities who’d become changed by what they considered to be the more authentic lives lived by their Pale coreligionists included not only Buber, amassing his landmark Die Erzählungen der Chassidim (Tales of the Hasidim, from which the selections in this essay are excerpted), but also friends Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, who immersed themselves in the contradictory doctrines of Messianic redemption (which early Hasidism was fascinated with) and Zionism (with which later Hasidism has maintained a skeptical relationship).

Foremost among those artistically converted by experience with Judaism’s East was Franz Kafka, who befriended Yitzchak Löwy, an actor of the traveling Yiddish theater, and the writer and dilettante Hasid Jiří Langer, an assimilated Jew but an occasional disciple of the third and fourth rebbeim of the dynasty of Belz. Kafka recounts in his diaries numerous tales told to him by both Löwy and Langer, Talmudic anecdotes and folk midrashim—and he manages to get many wrong, or confused—but aphorizes in a letter: “Langer tries to find or thinks he finds a deeper meaning in all this; I think that the deeper meaning is that there is none and in my opinion this is quite enough.” (Kafka also admixed the Oriental. His The Great Wall of China is a kabbalistic parable in Asian guise—its wall could just as well be Jerusalem’s Kotel, with each reader sharding together the meaning of the text made his own reduced Herod.)

By the time a warring Europe had become thoroughly existentialist – which is a philosophy that complicates the tenets of Zen with nihilism – West’s codification of East was so influential that it itself had become a kind of original: not an authentic thing to be sanctified, but a quality of hybridism to be emulated. Writers, after all, are readers, too, and though they might be cut off from an oral tradition, they do have recourse to regretting that estate by misrepresenting the oral in books. After Kafka there derives a host of Jewish, and especially Israeli, writers occupied with such conscious rewrites and blunt manipulations, with the free excavation of the overtly antiquarian in the hopes of finding whatever style next—and style has always stood as a proxy for life; the search for it being, at depth, the search for a meaningful future.

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Which brings us back to Yoel Hoffmann and his Curriculum Vitae, gracefully translated by the American-born poet Peter Cole. Hoffmann’s story begins at the end of Jewish Europe with its twilit escapes into other forms of being an Other; his is the tale of a life lived globally not in imagination but in actuality, his globalism a product of both historical circumstance and his own affinity and will.

Born in 1937 in Hungarian Romania, an infant immigrant to Palestine, Hoffmann is considered Israel’s most accomplished Nipponist, having translated a score of works from the Japanese: scholarly texts, and collections of poetry, including an important anthology of Zen Buddhist Death Poetry, or jisei, comprising the tanka and haiku Zen Masters write before dying naturally, or committing ritual suicide. Already in his forties, evidently obsessed with his family—who’d been dispersed if not murdered in the very fields and thickets in which Hasidism arose—Hofmann began writing a kind of poetic novel that is sentimentally affecting by way of memoir or confessional verse, yet recklessly fragmented in structure.

No such interpretations or even facts are to be found in this memoir-as-résumé, however—this Life of Hoffmann as Hoffmannesque fiction.

Instead, in Curriculum Vitae we find only quicksilver, gnomic glimpses of the author’s studenthood, love, and marriage; of his growth as an Israeli son, husband, and father whose nostalgia for a Judaism lost is satisfied only outside the borders of Israel—in an irresistible attraction to the foreign, and to the foreign’s conversion into intimate terms: “We’re reading Buddhist texts with master Hirano,” he writes. “The sound of one hand (he says) when there is nothing to strike. Everything strikes itself. If you see a flower—you don’t think of eyes. If you hear a sound—you don’t think of ears. It’s like a man who comes to Kiev and at the train station has his wallet stolen. Now he’s in Kiev and has no wallet. He wants to call the police, but there is no phone.”

This is the style of all Hoffmann’s books: They are composed of brief, joking remembrances that take the sorrows of origins’ Judaism, and offer them, in reparation, as hope, the detachment of Zen. The result is a fusion that doesn’t even need to take the Buddhistic as its deliberate subject to attain a sort of trancelike transcendence—a zazen whose silence still speaks with the accent of the shtetl.

