Art and Ardor

by Cynthia Ozick

  And it is these Jews—this pitiable phenomenon of a passionately loyal citizenry longing only to be good and peaceable Germans—who comprise the furious hidden text of From Berlin to Jerusalem. Writing of the bloodthirsty days of Nazi-dominated Munich, Scholem comments: “I had long since made my decision to leave Germany. But it was frightening to encounter the blindness of the Jews who refused to see and acknowledge all that. This greatly encumbered my relations with Munich Jews, for they became extremely jumpy and angry when someone broached that subject.” In Frankfurt, Scholem broke off his friendship with Franz Rosenzweig, the remarkable author of The Star of Redemption, a vigorously original meditation on Judaism; in spite of his “intense Jewish orientation,” Rosenzweig still hoped for “a Jewish community that considered itself German.” “Thus I had,” Scholem concludes, “one of the stormiest and most irreparable arguments of my youth.” And again: “In view of the task of radical renewal of Judaism and Jewish society, Germany was a vacuum in which we would choke.”

  It is more than an irony, it is an ongoing wound, that From Berlin to Jerusalem, incontestably a Zionist book, continues the fraternal drama in its dedication to the Marxist brother who chose Communist “Humanity” over Jewish fate. But if Werner is not yet absolved, neither is Benjamin. “He paid dearly for his flirtation with Marxism,” Scholem tells me. Not far from where we sit in the dining room, a long row of books commands an endless shelf: they are all by Walter Benjamin.

  *

  We are having this conversation over lunch in Scholem’s house in Jerusalem, on green and flowering Abarbanel Street. The books climb and spread over all the walls of every room. Scholem is famous for loving chocolates, so I have brought some, but warily: he is famous also for knowing which chocolates will do and which won’t. “Why am I being bribed?” cries Scholem—a very lofty elf with bold elfin ears and an antic elfin glee advertising tricks and enigmas—and I am relieved that my offering has passed muster. The pilgrimages to this house have been many. The critic Leslie Fiedler has been here. The historian Lucy Dawidowicz has been here. The scholar Yosef Yerushalmi has been here. The novelists Mark Mirsky and Norma Rosen have been here. Jorge Luis Borges has been here, in homage, but Scholem disclaims it: “Borges wrote all his work beforehand, before he read me.” Patrick White, the Australian Nobel Prize winner, acknowledges Scholem’s influence, particularly in the novel The Riders of the Chariot. Yale professor Harold Bloom’s startling schematic borrowings, in Kabbalah and Criticism and elsewhere, prompt Scholem to quip: “It’s a free country.”

  He seems pleased by these varied manifestations of his authority. What he does object to is the questionable uses his prestige is sometimes put to. “I was naïve,” he explains. “I believed that if scholarship came, it would drive out charlatanism. Instead, the charlatans go on as before—only now they use me as a footnote.” (The charlatans are presumably occult faddists who have appropriated Kabbalah.) He tells how his work is now frequently subject to a kind of veiled plagiarism: “One man wrote a book on Kabbalah and referred to Scholem in a few footnotes. But all the rest of the book was also Scholem!”

  Lunch is cold spinach soup, ambrosial in the perpetually patient sunheat of a Jerusalem afternoon; roast veal in a pastry crust; and, for dessert, Mrs. Scholem’s homemade pink ices, concocted of fresh strawberries. The meal is elegant, in an atmosphere new to me—is it the way the light laps over these Biblical hills like some heavy celestial ray, is it a redolence of 1912 Berlin? Mrs. Scholem has been thinking about my question—the question about the shadow-Scholem. She shakes her head; she looks grave, but in a riddling way. “I know what the shadow is. And I found out only three years ago. I know it only three years.” It has nothing to do with Benjamin; it has nothing to do with any of that. Will she tell? “No, I won’t tell.” It is a joke and it is not a joke. Later, when I plead with her to tell after all: “Maybe when I am one hundred years old. Until then I won’t tell.” Scholem, elfin, enjoying this: “What is `information’? Nothing at all. Use your judgment. Use your imagination.” It is as if he does not mind being invented. We begin to speak of the “theater of the self.” “I call myself a metaphysical clown,” Scholem says; “a clown hides himself in theater.” I ask whether Walter Benjamin ever hid himself that way. “Benjamin never played theater.” How much of Professor Scholem is theater? Scholem: “Ask Mrs. Scholem.” Mrs. Scholem: “One hundred percent.”

