The First Modern Jew

by Daniel B. Schwartz

  The Family Moskat contains a reprise, on an operatic scale, of the main question of “The Spinoza of Market Street”: namely, is the contemplative ideal of the “intellectual love of God” any match for the passions? The answer is an even more emphatic no. A chance encounter with Abram Shapiro, the sybaritic son-in-law of Reb Meshulem, gives Asa Heshel entrée into the Moskat family. There, he meets Hadassah, the granddaughter of Meshulem, and the two immediately fall for each other. Yet Meshulem is determined that Hadassah marry Fishele Kuttner, a scion of a wealthy family who is, to boot, a pious follower of the same Hasidic rebbe of the Moskat patriarch. In a passage found in the original Yiddish but scrubbed from the English translation of the book, Singer makes palpable the tension between Asa’s Spinozism and romantic obsession:

  Asa Heshel tried to console himself with the thought that he, Hadassah, Fishele, and Reb Meshulem were all motions of the infinite substance, bubbles in the sea of the Godhead. Everything that had happened to him today and would happen in the future was necessary, determined according to the eternal laws, unchangeable. But Spinoza’s thought did not help with his anxiety. He was still far from the level of loving God with an intellectual love, independent of everyday events. He was full of affects and had no idea how to expel them and what to supplant them with.91

  Needless to say, the affects win out. His continued visits to the Moskat family, ostensibly for tutoring in Polish and Russian by Hadassah (whose education in non-Jewish schools is an early symptom of the fraying of Meshulem’s authority), quickly become a pretext for an affair between them. Reb Meshulem’s discovery of their goings-on leads him to press hard for an arranged marriage to Fishele. Hadassah and Asa Heshel elope as a result, with the aim of absconding to Switzerland, but they are apprehended at the Austrian border, and while Asa manages to escape, Hadassah is arrested and, after brief internment, is returned to her parents in a sorry state. At this point the twosome becomes a foursome. Asa, now living in Switzerland, agrees—for unexplained reasons—to marry a woman he does not love: Adele, the daughter of Meshulem’s third wife, who has been infatuated with Asa from the very start. Hadassah, meanwhile, accedes to her family’s demand that she marry Fishele. Yet the magnetic attraction between the two lovers does not ebb. Returning to Warsaw, Asa resumes his now adulterous affair with Hadassah, the two engaging in ever more brazen acts of lust—from sadomasochistic fantasy to fornicating on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Their respective spouses eventually grant them divorces, and Asa and Hadassah, now ostracized by most of the branches of the Moskat family, finally enter into marriage. Yet it does not prove a consummation devoutly to be wished for. After marrying Hadassah and having a child with her, Asa loses all romantic interest. By the end of the book—when Hadassah is killed in the Nazi bombardment of Warsaw—Asa has already taken up with a new consort, a Communist-party functionary named Barbara. As Spinoza predicted, a life devoted to the pursuit of happiness via passionate love leads only to sadness, but his proposed alternative—the amor dei intellectualis—offers only puny opposition.

  To this tension between Spinozan equilibrium and the turbulence of the emotional life that was so central to “The Spinoza of Market Street,” Singer adds another key layer to the Spinoza theme in The Family Moskat—the conflict between Enlightenment rationalism and orthodoxy. This conflict is dramatized in the relationship between, and the often revealing doubling of, Asa Heshel and his elderly maternal granfather, Rabbi Dan Katzenellenbogen, the rabbi of Tereshpol Minor. Rabbi Dan is a thoroughgoing traditionalist, an ascetic by nature who is a harsh critic of “Jewish modernity” in all its forms. When Asa Heshel, drawing on his reading of the Ethics, tries to explain to his grandfather that he does not “deny the existence of God,” Rabbi Dan promptly rejects the deist and pantheist heresies: “I know, I know. All the arguments of the heretics; there is a Creator, but he has revealed Himself to no one; Moses lied. And others maintain that Nature is God. I know, I know. The sum and substance of it all is that any sin is permitted. That’s the truth of the matter.”92 He rejects all Jewish adaptations to modernity, from liberal Judaism to nationalism. When Asa Heshel ventures a halfhearted defense of secular Zionists, claiming that “Jews were a people like every other people, and . . . were demanding that the nations of the world should return the Holy Land to them,” his grandfather scoffs: “If . . . they had no further belief in the Bible, then why should they have any longing for the biblical land of the Jews? Why not some other country? Any country?”93