Take this, from the novel The Shunra and the Schmetterling (Shunra is Aramaic for “cat,” Schmetterling German for “butterfly”; in this book, each vignette stands lonely on the page, as if in contemplation of the white that surrounds):

“At night the moon stands over the head of Andreas my father. He wants to depart from what he is and meanwhile writes “Y-H-V-H” on the display windows of a store for electric appliances.”

While Hoffmann’s father graffities the Tetragrammaton—a name of God that Hasidim spell in their minds in order to address the presence of God and so, to forget their own names—he does so not in any sacred context, but on the dingy plateglass of a Tel-Aviv shop. In Kyoto we still long for Kyoto; while in Israel, we are in Zion and yet still we crave Zion, and will for as ever long as Israeli literature is written.

Hoffmann’s is an exile literature in exile from itself: self-conscious, and humorously historicized, yet with none of its homage preserved obviously. In his pages, the oldest of folkish tropes are wryly revivified into a third literature, that of a new and Third East—an undiscovered continent of exotically compelling fictions.

Nadir’s Narayev—today a Ukrainian town—is a Russian compound of two constituents: na, meaning “to,” and ray meaning “paradise”—“To Paradise!” The name Nadir is also a compound, possessed of two meanings that seem to oppose: The Yiddish phrase na dir can mean either a polite, bourgeois “To you!” or else a gutter-sniping “Take this and choke on it!” In his writing, Nadir resides at the Lower East Side intersection of these translations—at the corner, say, of Grand Street and Grandiloquence.

I’ve plagiarized the above paragraphs from an essay I wrote in praise of Nadir’s previous book to have been translated into English—From Man to Man, which was published, as was the essay, in 2007. Mine was the only review of that book to appear. I take the obnoxious liberty of quoting myself because that is what Nadir would have done: An original in unoriginal circumstances, Nadir, too, had to write for money, and so borrowed generously from others and from himself. When it was time to emote, he emoted; he praised Stalin when it was appropriate to praise Stalin, and then condemned him, too, when it became convenient after Molotov and von Ribbentrop agreed to nonaggression in Moscow; he would sit down at his desk to write about sitting down at his desk to write; he fabricated excruciating love poetry to any woman who incited his lust: “How fine and how beautiful are all these things when put into a seven-dollar poem.”

Now the translator of From Man to Man, Harvey Fink, has given us a volume of Nadir’s selected stories. That Is How It Is offers more than fifty examples of the short fragments that Nadir wrote throughout his short life (he died of a heart attack, in 1943, in Woodstock, New York). These are stories concerned, almost entirely, with America—“a land where people do not go for strolls, where no one drinks wine.” All of these stories were written for deadline, for publication in the New York Yiddish press, in daily newspapers such as the Teglikhn Herold (The Daily Herald), Tog (Day), and Frayhayt (Freedom, the official communist newspaper), and in popular humor magazines like the biweekly Der Yiddisher Gazlen (The Jewish Bandit, which Nadir edited), Der Groyser Kundes (The Big Prankster), and Der Kibitzer (The Joker).

Nadir’s New York was the madcap capital of an unintelligible Amerike: “the land of prairies, watermelon,Yaka Hula dances, Theodore Roosevelt, the Singer building, habeas corpus, Coney Island, infantile paralysis, and breach of promise.” This new country came to represent a nadir for Nadir—a Fall not into gehenna, but into the mundane—and the darkest of his humor tells us that though life was better and easier here, it was somehow not as real, not as authentic, as it had been under the kaiser, or the tsar. Nadir’s best stories acknowledge that a freer life might be practically preferable, but theologically barren; that there can be no ecstasy in a nation where ecstasies can be mass-produced; and that only kitsch can comfort when the communal is usurped by capitalism, and by democratic enfranchisement:

Lost. Man here is lost. He has no value—like a wisp of smoke, like a piece of straw.

