Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  It is not easy to counter this defence in its general form. But as a test case let us take the episode in The Moor’s Last Sigh in which Abraham Zogoiby, in a fit of enthusiasm for the modern, impersonal, ‘management’ style in business, adopts a young go-getter named Adam in place of Moraes as his son and heir. For some fifteen pages Adam occupies centre stage. Then he is dropped from the book. The episode peters out and has no consequences. I would hazard a guess that the reason why Adam disappears is not that Rushdie is following a particular narrative model but that he is only half-heartedly committed to satirising the business school ethos; he abandons this particular narrative strand for no better reason than that it is leading nowhere.

  Characters such as Vasco Miranda, Uma Sarasvati, or even Abraham Zogoiby himself, create a comparable problem. In their extravagant villainy they seem to come straight out of the entertainment factories of Hollywood or Bollywood. But, it might be argued, is this necessarily a drawback? In so palimpsested a novel as The Moor’s Last Sigh, why should the popular storytelling media of today not contribute to the textual layering? And are traditional folktales not full of unmotivated evil anyway?

  If we want to read The Moor’s Last Sigh as a mix of genres and a play of textuality, we must accept the consequences, however. When Moraes, in prison, wonders whether he is on the wrong page, he moves into a dimension in which not only the walls of his cell but he himself consist simply of words. In this purely textual dimension, Moraes’s lament that he is trapped within ‘colour, caste, sect’ and his longing for an authentic life outside them cannot be taken fully seriously. For if a creature of words wants to escape the inessential determinants of his life, all he need do is storytell his way out of them.

  V

  In fact Rushdie is far from being a programmatic metafictional postmodernist. The most obvious proof is that he is disinclined to treat the historical record as just one story among many. We see this in handling of the two histories out of which Moraes’s story grows: of the Moors in Spain and of the Jews in India. In the case of the Moors, and of Muhammad/Boabdil in particular, Rushdie does not deviate from the historical record, which Westerners probably know best from Washington Irving’s nostalgic sketches in The Alhambra. As for the Jewish communities in India, their origins are ancient and will probably never be known with certainty. However, the communities preserved certain legends of origin, and to these legends Rushdie adheres without embroidering, save for one superadded fiction: that the Zogoibys are descended from Sultan Muhammad (called by his subjects al-Zogoybi, the Unfortunate) via a Jewish mistress who sailed for India pregnant with his child. This story is specifically (though not unequivocally) bracketed as an invention by Moraes in his function as narrator.

  It is against a background of recent history, in which Rushdie’s own rather intellectualised play with varieties of identity was brushed aside by believers in a narrowly prescriptive notion of group identity, that we should understand the moment when Moraes, moving beyond a by now familiar Rushdian celebration of bastardy, mongrelhood and hybridity, rejects his ‘anti-Almighty’ father Abraham – a father ready to sacrifice him on the altar of his megalomaniac ambitions – and embraces a heritage that has hitherto meant nothing to him: ‘I find that I am a Jew.’ (pp. 336–7) For not only are Rushdie’s Jews (the Jews of Cochin, the Jews of Spain) powerless, dwindling communities; but to claim, voluntarily, the identity of a Jew, after the Holocaust, is to assert, however symbolically, solidarity with persecuted minorities worldwide.

  In a book in which ideas, characters and situations are invented with such prolific ease, one might wish that Rushdie had pushed the story of Moraes as rediscovered Jew further. ‘Here I stand,’ says Moraes/Luther, at the end of the journey of his life, ‘I couldn’t’ve done it differently.’ (p. 3) What does it mean in real-life terms, in India or in the world, to take a stand on a symbolic Jewishness?

  A final word. Five centuries after the campaigns of Ferdinand and Isabella swept Islam out of Iberia, the Muslims of south-eastern Europe faced genocidal onslaughts from their neighbours, Catholic and Orthodox. Though the word Bosnia is not so much as breathed (or sighed) in his book, it is inconceivable that the parallel did not cross Rushdie’s mind as he wrote.

