And yet, for some time after that final trip to Denmark, as I brooded over this problem of proximity and distance, of what happened and how it becomes a story, I would think of Alena’s little tale about the young woman who was writing about her grandmother. On the one hand there was the grandmother, the person to whom the terrible things had happened, and who could sit not three feet from a person like her granddaughter, or like me, an interested younger person, and tell her story. On the other hand there was the granddaughter, who because of distance, the passage of years and the failure of memories, would inevitably have to fill in the gaps in order to make the raw data into a story. I realized that what Alena had told me that night could be read as a kind of fable about the eternal conflict between what happened and the story of what happened, a fable that hints at the inevitable triumph of the storyteller even as it warns of the dangers inherent in that triumph. To become a story, the details of what happened to the grandmother, what happened in real time, in real history, to a real person, would have to be subordinated to the overall outline that already existed, for whatever idiosyncratic reasons of personality and preference and taste, in the mind of her granddaughter—the way that the small stones or tesserae used by ancient Greek and Roman artisans were set into grout or cement according to a design of the artist’s invention, a design without which (the artist would tell you) the tesserae themselves—which could be glittering semiprecious stones, onyx or quartz or jasper, or merely homely bits of local stone—were nothing, in the end, but attractive bits of rock.
Another way of saying this is that proximity brings you closer to what happened, is responsible for the facts we glean, the artifacts we possess, the verbatim quotations of what people said; but distance is what makes possible the story of what happened, is precisely what gives someone the freedom to organize and shape those bits into a pleasing and coherent whole—to, for example, take three separate quotations, made by one person over the course of three nights, and string them together because when strung together in this fashion they create a dramatic effect far more powerful than they could possibly make if you were to encounter them in three successive chapters of a book.
For a long time, after we’d gone on the last of our trips, this notion of the triumph of distance, of the storyteller, seemed to me to be an attractive and interesting one. And why not? I am the heir of my grandfather who (people used to joke when I was a little boy) could go to the grocery store to buy a quart of milk and come back with an amazing and dramatic story to tell. If you are a certain kind of person from a certain kind of family, you don’t need much to make a story.
It was for this reason that, when I came back from Denmark and looked at my dozens of videotapes, took stock of all the stories we’d heard even as I acknowledged that we hadn’t gotten the whole of the story we’d hoped for, I considered it all and I thought, It’s enough. I thought, Genug is genug.
I thought, We’re finished.
PART FIVE
Vayeira,
or,
The Tree in the Garden
(July 8, 2005)
…IN THE STATE OF MIND IN WHICH SOMEONE “OBSERVES,” HE IS FAR BELOW THE LEVEL AT WHICH HE FINDS HIMSELF WHEN HE CREATES.
Marcel Proust,
In Search of Lost Time
(Within a Budding Grove)
MRS. BEGLEY’S FUNERAL took place on a cold, bright Tuesday morning, late in December. She had died on a Saturday, two days shy of her ninety-fourth birthday. She had, as usual, been right: I hadn’t written fast enough.
For months she hadn’t been well. Not vell, not vell at all, she would snap back wearily whenever I was foolish enough to begin one of our phone conversations with a mechanical How are you? By then, I knew the answer. Although she had begun to seem frailer, her mind, as far as I could tell, was intact. She listened intently as I kept her up to date on my travels, my research, my writing; she was warmly, almost disconcertingly sympathetic when I told her, one afternoon as we talked on the phone, that I’d just had word that Dyzia Lew had died in Belarus; that we wouldn’t be going to Minsk, ever. We are all going, one by one, she said, tonelessly. She continued to read the Times and the New York Review of Books cover to cover, and throughout 2004 she called me frequently to comment on this or that piece I’d written. A month before she died, we talked over the phone for some time about the Greek playwrights, and again she told a story that she’d first told me on the January day nearly five years earlier when I had come nervously to her house and she had poured me the first of so many cups of tea. The story was this: that, soon after the war was over in Poland, the first cultural event to take place was a performance of Sophocles’ Antigone. As we both knew well, Antigone is a play about an individual who bravely stands up to authoritarian rule and dies for it. But there are other forms of resistance that are unthinkable in Greek tragedy; for instance, surviving. Now, whenever I teach Greek tragedy, I tell both stories: about Antigone in Poland after the war, and about Mrs. Begley, who had hidden, and had survived.