Yesterday a car ran someone over. I was in it. A crunch and a scream. No, not a scream, but a croak, like that of a frog. A tall man, crushed on the ground, his blood oozing out. One can’t touch him till the ambulance comes: the law doesn’t permit it. It’s important to know precisely in which position he was lying when the mishap occurred—necessary in order to be able to translate the tragedy into money. Money.

Then a woman bawling, shrieking, screaming, “Where’s his hand!” She is given the severed hand, pulls the diamond off, and then calms down a bit.

Elsewhere in this tale, “Meanwhile, I’m in the Land of America,” Nadir romances the Pale of Settlement:

Far from Broadway and Art will I kiss the earth—perhaps … (or not?) There I will sit upon the luminous mountain of the years of my youth and listen to the robin sing and to the sheep — praying to God …

And the shtetl, my home, will lay there before me: my luminous, small, still, rested world, which Time has only slightly erased and shrouded in mist and distanced, and yet—made closer and dearer.

Nadir made it seem as if the true work of writing Yiddish in America had been the living of Yiddish in Europe, and that the writing itself was mere transcription of the legacy of that past life—an offhand sort of paperwork. Fittingly, perhaps, many of his stories are no more than jokes or flitting character sketches; and many of his sketches are only catalogues of impractical advice: “Should a man live sitting down? Or should he live standing up?” (from “How Should A Man Live?”); “Give your children a good uneducation. Give your children an unschooling.” (“Uneducation”); “Live slowly, my friends!” (“Stop”). Concerned with the minor, with the corners of gardens and women’s mouths, with memories of Narayev’s lowly synagogue yards, Nadir felt no need to polish his folkways into what we call “fiction”; while the poetry that succeeded the sense of his sentences gives us, as if in explanation, the impetuous dashes and exclamatories of a heart that beat too intensely to bother with form. Here is Nadir’s own summation of his work, which embodies the practice it describes—beginning with a casual anecdote about an acquaintance, then turning to a fictionalization of the author, and ending, finally, with an encounter with the essence of writing:

B. Borchov was the first to pin me with the label: “a refined man.”

From then on I have been “a refined wordsmith!”

Although I no longer recall the year in which I used the word “fine” in my wordsmithing. Just as a hounded animal does not leap over a fence for the sake of leaping but in order to be on the other side, so too I employ words only in order to get over them all the quicker, in order to be on the other side of words.

Joshua Cohen, a contributing editor to Tablet, writes a monthly column devoted to literature in translation. He is the author of five books with a sixth, Graven Imaginings, a novel about the last Jew, to be published in spring 2010.

Alberto Giacometti sketched her with her hands either clasped in a saintly pose, or clenched out of neurosis. In one drawing, her shoulders are hunched, her neck inquisitively thrust forward, and her face open, as if nervously searching out viewers for their thoughts. The setting is a Paris atelier, 1958. In Vallauris in 1954, Pablo Picasso rendered the same woman, a painter known as Soshana, in darker strokes, with her hair exotically styled, and wearing a jacket deliriously striped. Here, her pose is reminiscent of Picasso’s famous portrayal of another tough female artist—Gertrude Stein. The gazes in both Picasso portraits are oblique, off to the side, as if women as strong as Stein and Soshana were not comfortable being made the objects of another’s appreciation. No mistress and no muse, Soshana never hoped to be known as a subject, but as a master in her own right.

One of the most diffuse, enthusiastic artists of the twentieth century, Soshana was born Susanne Schüller in Vienna in 1927, a daughter of the Jewish bourgeoisie. She received her earliest formal education amid the most rarefied of that milieu, attending Vienna’s Schwarzwaldschule, the first of the progressive girls’ schools founded by philanthropist Eugenie Schwarzwald (who was the inspiration for Ermelinda Tuzzi, heroine of Robert Musil’s epic novel of the period, The Man Without Qualities). Such a nontraditional institution needed to staff itself with nontraditional faculty, and its roster reads like a roll call of the Austro-Hungarian avant-garde: Schoenberg taught music, Adolf Loos taught architecture, and Oskar Kokoschka led a class in drawing. This school was where Schüller learned that being a woman didn’t preclude a painting career launched with the most liberal of ideals.