  We turn over the pages of Scholem’s memoir and study the photographs. There is one of Scholem and his three brothers, all of them under the age of fourteen. “His mother called them the four sparrows,” Mrs. Scholem supplies. In the picture Gerhard, the smallest, is only six. I am suddenly emboldened to speculate—though not out loud—about the flight of the last sparrow; it seems to me I know by now what the shadow-Scholem must be. It is the shadow cast by the sparrow’s wings on the way from Gerhard to Gershom. It is the capacity to make one’s life a surprise, even to oneself—to create the content of one’s own mind, to turn out to be something entirely unexpected. Nothing in the narrow Berlin of Gershom Scholem’s youth prepared him for where he stands now. When, I inquire, did he begin to sense what his destiny would be? He reflects; he resists. And then: “About the age of twenty. You get the feeling of going in a straight line.” And how would he account for this realization of a special intellectual calling? The rejoinder is so plain, and yet so obscure, that it shocks, like the throwing of three ordinary stones. “I wanted to learn about Judaism. I wanted to learn Hebrew. I wanted to learn as much as I could.” Mrs. Scholem: “He went to the bottom of the question. Curiosity.” Scholem: “Yes, curiosity.”

  But that cannot satisfy. And, in fact, the particulars of Gershom Scholem’s journey, as he describes them in From Berlin to Jerusalem, do not quite satisfy either, although they are meant to yield the story of “going in a straight line”—they leave out the mystery of self-surprise. Everything strange remains strange. The eccentricity of an education against all likelihood, begun in parental contempt, seized in contradiction of everything influential—society, the times, the drift and pulse of contemporary scholarship, Germany itself—is not unraveled. The secret of how that miraculous rupture and awakening came about, leading to Scholem’s rise as one of the whirlwind masters, teachers, wideners and imaginers of our age, is not revealed. The closest Scholem comes to it is in a single sentence. Alluding to his attraction to Kabbalah, he remarks, “Perhaps I was endowed with an affinity for this area from the ‘root of my soul,’ as the kabbalists would have put it, or maybe my desire to understand the enigma of Jewish history was also involved—and the existence of the Jews over the millennia is an enigma, no matter what the numerous ‘explanations’ may say.”

  Yet Scholem will go no further in self-disclosure, or even self-conjecture, than he has already gone; perhaps he cannot. “There will be no second volume of memoirs,” he warns. This book, another on Walter Benjamin that follows it, and the volume of correspondence with Benjamin—a trinity of biography, autobiography, and portraiture—are all we are to have in the way of personal history.

  What the memoir delivers—and it is, after all, a shining little book—is a pageant of characterizations, rife and roiling, in spots diaphanous, elsewhere speedy, skeletal, and spare. It is all a slender chain of shimmering beads on a string: quicksilver sketches of a hundred brilliant encounters—Rubashov, who became Shazar, Israel’s third President, living next door to Scholem in a boarding house packed with brainy but impoverished young Russian Jews; the philosophers Martin Buber and Hermann Cohen; Agnon, the Nobel-winning genius whose stories Scholem was the first to translate and to teach; Simmel, the prototypical self-estranged Jewish intellectual (to whom Buber “sometimes pointed out . . . that a man like himself ought to be interested in seeing to it that men of his type did not disappear”); Franz Rosenzweig; numbers of intellectual young women, German, Jewish, and half-Jewish; and glimpses of Benjamin himself. There is plenty of comedy, some of it melancholy, such as Hermann Cohen’
s comment to Franz Rosenzweig, reproaching the Zionists, “Those fellows want to be happy!”—“the most profound statement,” Scholem writes, “that an opponent of Zionism ever made.”

