by Joshua Cohen
Laor’s book begins with a simultaneous study and condemnation of this matured, normalized literature—a corpus of Hebrew letters that didn’t lament an absent patriarchal God or the travails of Exile but, instead, rejoiced in workaday existence. Yet this purported normalcy would degenerate into a type of propaganda in which the Israeli patriot was always in the right, a golden boy-man liberating Judea and Samaria from the Arab hordes in ecstatic self-realization. Canon-building became an initiative of nation-building, as nascent public and government alike clamored for a shira meguyeset—a “mobilized poetry,” able to defend the homeland at a stanza’s notice. Zealous revisionism wasn’t confined to Israeli bookery but also informed such American films as Exodus, starring Paul Newman as a miraculously brawny, virile Jew—half biblical Israelite, half Aryan redivivus. Laor notes, however, that “this trend was somewhat obstructed with the advance of Israeli cinema, perhaps because it was hard to find enough blue-eyed blond actors to fill all the parts.”
If the decades following 1948 found Israelis aspiring to Aryanhood, then the roots of that loathing grew from decades previous, from the Nazi desire to cast European Jewry as entirely Oriental—the infamous Der Stürmer cartoons of the fattish Jew with the hooked nose and tasseled fez, the cigar and ruby rings. Laor argues that the Nazi genocide represented a purgation of this stereotype, and that the Jew emerged from the war intensely Westernized, as if Auschwitz’s fires had burned away all traces of Otherness and now the Jew was fit to be not just a citizen like all Western citizens but the very paragon of a polis, the Western citizen par excellence. In Laor’s interpretation, if the Holocausted Jew is today regarded as the special guardian of Humanism, then the new Oriental Other or Easterner can be said to be the Arab, and especially the rock-throwing, half-literate Palestinian. Laor accuses the brandnames of Israeli letters of continuing to play up these roles, posing as diligent humanists internationally while turning a blind eye to, or even encouraging, the bloodshed at home.
Laor’s polemic engages divergences of East and West in two ways. He accuses his peers of advocating a vague peace in translation, in such forums as Le Monde and Die Zeit, then vociferously supporting recent incursions domestically, in Hebrew. He further accuses them of discriminating between putatively Eastern and Western influences within Israeli Jewry itself. Although Ashkenazim, or European Jewry, constitute a minority of Israelis, their traditions have always been privileged. Despite the presence of the Mizrahim—Jews ingathered from Arab lands, for whom Arabic was a primary language—culture for Israel still means Kultur, the cult of Bildung: Beethoven, Rembrandt, Goethe, with maybe a Russian or two, or Marx, included for good measure. This primacy, in turn, is evinced as the subject of most exported Israeli fiction—how European “we” are, how well educated, how polished. Israeli writers like to mention that Tel Aviv boasts the highest concentration of Bauhaus architecture in the world.
According to Laor, it is precisely this identification with the West that allows Oz and Yehoshua to be perceived as “liberals,” perhaps even to be “liberals,” yet to distort the facts mercilessly: Oz claiming in the foreign press that the Camp David accords failed because Yasir Arafat insisted on being granted the Right of Return (the right of Palestinians to return to confiscated lands, which critics rightly fear would overrun the country and outpopulate the Jews), whereas Laor (and subsequent intelligence) claims it was because Israel refused to negotiate shared custodianship of Jerusalem; Yehoshua insisting on a binational Pax Semitica, even while recommending an embargo on Gaza and justifying sanctions against the West Bank, agitating in Haaretz in 2004 for “not a desired war, but definitely a purifying one. A war that will make it clear to the Palestinians that they are sovereign,” and threatening “all the rules of war will be different…we will make use of force against an entire population.”
By contrast with the Ashkenazi, Israel’s Mizrahi (“Eastern”) majority are largely absent from Israeli fiction, even from that of writers born to Mizrahi families, like Yehoshua, whose mother was born in Morocco and whose father’s people have lived in Jerusalem for five generations. Laor takes Yehoshua to task for disavowing his heritage, and he censures Oz, born Amos Klausner, son of a renowned Russian family of Judaic scholars, for writing novels that praise Jewish Europe, or Jewish Europeans in Israel, while ignoring a sizable swath of his country’s demographic.