  The conflict between the two characters becomes more striking with the outbreak of the First World War, when the Russian soldiers drive all the Jews out of Tereshpol Minor, and Reb Dan is forced to lead his flock into exile. Among the few communal possessions the town Jews bring with them are “the scrolls of the law from the synagogue . . . carefully placed on beds of straw in a wagon, the holy objects covered with prayer shawls and Ark curtains.” Reb Dan, meanwhile, totes “his prayershawl bag and a couple of cherished volumes” while burning forty years’ worth of manuscripts and letters. The chaos of the evacuation, coupled with scenes en route of Russian soldiers brutalizing Jewish refugees, and wounded soldiers being brought back from the front, causes Reb Dan to lose his bearings:

  Here, stumbling along the wanderer’s path, the rabbi met the powers of evil face to face. It was as though the noise and the stench of corruption and death had extinguished in him the spark of godliness. He had lost the pillar he leaned against for support. He wanted to pray, but his lips were powerless to form the words. He closed his eyes. He felt that he was falling into an abyss. He gripped the sides of the wagon and began to recite the afternoon prayer, but in his confusion he forgot how the words went. Over and over he found himself repeating the same phrase, “Happy are they that dwell in Thy house.”94

  Reb Dan, ironically, finds himself in a situation much like Nahum Fischelson in “The Spinoza of Market Street.” Unable to recall the words to one of the most commonly repeated (and thereby memorized) prayers in the liturgy—the Ashre prayer, composed largely of Psalm 145, which opens the daily afternoon service—he reminds the reader of Singer’s earlier story of Fischelson’s sudden incapacity to remember the axioms of the Ethics amid war, sickness, and passion.

  Yet Reb Dan is able to recompose himself when he has a moment, in his cart, to read a page of Talmud, or when the procession arrives in a nearby village and he is escorted to the synagogue. He can withstand even the mayhem of Warsaw, his ultimate destination, when he sits in synagogue on the night of Yom Kippur:

  As he sat there in his prayer shawl and white robe Reb Dan could forget that he had been driven out of Tereshpol Minor. He was in a sanctuary, among his own people and among the familiar volumes of the law. No, he was not alone. There was still a God in heaven, angels, seraphim, a throne of grace. All that he needed was to stretch out his hand and he would touch one of the holy volumes whose words were the voice of the living God, the letters with which God had created the world. A sudden wave of pity swept over him for the unbelievers who wandered about in outer darkness, shooting and killing one another, looting, stealing, raping. What were they seeking? What would be the outcome of their endless wars? How long would they go on sinking into the morass of iniquity?95

  Whether Reb Dan’s continued belief in an omnipotent “God in heaven” whose will is revealed in the “familiar volumes of the law,” who is capable of bringing about miracles and who will ultimately reward good and punish evil—whether this is, ultimately, a convincing response to the “shooting and killing . . . looting, stealing, and raping” he has witnessed remains open to doubt. This is not an endorsement of Reb Dan’s orthodoxy. An earlier exchange between Reb Dan and the town maskil Jekutiel the watchmaker, in the midst of the evacuation from Tereshpol Minor, has already put the tenability of both the “traditional” and “modern” answers to antisemitism into question:

  “Nu, rabbi?” he said.

  It was clear what he meant was: Where is your Lord of the Universe
now? Where are His miracles? Where is your faith in Torah and prayer?

  “Nu, Jekutiel,” the rabbi answered. What he was saying was: Where are your worldly remedies? Where is your trust in the gentiles? What have you accomplished by aping Esau?96

  Yet the persuasiveness of his strong theism aside, what is striking is that Reb Dan—the golus (exilic) Jew personified—can be driven from home, bullied and humiliated en route, even momentarily shaken in his faith, and still regain his equilibrium. He does not need an actual home to feel at home: Place him in a shul, amid “the familiar volumes of sacred law,” and he will, however briefly, experience the warmth and protection of a second home.