  17 Aharon Appelfeld, The Iron Tracks

  I

  WHEN AHARON APPELFELD began writing in the early 1960s, the Holocaust did not count, in Israel, as a fitting subject for fiction. The prevailing public position was a Zionist one: that the assault on the Jews of the European Diaspora had been objectively predictable; that they had failed to escape it because of a certain passivity, a certain blindness on their part; that this passive set of mind would be eliminated, among survivors, by the new conditions of existence in Israel. Insofar as Israel was a new beginning, the Holocaust could have no relevance to its future.

  Combined with this public silence was a feeling that there was something indecent in representing the Holocaust, that the subject ought to be, if not beyond the reach of language, at least out of bounds to anyone who had not lived through it.

  The trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961 can be seen in hindsight as having been a watershed. A generation of Israelis, educated under Zionism but now exposed to the European side of the story, realised that the Jewish victims of the Third Reich could not be blamed for their fate and excluded from the history of Jewry. Since then a gradual shift in thought has been taking place, towards giving the history of European Jewry its proper place in the narrative of Israel, and thus towards accepting a conception of Israeli identity more eclectic than that prescribed by Zionism in its pioneer phase.

  As part of this national reorientation, the Holocaust has forced its way back into Hebrew literature. The work of David Grossman is particularly important here. In his novel See Under: Love (1986) Grossman drew upon the resources of international postmodernism to create a language in which whatever has been unsayable about the Holocaust could be, if not said, then at least adumbrated.

  To this movement in Israeli fiction Appelfeld has been a somewhat peripheral figure. Although, with Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, he belongs to the front rank of novelists of his generation, he remains the most European of Israeli writers, mapping, in one short book after another, a narrow fictional territory based on his own, and his family’s, past. Of these books, one sub-series, including Badenheim 1939 (1975), The Age of Wonders (1978), The Retreat (1982), and To the Land of the Reeds (1990), focuses on assimilated Jewish society on the eve of catastrophe. Another, including For Every Sin (1987), Unto the Soul (1994), and, most notably, Tzili (1983), tells stories of physical survival during the war and in its immediate aftermath. The Immortal Bartfuss (1983) and The Iron Tracks (1991) follow the fates of survivors of the war and the Displaced Persons camps.

  Appelfeld has testified eloquently to the struggle he faced before he could write about his own war experiences. He was born in Czernowicz, in Bukovina, into a German-speaking family. When the Germans moved in, his mother was shot, his father sent to a labour camp. He himself spent the war years wandering the Romanian countryside with other children, hiding, pretending not to be a Jew. He arrived in Israel in 1946, at the age of fourteen. To begin a new life there seemed to require a deliberate effort of forgetting. ‘[One] learned how to live without memory the way one learns to live without a limb of one’s body.’ As for finding a form of ‘artistic expression’ for his people’s suffering, this seemed merely insulting. ‘The pain and suffering called either for silence or for wild outcries.’1

  Appelfeld was able to re-enter his own past as a creative intelligence only when he took the step of re-imagining himself not as a clever young boy hiding from his pursuers but as a dull, inarticulate girl, Tzili. ‘Had I remained true to the facts, no one would have believed me. But the moment I chose [Tzili] . . . I removed “the story of my life” from the mighty grip of memory and gave it over to the creative laboratory.’2 Faith in the power of fiction to recover and restore the wounded self – ‘to give the tort
ured person back his human form, which was snatched away from him’ – has since then been at the core of Appelfeld’s work.3

  Despite his ostensible confidence in the healing powers of art (which would make of him a simpler, less self-doubting practitioner than his master Franz Kafka), the vision of the soul of the long-term Holocaust survivor that we get in Appelfeld’s fiction remains bleak. Both Bartfuss in The Immortal Bartfuss and Siegelbaum in The Iron Tracks are men who have cannily used the confusion of the postwar years to launch themselves to material success, yet in their mature years find themselves living impoverished, affectless lives, driven by compulsions they do not understand.

  Erwin Siegelbaum, in the latter book, is a creature of ritual, a trafficker in religious objects who since the end of the war has been travelling the iron tracks of the Austrian railway network, following a circular route. It begins each spring at Wirblbahn, site of the labour camp where he and his family were confined during the war – an ‘accursed place’, ‘a wound that won’t heal’ – and takes in twenty-one more stops. Each stop evokes memories; following the circuit entails reliving his life.4

  On his circuit Siegelbaum visits country fairs, buying up the surviving relics of Jewish religious life (goblets, menorahs, old books), which he sells to a collector who will eventually ship them on to Jerusalem. But his travels have a darker purpose too: he is on the trail of Nachtigel, onetime commandant of the Wirblbahn camp and murderer of his parents.