Laor—whose own father, a Galician immigrant to Germany, changed his surname from Laufer upon emigration to Palestine—is particularly perplexed by Oz, a writer who denies his origins in life yet cleaves to them on the page, eulogizing in his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, those Jewish “Europhiles, who could speak so many of Europe’s languages, recite its poetry, who believed in its moral superiority.” Oz does this, Laor maintains, to make a statement about the qualifications of the victims of Nazism, despite the fact that most of the Jews the Nazis exterminated were far from being urban poetasters or linguists. Just as wherever Jewish literary history is discussed the Yiddish of Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz is emphasized over the Arabic of Jewish writers like Anwar Shaul and Murad Michael, in popular iconography the image of the Lubavitcher rabbi appears intimately bound to that of Einstein, or Freud. To Laor, these reductions and lacunae imply a schizophrenia, a desperate reinforcement of older, weaker Jewishness as a stereotype of both what to venerate and never to be, commingled with a racist fear of Arabness that resolves itself in the institution of a synthetic Israeli identity.
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ISRAEL IS THE ONLY country in the world whose politics were initially a poetics. Anytime a ground operation or air raid is launched, the orders implement the dictates of national verse. When Jews first ruled Jerusalem, there was no call for poetry. Then, with the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E., Jewry was thrust into history, or Exile, with a return to Jerusalem representing the end of history, as if the Messiah were not a person but the reunification of a People with its Land. In Exile, Mosaic law gave way to textual interpretation, which gave way to secular letters. Religion turned to a religio poetae—a faith in poetry, or aesthetics, with wordmakers serving as surrogate priests. Their liturgies were odes to a Zion past, and their panegyrics will live forever even if Zionism won’t. The tragedy of Zionism is that history will outlive it, and that governments can never accomplish what should be the province of metaphor, or the divine.
That tragedy is best embodied in translation. Here is “A Citizen of the World,” the only poem of his that Laor quotes in this collection of prose that comments on prose:
We didn’t grow up where our fathers grew.
They didn’t grow up where
their fathers grew. We learned not to
feel nostalgic (we can feel nostalgic for any tombstone
decided upon) we don’t belong
anywhere (we shall belong with ease to anything
when demanded) we move across
countries, we sleep in fancy
hotels, we sleep in cold
barns, we love only to be
loved, we rape only
to be remembered, we enjoy
only to register ownership, destroying
mainly villages, declaring ownership
then leaving, hating peasants, mainly
peasants (if necessary, we’ll also cultivate
the land)
It’s unfortunate that Laor’s word choices in the last lines remain silent in English: “we’ll also cultivate/the land.” The solution to this problem is the solution to the entire Middle East. The last word in the Hebrew is Adamah, “land” in the sense of earth, ground, soil. An agricultural word, a common dirt-under-your-fingernails word, whose root, Adam, relates it to the name of the first man, made of mud, made of clay dug from Eden. The other way of saying “land” is Eretz, though it’s more like saying “Land” (the patriotic phrase is Eretz Yisroel, the “La
nd of Israel,” never Adamah Yisroel). Lacking capital letters, just as it lacks superlatives, Hebrew suggests differences of importance by near-synonyms, or by compounds. Eretz—used earlier in the poem, here translated as “countries”—is grasping, metaphysical, scriptural: Moses tried to enter the Eretz but failed; Joshua conquered the Eretz in the book that bears his name. The Land of Eretz is a biblical grant, an ethereal encryption of a heart’s ideal, whereas the land of Adamah is a profane place to feed your flesh and water your blood—emphasizing its corporeality, the word for “blood,” dam, is contained in Adamah—the impermanent ground beneath our feet; a temporal tract, or plot, which we could cultivate, “if necessary.” Hebrew poetry since the time of Titus called for an Eretz, modern realpolitik realized an Adamah, and the poets of Laor’s generation found that their grand subject could only be their loss of grand subject—the decapitalization of the Land their fathers had labored so hard to capitalize.