  Can the secular Jew exposed to the same turmoil and tragedy as Reb Dan find a second home in—Spinoza? Like Reb Dan, Asa Heshel—in part because of circumstances, in part because of his own ingrained passivity—is a peripatetic figure, a wandering Jew. The one constant by his side—whether he is in Warsaw or Tereshpol Minor, a student in Switzerland or a soldier on the eastern front in World War One—is Spinoza’s Ethics, which he reads and rereads with the same fanatical devoutness as Nahum Fischelson. While serving in the Russian army, to the mockery of his fellow soldiers, Asa sneaks in a few pages of the Ethics whenever possible:

  He sat here in the barracks before taps and carried on a dispute with Spinoza. Well, then, let it be admitted that everything that was happening was necessary. That the entire war was nothing but a play of modes in the infinite ocean of the Substance. But for what reason has the divine nature required all of this? Why should he not put an end to the entire tragicomedy? He read from the Fifth Part of the Ethics, where Spinoza discussed the intellectual love of God.

  Proposition 35: God loves Himself with infinite intellectual love.

  Proposition 37: There is nothing in nature that is contrary to this intellectual love of God or that can remove it.

  Asa Heshel raised his eyes from the page. Was it really so? Could one in truth love all these Ivans? Even this one with the pockmarked face and the shifty piggish eyes?97

  Doubts such as these dog Asa Heshel and he proves unable to resist the slide into ever increasing skepticism, misanthropy, and even nihilism. Returning from war, he confesses to Abram, “I have no philosophy,” and “I’ve made up my mind that the human race is no more important than flies or bedbugs.”98 Without abandoning Spinoza, Asa becomes convinced that the only way to “save” him is to reconcile Spinoza’s egoistic ethics (“the idea that happiness and morality are identical”) with the pessimistic philosophy of Malthus. Asa’s (unsurprisingly) never-finished dissertation, “The Laboratory of Happiness”—with its ludicrous proposal of “the establishment of a research laboratory for experimentation in pure happiness”—ultimately amounts to an argument for birth control, “more sex and fewer children.”99

  The contrast, then, between Reb Dan and Asa Heshel is quite stark. The proximity of the “familiar volumes of the law” provides Reb Dan with a reliable pillar of support, however tenuous that support will ultimately prove come the Nazi invasion. The Ethics—for all its original promise in Asa Heshel’s eyes—appears capable of offering no such mooring. Ironically, one of the rare times in the novel Asa enjoys a moment of “at-homeness” comes during his brief return home to Tereshpol Minor, when he accompanies his grandfather to synaogue for evening prayers. Surrounded by yeshiva students “reading in the dim light” and worshippers “softly chanting,” standing in front of the Ark and inhaling the “heavy odor that seemed . . . to be compounded of candle wax, dust, fast days, and eternity,” Asa Heshel is suddenly (if evanescently) seized with the thought that “everything he had experienced in alien places seemed to be without meaning. Time had flown like an illusion. This was his true home, this was where he belonged. Here was where he would come for refuge when everything else failed.”100 But even after his ambitions to become a professor of philosophy have collapsed, even after his divorce from Adele and the failure of his marriage to Hadassah, indeed even after the imminence of the Nazi attack has become evident, it is the system of Spinoza to which Asa consistently turns and returns. While gazing through his window at “the sky, the stars, the planets, the Milky Way,” he coolly ponders the thought that “the same laws which controlled the sun and the moon, the comets and the nebulae, also governed life and death, Mussolini, Hitler, every Nazi lout who lustily sang the Horst Wessel song and howled for Jewish blood to spurt from the knife.”101 Not even the blitzkrieg, when it comes, can initially shake his absorption in the rationalism of the Ethics: “Between bombardments he made calculations in pencil. . . . Where was one to seek refuge from this chaos if not in the realm of ‘adequate ideas’? A triangle still contained two right angles. Even Hitler could not change that.”102

  VII.