  As a family, the Siegelbaums had followed a pattern of assimilation common among Central European Jews. Erwin’s grandfather had been a rabbi in rural Bukovina, his father a dedicated Communist who even in the labour camp held to his new religion: ‘In a few generations people will remember us and say, Jewish Communism was the true Communism.’ (The Iron Tracks, p. 74)

  Young Erwin (whose name is a Germanisation of Aharon) is brought up speaking not Yiddish but German and Ruthenian. He does not go to school, but instead shares his father’s clandestine Party life. This involves winning converts among the Ruthenian working class by committing arson and sabotage against Jewish factory owners, treated by his father as ‘the very source of evil’. His father’s view of the Ruthenian peasantry, in contrast, is sentimental and uncritical. ‘Their way of life [is] correct and organic, and were it not for the estate owners and the Jewish merchants, they would live in complete harmony with nature.’ (pp. 63, 54)

  When war breaks out in 1941, the Ruthenians turn against the Jews among them. Of the Siegelbaums, only fifteen-year-old Erwin survives. After the war he finds himself in a transit camp in Italy, among hundreds of thousands of other displaced persons. He becomes a smuggler, trading cigarettes, liquor and watches, and accumulates a modest personal fortune. Ignoring the Zionist call to emigrate to Palestine, he remains near the grave of his parents, following the path of the iron tracks, never settling down, taking on the mantle of the Wandering Jew.

  II

  Appelfeld has acknowledged a debt to Kafka, but Kafka read as a Jew who in the course of being assimilated lost the core of his being and ached to recover it.5 His landscapes certainly have the pared-down, abstract quality of Kafka’s. Nevertheless, The Iron Tracks is recognisably set in rural Austria.

  The picture of Austrian life that emerges is as spiritually mean as anything produced by Thomas Bernhard, to whom Appelfeld is closer in tone and feeling than to his Israeli coevals. Appelfeld’s Austria is a land of smouldering, resentful anti-Semitism. A convert to Christianity who has quietly preserved some Jewish observances pronounces her verdict on it: ‘I should have left this accursed land . . . It should be wiped from the face of the earth, like Sodom and Gomorrah.’ (p. 114)

  Siegelbaum himself has no religious faith. But he does not live by faith: he lives by duty. His duty is to track down the killers from the camps. ‘As long as they live, our lives are meaningless.’ (p. 77) In his dedication to revenge he is the most sombre of all Appelfeld’s protagonists.

  Siegelbaum finds Nachtigel on a snowy country road, aged, toothless, sunk in depression. He shoots him in the back. But the success of his mission brings no release. ‘I had done everything out of compulsion, clumsily, and always too late,’ he reflects. Commended for the multitude of Jewish materials he has saved from destruction in the course of his labours (‘The Jewish people won’t forget your contribution’), he can respond only with raging anger. (pp. 218, 205)

  III

  A distinguishing feature of assimilated Jews of the generation which perished in the camps, says Appelfeld, was ‘anti-Semitism directed at oneself’.6 One invention of Christian anti-Semitism that has engraved itself deeply on history has been the myth of the Wandering Jew, roaming the face of the earth, unable to attain the peace of death. Erwin Siegelbaum, like other of Appelfeld’s protagonists, has swallowed and internalised this myth.7 Beneath his rage at the iron circuit to which he is bound we can detect a complex victimage: a sentence of self-hatred and self-punishment which, since it is handed down by an authority invisible to the sufferer, is understood not as a sentence but as a fate – a paradox worthy of the Kafka of ‘In the Penal Colony’.

  ‘The Jewish experience in the Second World War was not “historical”.’ Appelfeld has written. ‘We came into contact with archaic mythical forces, a kind of dark subconscious the meaning of which we did not know, nor do we know it to this day.’8 In his very ordinariness, Nachtigel embodies the paradox of the banality of evil on which Hannah Arendt put her finger. Facing Nachtigel, Siegelbaum confronts, in a sense, evil; but it is an evil whose essence it is to disappoint and frustrate its hunters. In this respect The Iron Tracks is a deeply pessimistic and even despairing book, the darkest that Appelfeld has written.