The Greeks, she sighed heavily into the phone, the Greeks, the theater, I used to know them all, I used to go to see everything.
But her body was failing her, I knew, although as usual I refused to think about the ending, about where that failure would finally lead. Her knees bothered her, she would say each time we talked, each time I visited her on upper Lexington Avenue, where she no longer came to the door to greet me but instead would be waiting, enthroned in the chair by the silent air conditioner, or seated at the dining-room table, in the chair nearest the kitchen door, waiting with the platters of smoked salmon, of bread, of serried pastries. What does it matter if I’m stuck here? she chuckled grimly into the phone in mid-August of her last year, when a blackout had cut the power to New York City, I can’t move anyway! From my apartment on Seventy-first Street I had rung her apartment on Ninety-fourth Street, to check in and make sure she didn’t need anything. My electric phone was, like everyone else’s, dead, but I’d dug an old telephone out of my closet, a massive black 1950s model that I’d bought on a whim at the flea market. This phone had no need of electricity, nor, I knew, did the ancient model that Mrs. Begley used. As I laboriously dialed the numbers, letting the dial rotate back with each digit to its resting point, a process that made a sound I hadn’t heard for years now, a sound that revived in me memories of my mother on the old rotary phone in the kitchen gesturing with her blond head in the direction of the neighbor’s house; as I dialed her number, I knew I’d get through to her. Her voice, when she answered, sounded surprisingly full of fun, as if the excitement of the citywide crisis were a relief from the stale news of her own failing health. She told me that, yes, she was all right, that, no, I didn’t need to bring her anything.
I looked out my window at the darkened buildings to the east of my neighborhood and, toying with the heavy receiver, said, We’re probably the only two people in New York City who are able to have a phone conversation!
You know why? she muttered. Because only we have such telephones! Because we both like old things! Ha!
So she had knee problems. Or she had deficiencies of sodium, or calcium, maybe it was potassium, I can’t even remember the names of the chemicals that ran too thickly or thinly in her blood. But I knew that one of these deficiencies was causing her a problem that enraged and frustrated her, which was an odd kind of aphasia. She’d be in the middle of a conversation and would suddenly look helpless and angry and say, Ecchhh, I can’t think of that thing I want to say, you know what it is, and sometimes I did and sometimes I didn’t but either way I would say, It’s all right, Mrs. Begley, it’s not important. Two words, I noticed, that had not vanished from her vocabulary in the summer and then autumn months just before she died were sentimental and better-looking.
And then she got pneumonia, and then she was better, and then she was worse, and then she died.
Inside the funeral chapel on Madison Avenue, at the front of a modest room lined with plain, polished wooden pews,
the plain pine coffin, as is the custom, was waiting. Seated in these pews there were perhaps twenty people: apart from the family it was mostly friends of her son, and a smattering of people who, like me, against all odds, were her friends, too. In the little antechamber where we gathered before the service began, a tiny, tiny old woman, as shrunken as some tribal idol, was sitting on a settee, dressed with a surprising chic: jaunty fedora, tailored suit, a jabot, huge glasses. Only her outlandish shoes, with thick, sporty soles, seemed out of place. She looked like she was a hundred, and as it turned out, she nearly was. Louis’s wife steered me over and introduced her. This lady had been Mrs. Begley’s neighbor in Stryj, Anka said. The old woman looked up at me with hugely magnified eyes and, peering at me, said, I have known Louis since he was a baby! Now I am the last one!
But for once, I wasn’t interested in talking to an old Jewish lady, and I just nodded and left soon afterward to take my seat, carefully avoiding contact with the other guests. The last time I had buried a Jew from a town in Galicia, it had been my grandfather, and what with the emotion and the family and my mother crying, it had gone by in a strange accelerated flash. I had been twenty. This time, I was in my forties. I knew what I was losing.