No idealism could curb the Anschluss, however, and the Schüller family escaped Austria for Switzerland, arriving in London just in time to witness the destruction of the Blitz. Finally, in 1941 the Schüllers arrived in the United States, where their only daughter met her husband, the painter Beys Afroyim (the Zionist cognomen of the Polish-born Ephraim Bernstein). Together with their son Amos, born in 1946, the Afroyims spent the latter 1940s traveling the country, sustaining a poor, boardinghouse existence by selling Schüller’s portraits of America’s Mitteleuropean refugees: Portraits by “Soshana” exist of composers Schoenberg and Hans Eisler, conductors Bruno Walter and Otto Klemperer, authors Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, and Franz Werfel on his Los Angeles deathbed.

In America, Schüller’s identity was split. She became a dutiful wife and mother, even while experimenting with the persona of “Soshana,” the moniker she first used, on her husband’s recommendation, in conjunction with her first solo show in Havana in 1948 (that name, the Yiddish for Hebrew’s Shoshana, means “lily-of-the-valley”). Her self-portraits reify this divergence. Soshana painted herself in the manner in which all Modernist men painted themselves—flattering their vanity with unflattering strokes, heroic in their ordinariness and exhaustion. In 1945, she stares seriously, her eyes intense, exophthalmic, while her mouth makes a petulant, desexualized mockery out of Modigliani’s sensuous Jewish puckers. Her brows, which even in photographs are her most memorable feature, are ostentatious, firm and furry, reflecting the severe central part of her hair. In a 1951 portrayal, her eyes are even more swollen than before, angrier, and she is holding flowers as if they were soured, disgusting objects, the decorations of a domesticity she was about to cast off. In Paris in 1955—having abandoned her husband and son in the United States in order to pursue her independence as an artist—Soshana paints herself again, now a liberated, and libertine, member of a creative community: In Artists in Paris she stands off to the side—a peer of the surrounding characters, struggling unknowns including the Indian painter Krishna Reddi, and the Japanese Tomoko Nakano (asked to label the painting’s other subjects later in life, Soshana had forgotten their names).

Taking over André Derain’s former studio, which she’d later abandon for Paul Gauguin’s old digs in the Rue de la Grande Chaumière, Soshana also set about befriending the stars of the art world, networking her way to the top: She flitted, and flirted, amid the likes of Brancusi, Bazaine, Calder, Chagall, Ernst, Klein, Kupka, Sartre, and Zadkine. Picasso, who admired the severity of her beauty, is said to have remarked: Je trouve qu’elle a du talent. “I think she has talent.” Giacometti was more effusive, and sincere, in his affection for “Mademoiselle Soshana.”

Though superficially something of a bonne vivante, Soshana suffered in her studio. There her life became a sort of feeling, functioning canvas for the sufferings of others. Unlike many of her contemporaries, who also made the mid-century journey from figurative art to abstraction, Soshana was guided not by any painterly hand or eye but by ideas, by politics, and by moral conscience. This condition gives her art a disembodied quality; making her portraits—even her self-portraits— seem somehow incorporeal. Soshana’s best paintings, then, are of decimated, depopulated landscapes, and their literary or programmatic moods can be inferred from a recounting of her titles: Fury of the Marshes, Chrysanthemum and the Spider, Dead City, Sad Flowers, Pain, Solitude, Disintegration, Bombed-Out Church, and The Wandering Jew.