  18 Amos Oz

  I

  IN AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF childhood the first moral crisis often looms large – the moment when the child faces for the first time a choice between right and wrong action. It is a moment which, in retrospect, the autobiographer recognises as having had a formative effect.

  One such moment is the theft of the ribbon in Book 2 of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions. The young Jean-Jacques steals a ribbon and, rather than speak up, allows a maidservant to be blamed for the theft and dismissed. He has chosen for ill, but his choice contributes to the nagging sense of guilt that makes him into the man he becomes and the author of, inter alia, the Confessions.

  For the young William Wordsworth, the moment comes when he borrows a boat without permission and goes for a row on the lake. The whole natural world around him seems to the imaginative boy to join forces to reprove him: the universe, he is learning, is instinct with moral force.

  For James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, the moment comes when he is unjustly punished by a teacher, and must decide whether to complain to the headmaster or accept the cynical view of the rest of the boys that might is right.

  In each case, the adult writer organises his story of his childhood around such critical episodes, identified as key moments in his moral growth.

  Panther in the Basement (1994) tells a story Amos Oz has told several times before, as autobiography (in Under This Blazing Light, 1979) or as fiction. At its barest, the story is about an Israeli boy who has arrived at a crossroads in his moral development. Is he to continue to cherish the childish fantasies of violence which his environment encourages in him, or is he to advance to a new stage of life, learning to love as well as to hate, to accept that the people around him cannot simply be classed as friends or enemies?

  The fact that this crossroads in his life coincides with a crossroads in the life of his nation – Panther in the Basement is set in Jerusalem in the last year of the British mandate, with war against the Arab states looming – gives the choice facing the young protagonist a political meaning (is Israel to continue on a path of violent self-assertion or to reach an accommodation based on give and take?) which Oz, to his credit, handles with the lightest of touches.

  The predecessor of Panther in the Basement in Oz’s fictional œuvre is
Soumchi (1978), which draws upon similar plot elements: a young boy, Soumchi, consumed with fantasies of violence against the British occupier and dreaming of becoming an Underground fighter (but also, contradictorily, an explorer in darkest Africa); a meeting with a friendly British soldier, which leads to exchanges of language lessons; persecution by erstwhile friends, who claim that by fraternising with the enemy he has become a traitor to his people; and a first experience of falling in love, which puts a distance between him and his murderous dreams. So close are the similarities, in fact, that Soumchi can be read as a sketch, marred by one or two moments of sentimentality, for the later novella.

  In Panther in the Basement the boy is nameless, known simply by the nickname given him because of his bookish habits: Proffy. The Englishman who brings confusion to his life is an army pay clerk who, because of a clerical background, speaks some Hebrew, though of a comically Biblical variety. Oz’s translator, Nicholas de Lange, catches its flavour by rendering it in sixteenth-century English. ‘Whither dost thou hasten?’ demands Sergeant Dunlop of Proffy, whom he has caught out of doors during the curfew. ‘Please, kindly sir, let me go home,’ replies Proffy in his best English (‘the language of the enemy’, he reminds himself sternly).1

  Unattractive and lonely, Dunlop is attracted to the strange boy; Proffy – whose own father plays sarcastic distancing games with him – responds with guarded warmth. The two agree to meet and exchange Hebrew for English lessons, using the Bible as their textbook.

  To himself Proffy rationalises these meetings as a cunning way of extracting military secrets from the enemy. For his part, Dunlop – in marked contrast to the teachers to whom Proffy is exposed at his Hebrew National school – selects biblical stories not about the victorious heroes of Israelite history but about weaker, more marginal figures. Dunlop thus becomes a moderating influence on the boy. He also takes on a mildly prophetic role. Once the British have left, he foresees, the Jews will defeat their Arab foes, after which ‘perhaps it [is] the Creator’s decree that [the Palestinians] should become a persecuted people, instead of the Jews’. He quotes from Scripture: ‘Wonderful are the ways of the Lord: . . . the one he loves he chastizes, and the one he would uproot he loves.’ (p. 85)