While the brief service went on, I took out the snapshot I’d taken four years earlier, on the day of the festive lunch she’d given after I came back from Ukraine. In it, she’s sitting at her dining-room table, her elegant, thickly veined hand resting on the cloth, staring a little warily at the camera, her good eye half-open, the long Central European face aloof and weary, but not unfriendly. As her son spoke—But something in her had been broken, he said at one point; that much I remember—and then her grandchildren and, finally, her great-granddaughter, a soulful, dark-haired teenager with a full mouth and dream-filled eyes who, I am convinced, looks remarkably like her great-grandmother must have looked, and indeed on the night I first laid eyes on this girl, which was the same night I met Mrs. Begley and she laughed at me and said, Bo-LEH-khoof!, on the first night I saw this girl I said, Oh! You look so much like your great-grandmother! which for all I know may, in thirty years, be the beginning of some other book—as the Begley children and grandchildren and great-grandchild spoke, I took out this photograph and looked at it and ran a finger across it, just as my mother had done, stroking a casual (but, for that reason, more authentic) photograph of her father, that June day in 1980 when they lowered the plain pine box into the earth of Mount Judah Cemetery, had stroked it and said over and over again, as a rabbi who had never met my grandfather went through the ritual by rote, and therefore had no way of conveying anything significant, any authenticating detail, about the person whose body he was committing to the earth, You have to say how funny he was, he was so funny!
That had been a quarter century earlier. Now it was time to bury Mrs. Begley, who had given me a second chance to know someone of my grandfather’s culture and time, to ask the questions I didn’t know how to ask when I was twenty. The service was over, and the room gradually emptied. I lingered after there was no one left, not even the ancient crone who had once been a young, fresh-faced housewife in a city far away who had, I suppose, once cooed over her neighbor’s new baby and said, Ludwik, Ludwik! as she stroked the plasticene infant flesh. I felt awkward: partly because it seemed strange to leave her alone there in the high-ceilinged institutional room; and also because I knew that when I walked out the broad doorway into the hallway where the family had formed a line and were shaking hands with the guests, I would never see her again. I started to walk to the door, but something stopped me, a hesitation so strong it felt like a physical force, like a firm hand being placed on my shoulder, and I turned back to look. Not caring who saw me or how foolish I looked, I walked briskly down the center aisle to the coffin and stood in front of it. I laid my hand on the unvarnished wood, blemished with its dark knots the way that an aged hand is blemished with its liver spots, and gently ran it back and forth for a moment, the way you might stroke the arm of a very old person, at once gingerly and reassuringly.
I said, I really loved you, Mrs. Begley. I’m going to miss you a lot.
Then I turned around and walked to the door. I stopped and turned back for one last look—I am, after all, a sentimental person—and then I walked away, and that was the last time we talked.
Although it is not the end of Genesis, parashat Vayeira, which takes its name from the divine manifestation to Abraham with which it begins—And He Appeared—provides, to my mind, a fitting and satisfying conclusion, at once dramatically riveting and morally searing, to the narrative that arcs through the first few parashot of the Hebrew Bible. Those readings trace the evolution of the Chosen People, narrowing its focus with increasing intensity as the text proceeds: beginning with the momentous, grand, wide-angle drama of the creation of all of Creation itself, every species and kind of living thing, and then proceeding, as it were through a series of ever smaller Chinese boxes, to the story of one species, mankind, then to the story of one specific family, and finally to the story of one specific man, a man whom God chose out, Abraham, the first Jew. This story of Abraham and his relationship with God, whom Abraham was the first human to acknowledge as the object of a proper religious awe, comes to an end in parashat Vayeira, which itself culminates in two famous and harrowing tales.
The first, the story of God’s destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, recapitulates themes that occur earlier in Genesis, while exploring more profoundly the moral implications of being chosen. There is, to begin with, another instance of divine annihilation: God’s decision to destroy a not insignificant number of human beings—the entire populations of two metropolises—as a punishment for their wickedness, an event that will inevitably call to mind his earlier decision, described in Noach, to destroy all of humanity with the exception of Noah and his immediate family. That decision raised flickering concerns about the possibility that innocent humans might have been destroyed along with the guilty ones—a moral problem that will be fully confronted at last in the Sodom and Gomorrah story. Furthermore, because it presents a stark confrontation between those chosen by God and the non-chosen, and indeed between what it means to have chosen goodness and what it means to have chosen wickedness, parashat Vayeira may be thought of as presenting to the reader yet another—perhaps the final and most refined—in the series of acts of distinguishing so memorably described at the beginning of Genesis. For as we know, the act of distinguishing is the hallmark of creation itself.