This “Cassandra of the canvas,” as the Parisian press called her, soon tired of the French capital’s competitiveness, and, turning tourist, took her horrors on the road. Traveling Asia and Africa, Soshana exhibited her artwork—which decried poverty and war amid landscapes more poor and war-torn than any she had previously seen—to the terror and delight of Anglo-American and French expatriate communities. India’s Statesman called her “a prophet of doom—atomic warfare, loneliness and unemployment are her themes.” The Ethiopian Herald noted her “scenes from death, pain, doom, destruction, anxiety and loneliness.” In 1957 Soshana was invited by the Chinese Cultural Ministry for an unprecedented show at the Imperial Palace in Peking. In 1959 she visited with and painted Albert Schweitzer in a leprosy lazarette in Lambaréné, Gabon. Strange attractors, Surrealist connections, abound: Soshana once met the painter Francesco Clemente at a school for yogis in Madras, and chatted up the writer Graham Greene on a flight to Soviet Russia.

In 1959 Soshana resettled in Paris, where she collaborated on mock cave paintings with Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, while involving herself with the Danish-Belgian-Dutch art collective CoBrA. That movement’s neo-Lascaux motifs and hermetically significant glyphs would be integrated with Soshana’s emerging interest in Japanese and Chinese calligraphy, resulting in an art of grids and mildewed textures, overlaid with an alphabet indecipherable in its violence: jagged scribbles signified as wounds, ripped by clusterbombs of color, symbolic of primal pain as well as of the revolutionary struggles of the mid-1960s. After time spent in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Soshana embarked on a third world tour, visiting the South Seas, the Caribbean, Thailand, Bali, Australia, India, Nepal, Afghanistan, and Iraq, partially paying her way by painting portraits, including a rendering of the king and queen of Sikkim. In 1972, slowing down, Soshana moved to Israel, and the following year her Israeli debut exhibition was scheduled to open on the day of the beginning of the Yom Kippur War. In 1974, Soshana returned to New York, where her style, or styles, changed yet again, accommodating both Pop cartooning and a renewed darkness, this time representing urban grit, specifically the neglect of downtown New York.

Soshana’s art and life were so varied not out of any appetite for change or intellectual restlessness, but out of a profound dislocation and social anxiety. She did not know whether she was a weakened victim of Nazism, or an iron survivor set out to master the masculine world. In Paris she painted like a Parisian, and in New York she painted like her favorite New Yorkers—first generation Abstract Expressionists such as old friends Mark Rothko and Adolph Gottlieb, both of whom had died by the time of her Manhattan arrival. In her very itinerancy Soshana became the prototypical Jewish painter, a painter who—more than Chagall and Chaim Soutine, more than Rothko and, later, even more than Philip Guston and R.B. Kitaj—adapts her mind and styles to those of the cultures that host her wandering.

In the 1980s, Soshana returned to Vienna, where she still lives and paints, her career promoted by her son Amos, with whom she was reconciled after the death of his father in 1984. In March 2008 Austria released the 55-cent Soshana stamp, featuring her 1981 New York painting Rainbow. Her best recent paintings have been political, in series entitled Kosovo, and Middle East. Two newer canvases, currently on view in a Soshana retrospective at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York through February 2009, are called N.Y.C. I 2001, WTC and Chorramshar—Irak 1992; both paintings are bold and confrontational, tempting iconoclasm by directly representing the tragedies of their titles. A 1991 self-portrait is called The Way I See Myself, and while it’s not yet an epitaph, the stark presence of death overwhelms. Here she presents herself as a hysterical skeleton, a ravaged black figure boxed in by bars of black paint shot through with red and blue bristles. The canvas is entirely naked beneath, as if imprisoned by these lines, by Soshana’s figure. One of Soshana’s eyes is left open to this surface—the outline of a hole giving way to bare canvas, a grainy, pixilated ground like the Polish snow that would have been her fate.

Soshana’s career can be seen as a model for the last aesthetic that might still be called Jewish: empathy, or compassion. She absorbed, and as an octogenarian continues to absorb, the sorrows of others and, by way of interpretation, offers them out again as uniquely, biographically, hers. Soshana’s highest desire is to be modern, or new, which is to say, to be fashionable, and necessary. She wants, like many people want, to always be young. This makes for an art of insecurity—an art that is occasionally, if glimpsed between poses, beautiful in its desperation for the beauty it lacks.