ATTENTION

by Joshua Cohen

  Ritter inflects his fictional peregrinations with nonfictional prose-flights concerning musical Orientalism, which read like Thomas Bernhard editing Wikipedia, or a Levantine-themed edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music. Famous names and motifs—Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca, Beethoven’s Marcia Alla Turca—entwine with excursuses on obscurer maestros: A brief account of Gaetano Donizetti, a composer of bel canto, leads to a biographical sketch of his brother, Giuseppe, who “introduced European music to the Ottoman ruling classes.” Occasionally, Ritter’s virtuoso solo will take in literature too, but even then his predilections tend to veer from the canon, with ruminations on Robert Musil followed by a portrait of his second cousin Alois Musil, an Austro-Hungarian priest who’d “set off, on camelback, in the company of a few Ottoman gendarmes ‘loaned’ by the kaimmakam of Akaba, into the desert to find the famous pleasure castle of Qasr Tuba, which no one had heard of for centuries, except the Bedouins.”

  This is where Ritter’s Orientalism dovetails with Said’s: Both are alternative histories of the West, the stifled chronicles of its cravings for emancipation (from liberalism), or escape (from la vie bourgeoise). But while Said meant his thesis in a corrective spirit, Ritter means his as a tragedy—not least because he’s expressing himself in prose, which is a fallen medium. Words, the medium of poetry but also of criticism, have to be translated to be made comprehensible, while music is universally coherent, the expression of pre- or postverbal emotions in time.

  “All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music”: Walter Pater’s fusty dictum is a neo-Romantic cri de coeur for Énard. All of his books share the hope of transposing prose into the empyrean of pure sound, where words can never correspond to stable meanings, but can merely indicate the energies underlying an attempt at stabilizing meanings and the bitterness that ensues when those attempts inevitably fail (even in Charlotte Mandell’s resoundingly successful translation). Ritter’s record of this pursuit is the record of his pursuit of love—but of a distant love, a doomed love—a love that won’t be returned: not by Sarah, not by the “foreign” cultures he dwells among, and, most grievously, not by music itself. He becomes the bard of a world growing smaller even as its rifts become larger. He’s the composer of a discomposing age, lamenting that “these days only Khomeini talks about love.”

  THE LITERATURE OF TWO EASTS

  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 blacked onto a scroll by a Buddhist scribe or delivered to an acolyte by a Zen monk from atop a Himalaya. It is, instead, the eighty-sixth section of the Sefer Hasidim (The Book of the Pious), attributed to Judah ben Samuel the Pious of Regensburg, founder of Ashkenazi or Western Hasidism in the late twelfth–early thirteenth 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 table.

  Not just style and subject, however. Zen Buddhist and Hasidic Jewish stories also share a handful of forms: a Q&A format in which a student approaches an illustrious Master—in Zen a sensei, in Hasidism a rabbi, known in Yiddish as a rebbe, or a tzaddik (a sage), or a maggid (a preacher)—in order to pose a question whose only answer is a slap, a laugh, or a seemingly nonsensical retort intended to reorient the senses (the highest expression of this might be the Zen koan); a type of anecdote relating the piety, and/or meekness, and/or miraculous powers of the Master, often related after the Master’s death by a student or relative-disciple; and, most literarily, the miniature wonder-tale that communicates both at face value and as parable or allegory.

  A monk asked, “Why is it that an outsider is not allowed to take over?” Master Zhaozhou [778–897, China] said, “Who are you?” The monk said, “Enan.” Master Zhaozhou said, “What is your question?” Enan asked, “Why is it that an outsider is not allowed to take over?” Master Zhaozhou patted his head.

  The people of a certain city begged the Baal Shem Tov [Israel ben Eliezer, 1698–1760, Poland] to force his disciple Yehiel Mikhal to accept the position of rabbi, which they had offered him. The Baal Shem Tov ordered him to accept, but he persisted in his refusal. “If you don’t obey me,” said the Master, “you will lose this world and the next world too.” “Even if I lose both worlds,” his disciple answered, “I won’t accept what does not befit me.” “Then take my blessing instead,” the Master said, “because you have resisted temptation.”

  The prime attribute uniting these literatures might be called a fascination with “authority.” Secular literature gains authority from the lives of its authors and from the outlets of its publication, but in the realm of oralia, especially in the realm of religious oralia, authority derives directly from the Master himself, that bearded embodiment of righteousness who is rarely if ever his own transcriber. The text is what the text is because the Master said it was, and it’s the disciple’s task to transmit that text accurately, and only then to interpret its meaning. The disciple becomes the Master at the very point at which his interpretations have themselves achieved the authority of primary texts, by having been transmitted accurately and interpreted by subsequent disciples, and so on, and that is the way a tradition works—a tradition, which is continual, as opposed to a culture, which is reactionary. In the anecdotes above, Master Zhaozhou’s lesson seems to be that Enan’s very acknowledgment of a hierarchy, in which he is a disciple and Zhaozhou a Master, will prevent Enan from ever becoming a Master himself. This paradox acquires an explicitly moral dimension with the Baal Shem Tov (the name itself is moralizing: Baal Shem Tov means “Master of the Good Name”), who ends his exchange not with emptiness but with an injunction against sin or evil.

