The Din in the Head

by Cynthia Ozick

  With Stalin's ascension in 1924, new tyrannies began to mimic the old. Postrevolutionary literary and artistic ferment, much of it experimental, ebbed or was suppressed. Censorship returned, sniffing after the subversive, favoring the coarse flatness of Socialist Realism. Babel's wife, Evgenia, whom he had married in 1919, emigrated to Paris, where his daughter Nathalie was born in 1929. His mother and sister, also disaffected, left for Brussels. Babel clung to Moscow, hotly wed to his truest bride, the Russian tongue, continuing his work on a cycle of childhood stories and venturing into writing for theater and film. The film scripts, especially those designed for silent movies, turned out to be remarkable: they took on, under the irresistible magnetism of the witnessing camera and the innovation of the present tense, all the surreal splendor of Babel's most plumaged prose. Several were produced and proved to be popular, but eventually they failed to meet Party guidelines, and the director of one of them, an adaptation of Turgenev, was compelled to apologize publicly.

  Unable to conform to official prescriptiveness, Babel's publications grew fewer and fewer. He was charged with "silence"—the sin of Soviet unproductivity—and was denied the privilege of traveling abroad. His last journey to Paris occurred in 1935, when André Malraux intervened with the Soviet authorities to urge Babel's attendance at a Communist-sponsored International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture and Peace—after which Babel never again met with his wife and daughter. Later that year, back in Moscow, he set up a second household with An-tonina Pirozhkova, with whom he fathered a second daughter; through an earlier liaison, he was already the father of a son. But if Babel's personal life was unpredictable, disorganized, and rash, his art was otherwise. He wrested his sentences out of a purifying immediacy. Like Pushkin, he said, he was in pursuit of "precision and brevity." His most pointed comment on literary style appears in "Guy de Maupassant," a cunning seriocomic sexual fable fixed on the weight and trajectory of language itself. The success of a phrase, the young narrator instructs, "rests in a crux that is barely discernible. One's fingertips must grasp the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned once, not twice." But even this is not the crux. The crux (Babel's severest literary dictum) is here: "No iron spike can pierce a human heart as icily as a period in the right place."

  A writer's credo, and Babel's most intimate confession. Stand in awe of it, yes—but remember also that this same master of the white bone of truth, this artist of the delicately turned key, was once a shameless propagandist for the Revolution, capable of rabid rote exhortations: "Beat them, Red Fighters, clobber them to death, if it is the last thing you do! Right away! This minute! Now!" "Slaughter them, Red Army fighters! Stamp harder on the rising lids of their rancid coffins!" Such catchwords are locked cells for which there are no keys, and while it is a truism that every Utopia contains the seeds of dystopia, Babel, after all, was granted skepticism almost from the start. Out of skepticism came disillusionment; out of disillusionment, revulsion. And in the end, as the tragic trope has it, the Revolution devoured its child.

  Babel's art served as a way station to the devouring. He was devoured because he would not, could not, accommodate to falsehood; because he saw and he saw, with an eye as merciless as a klieg light; and because, like Kafka, he surrendered his stories to voices and passions tremulous with the unforeseen. If we wish to complete, and transmit, the literary configuration of the twentieth century—the image that will enduringly stain history's retina—now is the time (it is past time) to set Babel beside Kafka. Between them, they leave no nerve unshaken.

  In Research of Lost Time

  "I'M A REPORTER, not a biographer," Joseph Lelyveld warns in an early passage of Omaha Blues, his distinctly reportorial memoir. This insistently honest assertion is confirmed by Lelyveld's history of hierarchical ascent at the New York Times: from errand boy (a daily run to the Weather Bureau) to local and national newshawk, to foreign correspondent, and eventually to executive editor. Retired now from the pinnacle of a long career, he has sought in his late sixties to mine the partly veiled, partly relinquished landscape of an irregular childhood. And it is as a seasoned journalist—legman, interviewer, researcher, chaser after leads—that he goes about the often harrowing job of uncovering painful old family truths. His is the restrained newspaperman's voice of principled detachment: no taking sides, little introspection, narrative plumbed for data and evidence rather than motive or metaphor.

