Sandstone Press

Hitler’s victory

Posted by RLD on 13th September 2009

One of Saul Bellow’s best jokes, so good he uses it more than once, runs like this. Q: What is the difference between ignorance and indifference? A: I don’t know and I don’t care.

Here is another quote, this time from his novella What Kind of Day Did You Have. ‘Society didn’t care about art anyway, it was busy with other things, and art became the plaything of intellectuals. Real painters, real painting, those are very rare. There are masses of educated people, and they’ll tell you that they are all for poetry, philosophy, or painting, but they don’t know them, don’t do them, don’t really care about them, sacrifice nothing for them, and really can’t spare them the time of day – can’t read, can’t see, and can’t hear. Their real interests are commercial, professional, political, sexual, financial.’

All practicing artists should have these words tattooed on their hearts. Aspiring writers should also note the deployment of relevant detail, a demotic diction that is nonetheless accessible to all speakers of English, the joyfulness that arrives with the quick receipt of idea after idea and their accumulation into a unified whole. It is dance, really; and it is worth examining how this brief extract fits into its paragraph, how the paragraph fits into its passage and the passage into the novella. Do this, learn from the skills and strategy but do not attempt to mimic. You will fail, as I certainly did.

This extract has not been chosen at random, the maguffin of What Kind of Day Did You Have is the enlightenment of one woman, picked out from among those masses, who is living a life of survival and endurance and is in no position to act on the big news about art, that it is transformative. On the surface this is a tragic revelation but her life is reloaded for a future that will be altered utterly by the integration of culture into the choices she must make, and so there is hope. This last point is mine and, no doubt, shows me up for a hare-brained optimist.

There is a sparky Jewishness, especially in Bellow’s earlier work. In 1913 his parents Abraham and Lescha (Gordin) Belo immigrated into Canada from the Russian Pale in what was known as the Great Emigration, which is where baby Solomon was born two years later. After some more or less unfortunate adventures they moved to Chicago and, in time, young Solomon Belo became the novelist and Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow.

The language in the growing child’s ear was Yiddish. The songs he was sung by his mother while at her breast were sung in Yiddish. The arguments, discussions, manipulations of one parent by the other were carried out in Yiddish. Small wonder then, if Bellow brought the rhythms of the language and its linguistic strategies into his mighty command of English. He was of the bridging generation, and was the great bridging author, between European Jews and America. Please note that necessary adjective ‘European’. Please also note that it is synonymous with ‘Yiddish’, because a digression is necessary here, to a café in Arad, on Israel’s West Bank. By all means, say Palestine’s West Bank if you so choose.

Every day, another great Jewish novelist sits here toying with his coffee, observing and thinking. Amos Oz, now in his seventies, writes more than once of his late father’s experience of Europe after a fifty year absence; how, before he left, the graffiti ran, ‘Dirty Yids, piss off to Palestine’, and how when he returned it ran, ‘Jews, get out of Palestine’. Oz also notes, as they walk, run, drive busily past him, that his fellow Israelis come in all colours and shapes.

The idea of the Jew, in the West, is of a particular type (I refuse to use the word ‘race’ in this context), who generally look like Oz himself, and Bellow, and Bellow’s great successor, Philip Roth, all of whom come from a European Yiddish background. Oz points out that Judaism is a religion, a faith system. Anyone can join. He might add, as I do now, that Yiddish is a language with an associated culture and, when inherited, is passed not genetically, but from mouth to ear.

For reasons which Amos Oz explains in A Tale of Love and Darkness, Israel, a nation of refugees, chose Hebrew as its national language. This is the language in which he writes and from which his work is translated. It is the language now associated with Judaism and Jews and probably explains the exchange of pejorative noun in those two, fifty years asunder graffiti.

Longstanding hatreds, current wars and threats of war, historical persecutions, religious intensity, landgrabs back and forward, high running passions and identity politics often of the lowest kind mean that any discussion in these areas must be embarked upon with the utmost sensitivity. The collective pronoun ‘we’ always implies a ‘them’. Echoes of Ulster and the West of Scotland, the Balkans, the countries around Russia and the countries around Serbia are easily perceived. Indeed, they can hardly be missed.

Let me quote another of my great heroes, the Palestinian Edward Said in his Culture and Imperialism, ‘Identity, always identity, over and above knowing about others.’ Implied is the idea that, yes, we do need these identities, but not that they become elevated above fellow feeling and understanding. Europe and Israel (this time, Israel) are joined in many ways, and among them is the translation of Yiddish sensibilities, which is to say European sensibilities of a particular type, into a revivified Hebraic culture.