  Still, everything flashes by with the quirky velocity of picture cards—people (Scholem is sensitive to looks), ideas, influential books (Kafka especially), Talmud study (“the dialogue of the generations”), extraordinary observations. Though crowded with radiant susceptibilities—for learning, for ideals, for intellectual friendships—yet these anecdotal portraits all run by too quickly. What we want from a memoir, I suppose, is something like the sensation of watching Hans Castorp’s thoughts open into new depths before our eyes; or the actual texture of a mind in struggle that John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography chillingly renders. One aches for a Thomas Mann to make a fat Bildungsroman of Scholem’s early life—to unfold, for instance, the falling-away of mathematical ambition in the young scholar (who began as a powerful mathematician). What a marvel it would be for those paternal and fraternal crises to play themselves out in dramatic scenes; for the late nights of boarding-house cake-nibbling and philosophy to shout themselves across the page; for the playful and gifted mother who took such twinkling pleasure in writing Scholem’s school compositions to draw nearer to us—for every unforeseeable and perplexing wave in Scholem’s life to break into novelistic plenitude! But no, the enigma with its aura of conjecture still glimmers—it is there for us to pluck at or reinvent. The shadow persists. The plenitude, and the revelations, are in the work.

  _____________

  Conflated from The New York Times Book Review, September 21, 1980, and February 24, 1974.

  1 Gershom Scholem died in 1982.

  Toward a New Yiddish

  NOTE

  “Toward a New Yiddish” was delivered at the Weizmann Institute in Rehovoth, Israel, in the summer of 1970, as a talk entitled “America” in a series of cultural Dialogues designed to facilitate intellectual exchange between Jewish Americans and Israelis. It was conceived, in part, as a reply to George Steiner, who had appeared under the same auspices two years earlier. I include it here because it is not bound by its occasion or by any period, though I am conscious of how certain events are caught in its texture like insects in amber—how long-ago and remote are these references to the New Left, Yippies, Indian headbands, “lifestyle,” Chicago street demonstrations! They teach one to distrust urgency; in the end, nothing needs footnoting more than the latest thing. (And yet the Emersonian grain of the “Movement”—so it is still called by its aging inheritors—continues to reverberate, with its emphasis on sensation, in the national self-consciousness.)

  A dozen years have gone by since the evolution of these ideas. They have already been thoroughly subjected to criticism and objection; they have even been charged with the sociological sin of the “visionary.” And I am no longer so tenderly disposed to the possibility of a New Yiddish—which was, anyhow, an invention, a literary conceit calculated to dispel pessimism. Gentile readers, should this essay invite any, may or may not be surprised at this self-portrait of a third-generation American Jew (though the first to have been native-born) perfectly at home and yet perfectly insecure, perfectly acculturated and yet perfectly marginal. I am myself sometimes taken aback by these contradictions, but what I do not feel uneasy about is the thesis of American pluralism, which, I think, calls for a mood vividly different from that of Saint Paul in the ancient world. Paul’s tactical “Be all things to all men” cannot apply; my own striving is to be one thing all the time, and to everyone; to speak in the same voice to every interlocutor, Gentile or Jew; not to have one attitude or subject matter (or imagining or storytelling) for one kind of friend and another for another kind. To be inwardly inhibited from this openness is mental abasement. Intellectual and spiritual freedom means to be peacefully all of a piece always, no matter who is being addressed. Anything else is parochialism.