If the land of Laor’s poem is Adamah, the poem’s “we” cannot be taken to mean Jews, who live for an Eretz while maintaining residence in Brooklyn and citizenship worldwide. Instead, this “we,” it must be assumed, are Israelis who “didn’t grow up where [our] fathers grew,” and so Laor means to speak only for, and to, Israelis of his own age and circumstances. It often seems that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just this, a textual problem. If so, then the muddle of meaning that must be analyzed lies in parsing not Palestinian from Israeli but “Israeli” from “Jew.” Only once those epithets have been dissevered can some sort of dialogue begin, between two political entities and not between two (or three) religions, or Peoples. Until then, “Israel” will continue to be vilified as a word that means something other than what it should, while all critics of Israel will be accused of anti-Semitism.
Some poets have tried to write the future; others have tried to rewrite the past, or erase it. Although a good poem does not necessarily have to be a moral poem, a good state is necessarily a moral state. So anarchical as to be apocalyptic, so sensitized to the lamentations of others as to negate his own birthright, Laor in his essays asks not another Jewish Question but rather a universal question: Can a Zionist act morally if morality dictates Zionism’s erasure?
* “Refusenik” is the sardonic invention of radical journalism. The original Refuseniks were Soviet Jews refused the opportunity of aliyah, or moving to Israel. In Hebrew, “conscientious objectors” are sarvanim, from the root serev, “to refuse” or “to decline.”
FROM THE DIARIES
TO THINK
“To think there’s weather, even here.”
TRAVELING WITHOUT YOU
Traveling without you: traveling without clothes, without a body.
LITERARY ANIMALS
TODAY, THE POLITICAL METAMORPHOSIS OF the novel ranges in every extreme: as some novelists debate gender and racial parity, while others let businesses sponsor their plots, to the point at which all their characters drive Mercedes (Mercedi?).
It frequently seems as if only one wrong remains to be righted, because it’s not regarded as wrong: the use, or abuse, of the literary animal.
This, of course, is a matter as hoary and spavined as Rucio, Sancho Panza’s donkey, and Rocinante, Quixote’s horse—a matter as old as the Bible, immediately older than misogyny and racism. After all, it was a serpent that was responsible for the fall of Eve, and so for the fall of humanity, in Genesis. Rather, it wasn’t just any garden-variety snake, but a snake that walked and talked and tempted our appetities, until we rewarded it for its surrogacy by mutilation: We forked its tongue and severed its legs and so forced it to hiss and crawl through the dust and blamed our massacre on God, Whom we kept shapeless and nameless and unaccountable.
Ten generations later, Creationdom was destroyed in a Flood, yet all the animals were rescued. Even the serpents. Even the worms, the parasitic worms, crept into the ark as individuals and out of it as prototypes. That vessel must’ve been a floating laboratory (but a laboratory of inbreeding or of hybridity?), as the two of each kind tamed each other (or mated with others?), until the waters receded to let their spawn be domesticated. Then Ham uncovered the nakedness—the feral nakedness—of his father, Noah, and was punished by having the skin of his spawn forever blackened. Ham’s descendants became the animals to men and the men to animals, a middle caste of chattel to till the fields. Their salvation was just another punishment: enslavement.
Consider Fable #150 by that slave named Aesop: The lion spares the mouse’s life and the mouse returns the favor and springs the lion by gnawing at the hunter’s net. Now, consider that same scenario but with the animals’ roles assumed by men: The behavior might be more, not less, of a shock. Allegories and parables are the political statements of censorious cultures and with democracy devolve into mere art. Bears and whales not to mention dogs and cats have been rendered endangered if not extinct—imaginatively, that is. We’ve so humanized them—we’ve so burdened them with consciousness, and even with conscience—that they’ve been exhausted, especially as symbols. In perpetrating this, we’ve proven ourselves to be the cruelest of creatures, because we are cruel to every creature. It is we who belong in the bestiaries. We’ve imposed our languages on animals (Ovid, Orwell), whose every utterance condemns us. We’ve usurped their bodies (Apuleius, Kafka), but treat that violation as collateral. We’ve even made our gods turn into bulls before raping women, and then to silence the women we’ve turned them into trees.