Chance had me tune into a BBC Radio 3 documentary on the resurgence of Yiddish in New York. People are learning the language, songs are being composed, books and poetry are being written. For the first time I was privileged to actually hear the language spoken and sung and it was a revelation how its pace and aural earthiness reminded me of the work not only of the Jewish American writers I have mentioned but also of speedy Jewish comics such as Lenny Bruce and Groucho Marx.

I was stopped in my tracks however, when an interviewee, a young man to judge by his voice, was asked a question about the holocaust. Instead of focussing on the massive toll of lives, or the cruelty, or any of its many facets that I have gradually become aware of through the course of my life, he angrily pointed to Europe and America’s very concentration on this tragedy, to the question itself. To paraphrase against my all too fallible memory: ‘Seventy years ago,’ he said, ‘Yiddish was spoken by millions of people across Europe. Imagine you bought the 500 page biography of some great writer, or politician, or artist, and 490 pages were given over to the death.’

There it is. I, a European, do not know what I have lost. I know that the worst of the killing was in Eastern Europe and that most of it happened by bullet, not gas. I know that it was the worst manifestation of a sustained persecution that included pogrom, ghettos, the Pale, legal constraints and individual, personal vilifications for centuries before the Nazi rise to power. I understand that many non-German people were actively complicit. I am aware of all this, but I know little or nothing of what Europe lost.

For that I must look to the work of Jews of the European, Yiddish tradition who managed to escape and survive and continue their family lines elsewhere. Now, after that brief statement from America I understand that the work of Bellow, Roth and Oz should have been ours, Europe’s, but we lost it. When the Nazi persecution of Jews increased dramatically we did not lift a finger. On one shameful occasion, we sent a shipload of them back. The Second World War was not fought to save European Jewry. I search the annals of my lifetime in vain for reference to European Jews as anything but ‘other’. I remember from the experience of my life many instances of contempt and one, witnessed, physical assault.

Let me return to Saul Bellow and the end of a story titled The Old System and, by the way, look at the name he gave to the doctor who observed a particular family of Jews and afterwards turned his attention to the stars: ‘Dr Braun, bitterly moved, tried to grasp what emotions were. What good were they! . . . once humankind had grasped its own idea, that it was human and human through such passions, it began to exploit, to play, to disturb for the sake of exciting disturbance, to make an uproar, a crude circus of feelings . . . But what did you understand? Again, nothing! It was only an intimation of understanding. A promise that mankind might – might, mind you – eventually, through its gift which might – might again! – be a divine gift, comprehend why it lived.’

This is what we have lost. Thank God some of it survived in America and, yes, certainly, Israel. Well before the end of his life Bellow was individuated enough to declare, ‘No more ethnic injury’, an apparently simple statement that we need desperately to repeat. No more ethnic injury given. No more ethnic injury taken and, of course, time.

Believe me, I write this with tears in my eyes. In Europe we do not know what we have lost. We do not understand. We can only take some clue from what has been created elsewhere and what little has survived from the past. We do not know what we have lost because, to a great extent, we can’t. When we speak of what might have been we are necessarily ignorant, but if we do not have any notion that what was lost was ours then indifference beyond a sense of pity is inevitable. If this is the case it follows that the Nazis have succeeded in their foul mission. European Jews will have been truly eradicated if we do not recognise their culture, especially their art and its transformative power, as part of our own.

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Sadly now out of print Saul Bellow: A biography by James Atlas was published in the UK by Faber and Faber in 2000.

What Kind of Day Did You Have first appeared in Vanity Fair and was later published in Saul Bellow’s short story collection Him with his Foot in his Mouth. The Old System is an earlier work that was first published in Playboy. Both appear in Bellow’s Collected Stories, published in the UK by Penguin, prefaced by Janis Bellow and introduced by James Wood. I agree with Martin Amis that this may be his greatest book. http://bit.ly/23Bku3

Amos Oz’s lengthy memoir A Tale of Love and Darkness (Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas De Lange) was published in the UK by Vintage in 2005. http://bit.ly/ZVGfM

For an inside account of what it is to be refugee there is no better book than our own Shadow Behind the Sun by Remzije Sherifi. http://bit.ly/C7agb