  A disciple told: Whenever we rode to our teacher, the maggid [Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezeritch, 1710–72, Poland]—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. 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.

  The two literatures have similar origins: They both began as the tralatitious lore of the peasantry, of the poor and uneducated village and town, as opposed to the city (the Baal Shem, founder of Eastern Hasidism, was an indifferent Talmudist who worshipped mostly in forests; Huineng, Zen’s Sixth and last Patriarch, was an illiterate woodcutter when he went to study under the Fifth Patriarch, Hungjen); they both grew out of a revolt against religious intellectualism, Zen as a meditative response to the increasingly hermetic tenets of Chinese Mahayana Buddhism, Hasidism as an ecstatic rejoinder to the rote primacy of Lithuanian Jewish scriptural interpretation; they both became famous to the world as the aloud musings of charismatic leaders forced into itinerancy, moving constantly among monasteries and rabbinic courts in order to attract adherents and charity, and too to evade persecution.

  A monk asked, “What is the depth of the deep?” Master Zhaozhou said, “What depth of the deep should I talk about, the seven of seven or the eight of eight?”

  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.”

  About their codifications.

  The Blue Cliff Record and The Book of Equanimity (aka The Book of Serenity) were coll
ated in twelfth-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 Kalonymus ben Isaac the Elder, Samuel the Pious, his son Judah the Pious, and the latter’s apostle Eleazar ben Judah of Worms, whose Western Hasidism—half a millennium before the Hasidism of the Polish and Russian Pale—developed as a theological reckoning with the carnage of the Crusades and the escalation of the oppressive conduct, commercial, and sumptuary laws that followed.

  Hasidism’s canonical stories were assembled from their diverse sects for translation only at the turn of the twentieth century, however, a time when assimilated Jews in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire felt themselves alienated from their ancestral ceremonies and languages and were negotiating their returns to the wilds of Yiddish and a Hebrew revivified through Zionism. Not coincidentally, 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 Asia.

  European 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 Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its manifestations included the decoration of porcelain with ostensibly Chinese and Japanese tableaux, and the erection on noble estates of pagodas of a theoretically Buddhist architecture. In literature, this vogue culminated with Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, the Bildungsroman of a boy pursuing enlightenment in the India of the Gautama Buddha, though its elements are apparent in all of the arts, from the background patterning in paintings by van Gogh and Klimt to the use of the gong in the First Symphony of 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 co-religionists included not only Martin Buber, amassing his landmark Die Erzählungen der Chassidim (Tales of the Hasidim, from which the selections here are adapted), but also Benjamin and Scholem, who immersed themselves in the contradictory doctrines of messianic redemption (which early Hasidism was fascinated with) and Jewish statehood in Palestine (with which later Hasidism has maintained a skeptical relationship).

  Foremost among those artistically converted by experience with Judaism’s East was Kafka, who befriended Yitzchak Löwy, an actor of the traveling Yiddish theater, and the writer and dilettante Hasid Jiří Langer, a Jew who was born secular but became an errant disciple of the third and fourth rabbis of the dynasty of Belz. Kafka recounted in his diaries numerous tales told to him by both Löwy and Langer, Talmudic episodes, and miscellaneous midrashim—and he managed to get many wrong or confused—but aphorized in a letter to Max Brod: “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: The Great Wall of China is a kabbalistic fable in Asian garb; its unabating wall could just as well be Jerusalem’s Kotel.)

  By the time of the Holocaust, Western Jewry’s appropriation of Eastern Jewry was so complete and influential that it itself had become a kind of original: not an authentic thing to be sanctified, but a hybridity 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 transforming the oral in books. After Kafka, there derives a host of Jewish and distinctly Israeli writers occupied with the free excavation of the overtly antiquarian in the hopes of finding whatever style next—style, the artist’s religion.

  FROM THE DIARIES

  TRAVELING

  While traveling and sitting perfectly still, he could feel the many objects in his many pockets all pressing in on him. He felt his wallet press against his right leg, while his left leg bore the weight of an American passport, $40 American in tens, and an oversize key to a seventh-floor apartment in Yalta. Train tickets, clipped together, pressed against his left buttock. Three cigarettes left in a pack pressed up against his left breast from the pocket above his heart. Their combined weight pressured him, pushed through his pockets and into him, until he himself was pocketed—until all that was left of him was an essential point, which had to bear these weights, still beating.

