The Ritual of New Creation (21 page)

Read The Ritual of New Creation Online

Authors: Norman Finkelstein

Tags: #History, #Jewish, #Religion, #General, #test

 
Page 72
to datepolitical in the original sense of the
polis
. But as a Hebrew rather than a Hellene, Ozick cannot put her full faith in the human affairs of the polis; she understands that even our most admirable communal aspirationsthe very stuff of history as it is usually understoodinevitably unmake themselves. Even Jewish justice and Jewish reason are inadequate bulwarks against lust, greed, ambition, and pettiness. The well-intentioned Puttermesser plays her part in the city's history (at one point she counts all of her predecessors, up to and including Ed Koch), learning too late what Ozick and the reader knew all along: that she and her golem, as historical instruments, are doomed to failure and decreation.
Puttermesser's lesson involves both the representation of historical processes in the fiction of a Jewish writer and the shaping of that fiction by historical processes. If I may resort to Robert Scholes' useful distinction, the former is a matter of
interpretation
while the latter is a concern of
criticism
and as such, they are relevant not only to
Puttermesser and Xantippe
but to all of Ozick's work.
21
Our desire to understand the tragicomic failures which Ozick so frequently depicts leads us to
interpret
the view of history which emerges from her tales: a view of history as a struggle not merely for the temporally appropriate, but for temporal fulfillment or even blessing, what Harold Bloom, in his various discussions of the agon in the Hebrew Bible, call
olam
or ''time without boundaries."
22
Ozick's protagonists are invariably denied such fulfillment; modern history especially is regarded as a time when passionate Jewish personalities would do better to live quietly under normative patterns of belief, as argued, for example, in the great cautionary tale "The Pagan Rabbi." This recognition leads to a sense of "some deficiency in the text or excess in the reader," and hence to
criticism
.
23
Why does Ozick, who argues strongly for a historically engaged art of fiction, continually produce what appear to be Aggadic parables devoted to (the God of) redemptive history, but which may be read contradictorily as dark shrines to those forces which fatally limit human agency on the historical stage? It is a question reserved for Ozick as opposed to any of her precursors, for she is unique among the writers of this modern Aggadic tradition in insisting that art must be an either/or proposition:
either
liturgical, historically redemptive, and monotheistic
or
aesthetic, blithely forgetful, and idolatrous. For Jewish writers at least, confronted with "the Mosaic revolution in human perception," "There is no Instead Of."
24
 
Page 73
If the contradictions which we meet in reading Ozick emerge, as I have been arguing, from her problematic orientation to history, then what is necessary for both our interpretive and critical tasks is insight into the Jewish self-understanding of history. Yerushalmi's
Zakhor
provides us with just such insight. As Yerushalmi demonstrates throughout his brooding survey, history in the modern sense of a rational analysis of the past stands peculiarly at odds with the traditional Jewish relationship to the past through memory. In the Bible, "It is above all God's acts of intervention in history, and man's responses to them, be they positive or negative, that must be recalled."
25
"Historiography," Yerushalmi continues, "is but one expression of the awareness that history is meaningful and of the need to remember, and neither meaning nor memory ultimately depends upon it."
26
In the post-biblical period, the Jews inherit what they believe to be a ''revealed pattern of the whole of history"; thus the normative attitude toward the past, especially for the Rabbis, becomes "an ongoing exploration of the meaning of the history bequeathed to them, striving to interpret it in living terms for their own and later generations."
27
With few exceptions, this religious, memory-based attitude toward the past dominates Jewish culture up until the Haskalah in the late eighteenth century and the subsequent movement to uncover Jewish history in the modern manner called the
Wissenschaft des Judentums
.
28
Only at this point, as Yerushalmi says, "do we really find, for the first time, a Jewish historiography divorced from Jewish collective memory and, in crucial respects, thoroughly at odds with it."
29
It is within these circumstances, so completely "the product of rupture" (as understood by both Yerushalmi the historian and Bloom the literary theorist) that we can locate Ozick's struggle for historicity. Ozick's denial of rupture, her emphasis on normative patterns of belief and behavior, her attempt to restore Jewish fiction to its Aggadic role, are all signs that her conception of the past has less to do with Jewish history and more to do with Jewish memory. When "the true image of the past flits by" for Ozick, it is the remembered past, the past of God's interventions and Israel's responses. Commenting on this traditional view of the past, Bloom pointedly notes that "Because the intervention is for
our
response, we can be tempted to believe we are everything; because the intervener is incommensurate with us, we can fear that we are nothing."
30
It is the latter possibility, the fear that we are nothing and that we have failed in our response, which moves Ozick so strongly in her recent work.
 
Page 74
Joseph Brill yearns to respond appropriately to what he perceives to be divine intervention in his life at least as strongly as does Edelshtein or Puttermesser, but Ozick treats him with less sympathy, and his recognition of limitation and failure is ultimately more painful and more profound. The protagonist of
The Cannibal Galaxy,
having escaped from the Nazis as a young man, emigrates from his native France to "the middle of an ashen America,"
31
founding a school based on a "Dual Curriculum" of his own devising:
a school run according to the principle of twin nobilities, twin antiquities. The fusion of scholarly Europe and burnished Jerusalem. The grace of Madame de Sévigné's flowery courtyard mated to the perfect serenity of a purified Sabbath. Corneille and Racine set beside Jonah and Koheleth. The combinations wheeled in his brain.
32
This passage and the context in which it appears (the young Brill is hiding in the cellar of a convent when he is struck by pedagogical inspiration) take us to the center of Ozick's historical and cultural obsessions. To what extent is Jewish culture compatible with "Western Civilization"? Brill admires both Rabbi Akiva and Madame de Sévigné; his lifelong attempt to unite them, and find, moreover, a brilliant student in whom such a union might flourish, is an indication of his idealism but perhaps his folly as well. As Sanford Pinsker observes, one interpretation of the image of the cannibal galaxy is that it represents "the clash of cultures, Western and Jewish"; thus the novel "is a study in assimilation's multiple personalities and changing faces."
33
For Ozick, assimilation is not the wonderful synthesis of the misguided Brill's Dual Curriculum, or for that matter, what Yerushalmi calls ''the creative assimilation of initially foreign influences [that] has often fructified the Jewish people."
34
No, for Ozick, assimilation is the cannibalization of Judaism: as a historical entity, Judaism can barely survive in the devouring maw of Western Civilization. The fact that Ozick conducts this study in a primary school indicates how far she has come from Edelshtein's manic but still sentimental comedy of isolated old age. Brill, the émigré from Old World Jewish culture, is forced to confront the culturally impoverished mediocrity of contemporary Jewish-American life. His treasured ideal of a rich, rational education drawing on the best of both worlds is thoroughly deflated by generations of monotonous American children, their equally dull parents, and their uninspired teachers.
 