  But the data are mostly tumultuous, and the evidence turns out to be as ambiguous as it is troubling. Memory itself, frail and dappled, is scarcely trustworthy, and is anyhow the poet's tool; yet Lelyveld means to reconstruct—no, to reanimate—the faded lives and hidden passions of his parents, and of Ben, an enigmatic older friend: the central trio of his boyhood. Self-defined as a "scavenger of archives," he plunges into the documented sources. He requests FBI files of half a century ago. He looks up court records, defunct newspapers, film libraries, historical societies, the relics of disbanded committees. He tracks down a schoolmate he has not spoken to since the ninth grade. He excavates an old trunk stuffed with letters and stored in a synagogue basement. And in this way he hopes to retrieve the dramatis personae of an unhappy childhood: father, mother, Ben.

  Each was a force, and ultimately an absence. His father, Arthur Lelyveld, was an eminent Reform rabbi and a committed civil rights activist. From the pulpit of his Cleveland synagogue he pressed for the integration of that city's public schools. In the "freedom summer" of 1964 he was brutally beaten and bloodied with a tire iron by racist thugs in Mississippi. But twenty years earlier, in the heart of the Second World War, in the very hour when the fires of Auschwitz were obliterating the Jews of Europe, a misplaced pacifist zeal had led him to a position acutely grotesque for a Jewish leader. Idealist purity took on a problematical, even a chimerical, taint: he proposed to send a Jewish "relief unit" to Europe, to be composed of conscientious objectors like himself. However respectful of human life and unwilling to shed blood he might be, a conscientious objector in that period was nevertheless a bystander to the murder of Jews.

  Delusion evaporated finally in the blaze of intelligent hindsight, and Arthur Lelyveld became a tireless advocate for the Zionist cause, at first working to bring round Jews inimical to the idea of Jewish nationhood. Prominent among these was Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the publisher of the New York Times; Sulzberger was not won over. At thirty-three, Arthur Lelyveld joined a delegation to the Oval Office to plead with an irritable Truman for the establishment of the Jewish state. "Jesus Christ couldn't please them when he was on earth," the president was reported to have said. Still, Joseph recalls, "my dad came home thinking he had made a sale."

  Joseph's mother, meanwhile, was an idealist of a different color. Though at twenty-one she had begun her marriage with radiant visions of a midwestern clerical life, she soon discovered that the role of rebbetzin, the rabbi's wife, was far too restrictive for her emerging literary and scholarly ambitions. In her teens she had performed in amateur theatricals, and continued to be drawn to drama: the year Joseph was born she was directing a play by Clifford Odets. Increasingly restless, she wearied of her duties as a purveyor of congregational politesse. What she craved was Shakespeare and doctoral study at Columbia University with Maurice Valency, a popular Renaissance scholar and drama consultant. "I'm in a world I adore," she wrote from Morningside Heights, having left behind both husband and two small sons.

  In 1943, nine-year-old Joseph (stylishly dubbed Jo by his mother, after the sculptor Jo Davidson) abruptly became Joey in mud-soaked rural Tekamah, north of Omaha, where his father then held his pulpit. The boy was uprooted—farmed out, literally—and sent to live with the Jensens, a Seventh-day Adventist family. The Sabbatarian Jensens shunned pork; the Reform Lelyvelds did not. On the Jensens' 240-acre farm Joey milked cows, put up wallpaper to thwart leaks, and learned that "culti-vatin" meant "diggin out the pig weeds." Both Lelyveld parents were distantly preoccupied with their divided aspirations, the father
looking to succor the world's forlorn, the mother in New York, intellectually liberated from domesticity and resentful of its claims. Despite love poems and pleas from her husband, she declined to return to him. Joseph was again shipped off, this time to Brooklyn and the care of his paternal grandparents. Torn between the divergent urgencies of traditional wifehood and the seductions of Shakespeare, his mother suffered repeated breakdowns; there were three suicide attempts.

  But there were also repeated reconciliations, during one of which Michael, Joseph's youngest brother, was born. In a clan of blonds, Michael was dark-haired. His actual father, it was revealed long afterward, was Maurice Valency. And still the marriage lasted, even in the face of multiple stormy separations, for some thirty years. This did not prevent Joseph from fathoming, early on, that as a child of intermittent parents he was to be dismissed as secondary to their respective primary passions.