  The differences between the English and Yiddish versions of The Family Moskat are most glaring in their respective endings. The former concludes with what is the penultimate chapter in the Yiddish original. There, the last word is given to Hertz Yanovar, a “secular” intellectual who nevertheless throughout the novel is obsessed with the occult. Standing amid the Nazi devastation of Warsaw, a bedraggled Yanovar blurts out in Polish that the Messiah will soon come. Pressed by Asa Heshel to explain his meaning, he answers, “Death is the Messiah. That’s the real truth!” For the English reader, then, the book closes on a note of nihilistic resignation that appears to reflect Asa Heshel’s own outlook by novel’s end.

  Not so the Yiddish edition, which includes an additional chapter (chapter 65) of eleven pages. Here, after depicting the observance of the Jewish New Year among the surviving members of the Moskat clan, the narrative abruptly shifts to a “pine forest” far from Warsaw, where a small group of “would-be pioneers” celebrate Rosh Hashanah, taking a brief respite in their desperate efforts to escape the Germans and “reach the land of Israel.” The omniscient narrator makes clear that they are not the only ones: “From every town, young men and women, Zionist and otherwise, started out with the same desire: to reach the far-off promised land, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Jaffa, and Haifa, the colonies and the kibbutzim.”103 And whereas the English ending equates messianism with death and catastrophe, the Yiddish version connects the Zionist emigration to the traditional belief in messianic restoration: “Rise up, oh, remnants of Israel, and prepare for the final battle. Like a torch is the House of Jacob and the House of Esau is straw. Rise up and fear not. Yours is the final victory. Unto you will come the Messiah.”104 A stark gap thus separates the two endings, a near polar opposition between hopelessness and hope.

  Critics familiar with the Yiddish edition have long clashed over the literary merits of the original ending. Some argue that its inclusion was little more than an attempt to console the contemporary Yiddish reader—a reader likely to have lost scores of loved ones, relatives, friends, and acquaintances in the recent destruction—by providing an optimistic conclusion altogether discordant with the general mood of the book. In this view, the darkness of the English ending—“Death is the Messiah”—forms a more appropriate resolution.105 Others insist on the integral connection of the final chapter to the overall thematic framework of the novel and on the consequent incomplete character of the English edition.106

  What is indisputable is that one cannot appreciate the centrality of the Spinoza theme to The Family Moskat, and to the figure of Asa Heshel in particular, without reading chapter 65 of the Yiddish original. The chapter begins with a description of Asa Heshel gathering his things, preparing to move in with his sister’s family on a street in Warsaw thus far spared the worst of the bombardment. In addition to packing “a few shirts, underwear, a sweater, socks, and some books,” Asa also stuffs his copy of Spinoza’s Ethics into his pocket. An extended argument with Spinoza ensues, as Asa, his previous detachment wavering, struggles to make sense of Hadassah’s death and the devastation all around him:

  He stood near the boarded-up doorway of a shop in the glare of a burning sunset and took stock of his life. Is there a God? Ye
s, there is. He is everything: the earth, the sky, the milky way, the crying of a child, the Nazi bomb, Einstein’s theory, Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The smoke rising there is He, too. He is One, He is Eternal. My body is an infinitely small part of His body. My spirit is a drop in the ocean of His spirit. Who is killing whom? Who hates whom? All answers rest in God. We have one aim here: to continue existence as long as possible; to be happy as much as one can. If you can’t, let His will be done. Is this Spinoza? Yes, that’s the whole of him. Can one die with such a philosophy? There’s no choice. What do the others say that’s different? God’s ways are hidden.

  But no, no! It isn’t so! There is another credo: God is a fighter, a warrior. God is on the side of the righteous. He gave free will to choose between good and evil. Every hour. Every second. What kind of God is that? The Jewish God, the Judge of all the earth, the God who is jealous and vengeful. He wages war against Amalek. He is neither Hitler’s Mein Kampf nor the Nazi bomb. Nature is His work but is not He. He created evil to provide a choice. He sent Hitler as a trial and a punishment. Is God to blame if we sat by with folded hands and let the wicked rise up? If we are all lazy, why should He be diligent? Why should not the wicked triumph if the righteous wait for miracles? How could I have forgotten this precept? Did I not learn it in religious school, studying Deuteronomy? I forgot it because I wanted to cast off every yoke, because I wanted to yield to every lust and close an eye while men of power robbed, killed, raped, incited. What better excuse for tolerating evil than to blame God for everything?107