  ISRAEL DIARY

  7/31/2015

  THE PLAN WAS, IF MY brother and sister-in-law had a girl, to fly just after the birth. If they had a boy, I’d fly the next week, just after the bris. They had a boy. The boy had a bris. Between the birth and the bris I bought a ticket (expensive). At the bris, my brother announced he was naming his son after his, and so my, paternal grandfather, Benjamin (nickname: Benjy? Benji? Not Bibi).

  I ate, I drank, I stopped by my apartment for my bag and got to Newark still tipsyish about three hours before my flight. Check-in and security sobered me up. About an hour before the scheduled departure, the screens reddened: DELAYED.

  Nearing midnight, the flight was canceled and rescheduled for the morning.

  Flights to Israel are the worst flights to cancel—the worst for airline employees, that is. One woman, just one, a woman so short that even standing on a box she could barely clear her desk, now had to deal with over one hundred Long Island Jews, and the enraged coordinators of a massive bar mitzvah party from Teaneck.

  I stayed over at the airport, camped out on the floor. A guy in a knitted kippah—a fellow stranded traveler—stretched out too close to me on the tiles.

  “What do you do?” is how he introduces himself.

  I say, “I’m an uncle.”

  Avi’s from Woodmere, Long Island—“I’m an uncle too. What are the chances?” He has a sister and nieces in Jerusalem. Then, suddenly, he’s talking about the Holocaust. He’s trying to explain how and why his parents came to be in the States and not Israel—he thinks that requires an explanation. Then he’s trying to explain why he didn’t make aliyah, like his sister did—he thinks that also requires an explanation. He says he thinks he knows a friend of mine, from yeshiva.

  8/2

  Tel Aviv. Staying in too-cool-for-school Florentin, south Tel Aviv, on a street called Hazanovich, in what’d been described to me by the friend of a friend, whose family owns it, as a courtyard apartment. Turns out the courtyard is a parkinglot, and the apartment is a room. Not air-conditioned, hot—living here’s like living in the crook of a knee, or inside a scrotum between two chubby legs rubbing up against each other, chafing. The chubby legs in this analogy being two busy thoroughfares: Sderot Har Tsiyon and Derekh Shalma.

  The friend of a friend’s grandparents used to live here, their first apartment after coming to Israel from Yemen in or around 1950. The friend of a friend had been listing the apartment on Airbnb, until he was forced off the site for having garnered too many complaints and one-star reviews. At least I’m staying here for free. I keep reminding myself, I’m staying here for free.

  8/4

  I’m here to write a novel about Israel. Which is not what I told the woman who checked my passport at Ben Gurion. I told her I was here to visit cousins.

  So many dangers in writing about Israel. So many failures. Especially for Israeli novelists.

  To my mind, Israel is the only contemporary Jewish subject, or the last contemporary Jewish subject not kitsch. Reading a popular novel about Israel (there aren’t more than a few) is like reading a Holocaust novel (of which there are many), but backward: the last page (death or escape from death) coming first, the first page (bourgeois respectability, bourgeois self-loathing) coming last.

  Right to left: Popular Israeli novels are just novels about the Holocaust read right to left.

  8/7

  “The politics of the novel”: The meaning of this phrase has changed in my lifetime. Or maybe just my interpretation of it has.

  Once upon a time, preonline, the phrase used to mean: “the politics espoused in a novel, by its characters
and author.” But now, it seems, I take the phrase to mean: “the politics implied by the very act of writing or even reading a novel in the year 2015, with everything beautiful gone to blazing hell, and so much else to do, especially so much else to do that’s easier and more comforting.”

  To exercise literacy has become a political act in and of itself.

  The politics of the novel are now just the novel.

  About cousins (not mine): In line to pay at Hummus Beit Lechem, unable or unwilling to ignore the discussion in front of me, I’m reminded that Mizrahi Jews (Jews from Arab countries) have strange ways of talking about their cousins. They will refer to a male cousin in the feminine, which sounds to me and to most Ashkenazi Jews (Jews from Europe) like a grammatical mistake. But it’s not a mistake so much as a sign of how intensely invested Mizrahi Jews are in filiation, which itself is just a sign of the importance of blood to Judaism. To refer to your male cousin but in the feminine (ben dodah, literally “son of aunt”) signifies that your relation to him comes through his mother—it defines his mother as the sister of one of your parents. Similarly, to refer to your female cousin but in the masculine (bat dod, literally “daughter of uncle”) signifies that your relation to her comes through her father—it defines her father as the brother of one of your parents. The genealogy of this grammatical quirk seems Arabic, which has eight different terms for cousin, each describing a different kinship type: son of paternal uncle, son of paternal aunt, son of maternal uncle, son of maternal aunt, daughter of paternal uncle, daughter of paternal aunt, daughter of maternal uncle, daughter of maternal aunt. In Arab countries, as among Arab Jews, everything, apparently, is about your blood. For me, however, everything is about your language, which is the conduit, and the only consanguinity you can choose.