  Enter Ben, Joseph's affectionate and attentive grown-up pal. Like Arthur Lelyveld, he too was a rabbi; he had been ordained as a graduate of the first class of the Jewish Institute of Religion, a new seminary founded by the renowned Rabbi Stephen'S. Wise, a friend of Woodrow Wilson and the nation's foremost Zionist spokesman. Unlike Joseph's often unavailable father, Ben was open to the confidences of an otherwise stubbornly reticent boy, and willingly shepherded him to innumerable baseball games. Yet much of Ben's background was strangely shrouded. Was he or wasn't he a Communist, or even a Soviet agent? Hadn't he consorted with Vasily Zarubin, the KGB's man in the United States, who had twice been awarded the Order of Lenin, and whose spies had penetrated the Manhattan Project? The FBI had all along been collecting observations mixed with suspicions concerning one Benjamin Lowell, who had been George B. Stern, who had been Rabbi Benjamin Goldstein of Temple Beth Or in Montgomery, Alabama.

  Temple Beth Or was Ben's first pulpit. He preached against the wretchedly low wages paid to workers in the South. He preached on the "Negro question." When the Scottsboro Boys, nine young black men falsely accused of raping two white women, were confined on death row in a Montgomery jail, Ben was the only white clergyman to visit them. Together with local black ministers, he organized protest rallies on their behalf, and defended their innocence in a Yom Kippur sermon. His congregants trembled; in rigidly stratified Montgomery, they were themselves insecure. The mayor of Montgomery, it was said, had warned of boycotts of Jewish businesses, and possible violence by the Klan. The Beth Or board ordered Ben to "desist doing anything further in the Scottsboro case." Ousted from his position and charged with Communist connections, Ben was effectively run out of town.

  Rabbi Wise, his mentor, into whose family he had married, offered less than tepid support: Ben's name was turning up in one Communist front organization after another. Now known as George B. Stern, he had drifted off to Hollywood, where he was working for a company that distributed Soviet films. In 1939, in an outrageously sloganeering letter to Rabbi Wise, he made excuses justifying the Nazi-Soviet Pact. "The high, holy peace of the Nazi and Communist saints," Wise wrote back bitterly.

  But when the young Joseph Lelyveld met a captivating Ben in the summer of 1948, the paramount subject was baseball, and Ben himself was now styled Rabbi Benjamin B. Lowell (a WASPized name swiped from his second wife, née Lowenstein). He had been hired as an assistant to Arthur Lelyveld, who was then directing the Hillel Foundation, a nationwide Jewish campus society. "For a couple of years," Lelyveld writes, "Ben was the one adult in my life who seemed consistently and reliably available.... I'd never felt as indulged as I did in Ben's company."

  This may account for Ben's powerfully disproportionate presence in these pages. The mammoth archival effort Lelyveld expends on Ben is, after all, neither the measure nor the essence of the boy's need. The boy knows nothing of Ben's political life. It is for his indulgence, not his politics, that Ben is cherished. The political Ben, the Soviet-apologist Ben, is beyond the boy's scope or interest; if he dominates, it is because of the scope and interest of the journalist. Omaha Blues is subtitled "A Memory Loop." But the Ben who takes over and sets the tone of this narrative is only partly in Lelyveld's memory loop. He is preeminently in Lelyveld's research loop—which is why Ben's every affiliation with all manner of Communist fronts is sumptuously explored. Having recovered that 1939 letter to Stephen Wise, Ben's brash pronunciamento that the Soviet Union is not "on the side of the despisers of mankind," Lelyveld sighs, "Oh Ben"—the impatient despair of the mature political reporter immersed in the unsavory events of the 1930s and 1940s. "I can only be grateful," he adds, "the archives haven't yielded my old friend's rationalization for the Moscow trials." Here speaks the editorialist; the hurt boy is forgotten, fallen out of the memory loop. The blues are muted.