  “Toward a New Yiddish,” notwithstanding (or perhaps because of) its historical focus, is, it seems to me, the opposite of parochial—though I am, as I have said, no longer greatly attached to its conclusions.1

  How, by the way, do we recognize the parochial? It is the point of view that invented the ugly and intolerable term “ethnic.” It is the point of view that dismisses as parochial a civilization not one’s own. And it is, sometimes, the point of view that characterizes Jews who, for whatever reasons, personal or political, are not much interested in Jewish ideas. Such persons (unlike most Gentiles who have severed any serious connection with Christianity) call themselves “universalists.” It is striking to observe that universalism of this sort is, however, the ultimate Jewish parochialism. It is mainly Jews who profess it.

  Toward a New Yiddish

  Two years ago an illustrious man of letters came out of Diaspora to this place and offered Exile as a metaphor for the Essential Jew, and himself as a metaphor of Exile. He came, he said, as a visitor. Now immediately I would distinguish between a visitor and a pilgrim: both will come to a place and go away again, but a visitor arrives, a pilgrim is restored. A visitor passes through a place; the place passes through the pilgrim. A visitor comes either to teach or to learn, or perhaps simply and neutrally to observe; but a pilgrim comes on purpose to be taught renewal. And so, as self-defined “guest” and ideological outsider, this visitor I speak of designated, with all authenticity, his personal mode, mien, and consciousness as exilic; then, less authentically, he characterized Exile as an arena for humankind’s finest perceptions, free of “lunatic parochialism”; and finally—questionably—he concluded that to be most exiled is to be most exalted, that a sensibility most outside the commonalty of Jews is most within the “genius of Judaism.” “Yes,” he said, “I am a wanderer, a Luftmensch. . . . But I have made of my harrying . . . a creative impulse so strong that it has recast much of the politics, art and intellectual constructs of the age.” Far from being cultural disaster, outsideness becomes cultural opportunity. “Marx lies in Highgate and Freud in Golders Green. . . . Einstein’s ashes were scattered off New Jersey.” Think also of Trotsky, Kafka, Lévi-Strauss, Chomsky, Spinoza, Heine. Homelessness is the virtue of being disarmed, and powerlessness has at least the power to slay without weaponry the serpent Nationalism, whose secret name is Atavistic Tribalism. By declaring himself marginal man, wanderer and guest, the visitor pronounced himself “unto the elements . . . free.” Impressively in command of the lyrical and the moral imagination, he put both at the service of his perception of universalism, and called this the genius of Judaism. Diaspora, then, is the rootless though paradoxically fruitful soil of the Essential Jew (explained the visitor), and my own envisioning sensibility, born of my precarious tenure there (explained the visitor), is the genius of Judaism. Diaspora, c’est moi: what I am, he in effect told us, is what a Jew ought to be—thereby elevating his individual and personal satisfactions to a general theory—in fact to a behavioral ideal.

  Now my intention here is not to fall into a polemical struggle with an absent luminary. I am on another line, and am lured by a seizure of history more deeply ancient than any local debate in a corner of our current Dispersion. George Steiner justifies his vision of Diaspora partly by his own achievements and reputation, partly through contemplation of the achievements and reputation of other Jews. What I want to question—the vocation and leash of these speculations—is whether the accomplishments of Jews in Diaspora are in fact Jewish accomplishments; and further, whether it matters that they are or are not. When George Steiner speaks of universalism and calls it Jewish, for instance, I agree that universalism is of course a Jewish impulse—but not as he conceives it. Jewish universalism emphasizes that the God of Israel is also the God of mankind-in-general. It does not claim that mankind-in-general must be the god of Israel. To celebrate what the “harrying” of Diaspora does for the Jew is somehow also to celebrate the harrying. You cannot praise the consequence without having some of your praise stick to its brute instrumentality. An idol is a-thing-that-subsists-fo
r-its-own-sake-without-a-history; significantly, that is also what a poem is; and even universalism can become tainted if it is turned into an idol or a poem. In short, even if Diaspora is credited with begetting, or reinforcing, the universalist mentality, it remains a perverse criterion.