These and other repetitions of earlier themes and motifs persuade me that parashat Vayeira is intended to feel like a culmination, a summing up. This cyclical quality of the text applies not only to large themes, but also to passing details. For instance: in this reading we learn that, after the destruction of the twin cities of the plain, as Sodom and Gomorrah are often called, Abraham moves on with Sarah to the Negev, to the city of Gerar. Here, exactly as he had once done in Egypt, the patriarch pretends that his wife is his sister, with the result that, exactly as we saw before, the king of the place takes her into his household, only to be stopped from touching her by the hand of God himself, who gives the king a warning in a dream. Precisely what designs this king, Abimelek, may have had on the ninety-year-old Sarah are unclear, but the recurrent motif of the patriarch’s lie about his wife, however contrived it feels at this point, is surely meant to bring us back, at the exact point at which the story of this couple’s wanderings comes to a close (for Sarah dies at the beginning of the very next parashah) to a recollection of how those wanderings began. Certain kinds of manipulations of the truth are irresistible if what one wants to create is a story with a satisfying shape.
So there is Sodom and Gomorrah. The second of the climactic stories told in parashat Vayeira, the story of Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac, nicely suggests—because it involves a father’s relationship with his young son as well as his relationship with his own divine parent—the way in which every single person constitutes within himself a bridge bet
ween the past and the future; and by introducing Isaac at last as a full-fledged character in the narrative, this story also lays the narrative foundation for the story of Abraham’s descendants, which will take readers to the end of the Hebrew Bible itself. The latter, however, will not concern us here, since, as I have said, at the time I briefly studied the Torah when I was a young adult and before I turned once again to the Greeks, I only got as far as parashat Vayeira, and so it is there that we shall stop.
I will return to the individual stories later, but here it seems worth trying to interpret one of the best known moments in Vayeira, if only because the two commentaries I have sought out to illuminate these texts, the ancient and the modern, Rashi and Friedman, seem to me to fail to elucidate the meaning of this strange and famous incident (which is, however, minor enough not to be of concern to us later when considering the larger moral implications of the two stories I have alluded to). I refer here to the well-known story of Lot’s wife—of how, even as she and her husband and two daughters are being rescued from the doomed city by the intervention of God’s angel, are being physically dragged away from their home by the heavenly beings, the wife of Lot violates the angel’s express command not to turn back and look at the city during their flight, and for that transgression is turned into a pillar of salt.
Shockingly, at least to me, Friedman has nothing whatsoever to say about this riveting moment—perhaps because he’s saving his exegetical ammunition for where it’s really needed, which is the far more troubling story of Abraham’s willingness to kill his own child. Nor does Rashi’s explication seem to me, for once, to be persuasive. The medieval French scholar begins by explaining the angel’s order not to “look back” as a punishment of sorts: he glosses the text’s “Do not look behind you” by suggesting that, since Lot and his family had sinned in precisely the way that the inhabitants of the twin cities sinned, and since they are being saved only because of their relationship to Abraham, that good prophet, they have no right to witness the punishment of the doomed from the comfortable vantage point of their escape route. “You do not deserve to see their punishment while you are being saved” is how the Frenchman puts it. As for the fate of Lot’s wife, Rashi explains the bizarre detail of her metamorphosis from human being into mineral by saying that she “had sinned with salt” and hence “was stricken with salt.” This “sinned with salt” is a reference to a midrashic tradition that Lot’s wife had begrudged the traditional gesture of giving salt to guests. (The same tradition also holds that later, on the pretext of borrowing salt from her neighbors, Lot’s wife reported her foreign-born husband’s actions to the Sodomite authorities—a reminder that, unlike her husband, she is, presumably, a native Sodomite.)
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