Page 75
It is no accident that throughout the novel, Brill, once the assiduous student of Talmud and astronomy, nods off in front of the TV.
The cannibalization of Brill's dream is apparently allayed by the entrance into his life of the brilliant philosopher Hester Lilt and her daughter Beulah. In a sense, Hester is the successful embodiment of the synthesis which Brill hopes to achieve with his students. The author of such books as
Metaphor as Exegesis
and
Interpretation as an End in Itself,
she cites midrash and Mozart in her lecturesand sharp criticizes Brill's surrender, his failure to take up his own intellectual and pedagogical challenges, especially the challenge of teaching her mediocre daughter. Brill on the other hand sees Hester's philosophy as a set of elaborate strategies justifying Beulah's total lack of inspiration; in Ozick's kabbalistic metaphor, "The flawed daughter, shining, crowned, barefoot, inside the veil of the mother's madness."
35
At issue in this debate is much more than the psychology of teachers and parents. Brill renounces his passionate dedication to his youthful synthesis of cultural values; in marrying and fathering a child late in life, he gives in to his desire merely to perpetuate himself and live a "normal" existence. Hester sacrifices neither the extraordinary life of the mind nor the ordinary world of the devoted parent. Brill's son Naphtali ends up as a business major; Beulah, of course, emerges from her cocoon as a brilliant, acclaimed artist. In the novel's last sentence, we read that "She labored without brooding in calculated and enameled forms out of which a flaming nimbus sometimes spread.''
36
This nimbus corresponds to what Ozick calls "the redemptive corona," "interpretation, implicitness, the nimbus of
meaning
that envelopes story."
37
To an even greater extent than her mother's philosophy, Beulah's paintings miraculously bring together Jewish and Western cultures: products of a liturgical imagination, they are graven images that bear interpretation, and as such impose themselves powerfully upon the memory. As Benjamin would say, they are approaches to the Messianic Kingdom through the world of the profane.
Joseph Brill, however, has failed to recognize this, even as he has failed to respond properly to the intervention of Hester and Beulah into the otherwise fatal progress of his life. Sadly misguided (and for Ozick, I think, typical of even the most brilliant of modern Jews), he regards Beulah's paintings as "The purity of babble inconceivable in the vale of interpretation," but then tries vainly to interpret them. As he stares thoughtfully at the paintings, he is at the brink of the abyss into which Ozick and her reader plunge in the more audacious
 
Page 76
Messiah of Stockholm
. For in this most recent work, Ozick goes beyond the question of education to interrogate the primal Jewish object in matters of memory and history, covenant and redemption: the Book.
From her study of Scholem, Ozick knows that there is a long tradition of kabbalistic speculation regarding the nature of the Torah in the messianic age. This tradition informs her reading of the heretical scriptures of Bruno Schulz, leading her in turn to speculate upon the nature of Schulz's lost novel, appropriately called
The Messiah
. Ozick knows that Schulz's work is profoundly at odds with normative Judaism; the epigraph of
The Messiah of Stockholm
comes from the passage in
The Street of Crocodiles
in which Jacob, the demiurgic father of Schulz's alter-ego narrator, describes "an infinity of heretical and criminal methods" of creation. For Schulz, the most sublime of these methods is fiction, that profane secondary means of creation always in competition with the natural world created by God. But Ozick and her protagonist Lars Andemening, who believes he is Schulz's son, productively misread Schulz, treating him not as a heretical and profane writer but as prophet, a visionary who sees through the apparently dead matter of history to catch a redemptive glimpse of the messianic current swirling through even the most remote and moribund corners of provincial life. This is why
The Messiah of Stockholm
is so masterfully riddled with unresolved and ultimately self-destructive questions of identity: they reflect Ozick's ambivalence toward her own identity as a writer of fiction and thus toward the historicity of her art within the Jewish textual tradition. At best, fiction becomes a gnostic con game through which we can somehow gain access to revealed truth in history; at worst, it is a predatory forgery, the dead stuff of time imbued with preternatural life.
Lars comes to understand this in the climactic scene of the novel, when his friend the bookseller Heidi introduces him to her husband Dr. Eklund, whose existence Lars has previously doubted. The shady Dr. Eklund has "rescued" the lost manuscript of
The Messiah,
as well as a woman named Adela (after the alluring housemaid of Schulz's tales) who is supposedly Schulz's illegitimate daughterthough Eklund has probably forged the manuscript and fathered Adela himself. In Ozick's invented version of Schulz's novel, the messiah is a weirdly organic, palpitating, booklike thing which moves by means of "winglike sails." These sailspages, actuallyare covered with an alphabet of images made up of all the idols that have overrun Drohobycz, Schulz's provincial Polish hometown, which

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