I know of no species worse than our own—worse than my own. Writing is the act of acknowledging my wildness.
TOP TEN BOOKS ABOUT ONLINE
THE CATALOG OF NIBRU (VARIOUS, CA. TWENTY-FIRST TO TWENTIETH CENTURIES B.C.E.)
I, the king, was a hero already in the womb
I am a king treated with respect
Not only did the lord make the world appear in its correct form
Lady of all the divine powers
THESE LINES, INSCRIBED IN CLAY in Sumerian during the Third Dynasty of Ur, were initially confusing to the American archaeologists who around 1900 uncovered them from the ruins of the city of Nibru, or Nippur, in contemporary Iraq. They appeared to be poems, or the Sumerian equivalent of poems, but none cohered, or cohered as completely as the forty thousand or so other texts excavated from the area. And so the sixty-two lines of this incomprehensible tablet—of this intact yet stylistically fragmented tablet—were set aside, as the more formally explicable texts were decoded. In the course of that decoding, however, the same lines kept cropping up—as first lines: “I, the king, was a hero already in the womb” was the first line of a poem in praise of Shulgi; “I am a king treated with respect” was the first line of a poem in praise of Lipit-Ishtar; “Not only did the lord make the world appear in its correct form” was a song for hoeing; “Lady of all the divine powers” was a hymn to the love goddess Inana. This led scholars to conclude that this mysterious cuneiform slab was no avant-garde Gilgamesh (whose earliest version was also unearthed at Nibru), but a bibliography or curriculum—an index of the Sumerian canon intended for reference, or instruction. Literature began with the list: Online just made the links palpable.
TALMUD (VARIOUS, CA. 200 C.E. TO PRESENT)
A commentary on commentaries: a book divided into books, or tractates, whose every page is divided among debates about Jewish law (Mishnah, 200 C.E.), debates about the debates (Gemarah, 500 C.E.), the glosses of the twelfth-century French rabbi Rashi (in a strip down one margin), and over six centuries of tosafot, which are glosses on Rashi’s glosses (in a strip down the opposite margin). Interspersed textblocks can feature extracts from legal codices by Maimonides (twelfth-century Egypt), Nachmanides (thirteenth-century Spain), Joseph Caro (sixteenth-century Palestine), and Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, aka the Vilna Gaon (eighteenth-century Polish Lithuania). To speak of the Talmud is to speak of a multiplicity seeking syncreticity, a jurisprudential pullulation: a work that intermixes Aramaic and
Hebrew and exists in two forms (the earlier Jerusalem Talmud, the later Babylonian Talmud), each of which has appeared in disparate editions, with dissentaneous annotations and addenda. The Talmud’s ultimate interpretive difficulty, however, inheres in the fact that for over a millennium its primary “text” had been overwhelmingly oral—commandments communicated face-to-face before being transcribed.
THE COMPENDIOUS BOOK ON CALCULATION BY COMPLETION AND BALANCING, MUHAMMAD IBN MUSA AL-KHWARIZMI (CA. 820 C.E.)
A book from Baghdad, written by a Persian astronomer and mathematician credited with the introduction of what we now call Arabic numerals to Europe. Al-Khwarizmi’s Arabic treatise, which is known to us solely through its twelfth-century Latin translation by Robert of Chester, delineates two ways of solving quadratic equations: the first by means of completion, or the movement of negative terms from one side of an equation to the other; the second by means of balancing, or the cancelation of equal terms on both sides of an equation. “The balancing” was al-muqabala; “the completion” was al-gabr, whose transliteration into “algebra” was relatively logical when compared with the Latinate corruption of its creator’s name: from Al-Khwarizmi to Algoritmi—source of the modern “algorithm.” By proposing the abstraction or transposition of all quantities into a representative language, Al-Khwarizmi founded a method by which all extant mathematical disciplines could communicate. His immediate concerns, though, were more mundane, as his treatise concludes by turning theory to practice and, like the search engines that continue its work today, becomes preoccupied with mercantile transactions: “A man is hired to work in a vineyard for thirty days for 10 dinars. He works six days. How much of the agreed price should he receive?”