  For the hurt boy, Ben was for a time a "solid presence." Then he disappeared—another instance of an inconstant world. He disappeared because Joseph's father sacked him. Though Arthur Lelyveld had resisted the prevailing pressures of redbaiting, he finally lost confidence in his deputy. The Korean War was under way, and Ben had been fundraising at a front meeting where America was accused of manipulating the United Nations on behalf of a reactionary regime. "The former pacifist," Lelyveld reflects, "had to ask his assistant how on earth ... he could mindlessly fall in step with a cynical peace campaign designed in Moscow, a throwback to the era of the Nazi-Soviet Pact when believers like Ben learned to denounce 'the second imperialist war.'" For fifteen years Ben had not veered from the party line. The Marshall Plan, he once remarked, was an American capitalist plot to seize Europe's markets. Sadly, "Ben had put [my dad] in a situation where he ended up closer to the position of the witch-hunters than he ever imagined he could find himself. It was Ben who had stuck him there, sure, but then what's freedom of speech for if it only belongs to those who'll always be beyond reproach in the use they make of it?"

  This last sentiment is unexceptionable, but once again it has an editorial ring. A more contentious, or call it loyalist, declaration crops up elsewhere. In an extraordinary irony of the generations, the Zionist rabbi and his journalist son were destined to parody history by trading places. "One of my father's tasks as a Zionist official," Lelyveld writes in a footnote, "was to try to persuade the Times that it was giving the anti-Zionist position excessive coverage. He never got to meet the publisher but periodically called on Sulzberger's second-in-command, Julius Ochs Adler." Years later, here is Lelyveld standing in Adler's stead, fending off "a rabbi in full cry who accused the Times of using its news columns with malice aforethought to undermine Israel." Critical views like these Lelyveld dismisses as "Jewish folk belief."

  The complainer in question, however, was a member of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, of which, as it happened, Arthur Lelyveld was president. Learning of this incident, Lelyveld tells us, his father sighed the familial Lelyveld sigh, "a tic passed from generation to generation," and "offered no comment. He understood that the approaches of an advocate and a journalist had to differ." Possibly this was the very argument with which Adler had long ago sent Lelyveld's father packing. Its hidden flaw is that it will sometimes, under the banner of high principle, preclude useful corrective self-interrogation. Did the senior Lelyveld's sigh signify that vaunted neutrality may on occasion be tantamount to evasiveness?

  The approaches of a memoirist and a journalist can also be said to differ. Or put it that there is no all-pervading Proustian madeleine in Lelyveld's workaday prose. Yet salted through this short work is the smarting of an unpretentious lamentation: "If this were a novel," "If I were using these events in a novel," and so on. Flickeringly, the writer appears to see what is missing; and what is missing is the intuitive, the metaphoric, the uncertain, the introspective with its untethered vagaries: in brief, the not-nailed-down. Consequently Lelyveld's memory loop becomes a memory hole, through which everything that is not factually retrievable escapes. Memory, at bottom, is an act of imaginative re-creation, not of archival legwork. "Yes, I was finding, it was possible to do a reporting job on your childh
ood," Lelyveld insists. Yes? Perhaps no. The memoirist has this in common with the novelist: he is like the watchful spider alert to every quiver on its lines. Sensation, not research. Even the conflicted interlude on the farm is retraced (but not replenished) through informational interviews and correspondence, not through the child's sense of desertion and loss. It is telling that what Lelyveld terms "a transfixing moment" of his adolescence turns on an ideological debate with a Communist schoolmate.

  All the same, there are three genuinely transfixing moments—infusions of transcendence—that take this markedly political mindset by surprise. Assigned in 1976 to a presidential campaign in Omaha, Lelyveld visits a transient site of his childhood, the house that is now an institution for the troubled young. "The deep closet of my parents' bedroom" he remembers as a luring tunnel leading to a heap of National Geographic magazines; the laundry sink in the basement calls up "thoughts of model planes." Here, suddenly, is the heat of flesh and blood: intimations of the living thinking feeling boy, and what he read, and the thrilling smells of balsawood and glue. (And here Lelyveld himself scents the revelatory madeleine.)

  Next, reproduced on the page in black and white, without a caption, a rather amateurish watercolor of his mother, painted by a family friend, and belatedly plucked from the synagogue trunk. A woman sunk in discontent, beautiful, longing, pensive, unsayably sad.

  And last, a vision of himself that came upon the fifty-nine-year-old Lelyveld in the course of his father's funeral, even as the eulogies thickened: "I imagined a little boy with curly blond hair ... running up a slight slope, through high grass, on a summery day. The little boy was calling, 'Daddy, Daddy, Daddy..."'