Tikkun Magazine, November/December 2005

Radical Nostalgia: Some Thoughts on a Jewish Literary Sensibility

by Steve Stern

Growing up, I had a tenuous relationship with my own heritage. Raised in a Reform synagogue in Memphis that had expunged most vestiges of Old World tradition from its liturgy, I had little knowledge of or interest in the Jewish past. Classically assimilated and unbelieving, I was pleased that nothing beyond the map of Jerusalem on my face identified my otherwise invisible religious provenance. But that was before I started to write fiction. Once I did, I was assaulted by echoes from an undigested past, and in my case the echoes tolled louder than the original noise. Helpless to do other than listen, I was shocked and surprised (I still am) by how seductive I found the music. So seductive, in fact, that I could have wished myself lashed more securely to the mast of the twentieth century. Enticed despite myself, however, I began to imagine the mysterious transit of the blood in my own body's arteries—how it might have issued initially from the heart of some bearded Talmudist conning his Hebrew text in a tumbledown study house in Pshitsk, how the blood had thinned over time to an eventual trickle as it branched like a river delta toward a desert suburb in Tennessee. It was a comfortable, nostalgic conceit. But there must also have been something of the Huck Finn impulse leftover from my Southern heritage at work, an adventuring impulse that made me want to un-tether myself from my own moment in time, to build a raft and paddle upstream to visit that noisome old Talmudist.

It was a longer and more arduous journey than I'd counted on. En route I wrote a story called "Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven" about an old man too obstinate to die, who is dragged off to Paradise by a frustrated Malech Hamovess, the Angel of Death, while still alive. I thought myself very clever. But not long after, having begun to follow the echoes back to their source, I discovered the legend of Enoch to whom only a couple of lines are devoted in the Book of Genesis. "He walked with God, and was not," says the verse, and that was apparently all it took to trigger among the rabbis, for whom Scripture was a kind of trampoline, a whole mystical literature about Enoch the shoemaker, who was translated to heaven alive for his righteousness. There he became the Archangel Metatron who sits at God's right hand. I read about Serah Bat Asher, the original prototype of the Wandering Jew, who endured for many centuries on earth before she too was taken to heaven alive. Then there were the tales of the prophet Elijah, who regularly commutes between heaven and earth in his tatterdemalion disguise, dispensing mischief and mitzvot in equal portions; and the cautionary legend of "The Four Who Entered Paradise"—"...and only Rabbi Akiba descended in peace," for it's a dangerous business to trespass in heaven. Suddenly I didn't feel so clever anymore. Having tugged at the branches of my meager sapling of a story. I'd pulled up a root system as large as a giant sequoia's.

There's a tale in which Nachman of Bratslav, the great Yiddish storyteller, says to the scribe to whom he is dictating, "If only you knew what you write." "Surely I do not know," says the humble scribe, to which the not-so-humble Nachman replies, "You don't even know how much you don't know." I was beginning to understand how much I didn't know. This was as scary as it was exhilarating. The analogy with Pandora's Box comes to mind, or its Jewish equivalent: the tale of King David who defied God's decree to lift the Foundation Stone of the world, thereby releasing chaos and perpetual night. In contacting the world of the archetypes, I felt I'd set loose a gang of dybbuks, golems, and demi-angels from an immemorial past to jostle among and perhaps displace the frail neurasthenics of the current moment, among whom I count myself. But who am I kidding? After all, nobody dies or goes mad like Rabbi Akiba's companions from exposure to a little antique lore; nobody has the sensory equipment anymore to even recognize the power that the mothballed myths once contained. Still, my tentative researches had an impact, and sometimes I thought it would have been better to have left well enough alone.

In his "Before the Law" parable, Franz Kafka, the Jewish prince of hopelessness, tells the story of the man from the country who spends his entire life waiting for admittance to the Palace of the Law—only to be told by the gatekeeper at the end of his days that this particular entrance had been reserved especially for him. "And now," said the gatekeeper, "I am going to close it." With that pronouncement the case for much of modern literature was similarly closed: the door to the truth of our essential selves was shut for good and all, and variations on a now-tired theme of alienation have since had to be sufficient. And lo, they were sufficient: it's been enough merely to long for a time when the Law was accessible, rather than live with the awful burden of having to accommodate it. But again helplessly pursuing echoes, I read this in Gershom Scholem: "A widely accepted belief of the later Kabbalah states that Torah reveals to each individual a particular aspect meant for him and understood by him alone." And: "In the Messianic Age, every single man [and woman] in Israel will read the Torah in keeping with the meaning peculiar to his [or her] root. This is also the way Torah is understood in Paradise." I don't think Kafka was aware of this notion. Yet even as he was denying the possibility of a connection with the Law (for which you may substitute self, truth, community, primal intelligence, the Godhead, what you will), he could not avoid the paradox of instinctively invoking the defining myths of the tribe. If not suggesting the Covenant itself, he was at least summoning an echo of the Covenant, and this inescapable paradox—of expressing desolation in the language of midrash, of faith—is the engine that drives all Kafka's work.

"Now there is a country that contains within it all countries," said Rabbi Nachman. "And in that country there is a city that contains all the cities of that country that contains all countries. And in that city there is a house that contains all the cities of that country that contains all countries. And in that house is a man who bears all this within him." Nachman is maybe describing the condition of the complete Jewish soul, and I suppose a good Jewish writer ought to have one. Problem is that the writer, like everyone else at our creaky juncture in history, can be willfully absentminded, cultivating the luxury of forgetting what he contains and the longing for what he's forgotten. Lord knows we have so much to forget. Indeed, Jewish lore makes a shibboleth of forgetting: witness the paradigmatic legend of the Angel of Forgetfulness, who tweaks the newborn under the nose at birth to erase their knowledge of Paradise, with which it is assumed that life on earth would be intolerable. Consequently we are born with the sense of a radiant dream that has evaporated upon our waking, a dream we're condemned to spend our days trying in vain to recall. Or conversely, we're content to brood wistfully over our inability to remember. In an apocryphal story of the creation of Adam, the patriarch is given a light by which he can see everything at once: he sees all of his own life and the history of the world unto its very end. Then the angel who presented the gift, acting on behalf of God—who either wants to protect Adam from a searing vision or simply to preserve that vision for Himself—revokes the light. However, as nothing in Jewish lore is un-recyclable, the light—again according to Nachman—was never extinguished. He says:

Every story has something that is concealed. What is concealed is the hidden light. The Book of Genesis says that God created light on the first day, the sun on the fourth. What light existed before the sun? The tradition says this was the spiritual light, and God hid it for future use. Where was it hidden? In the stories of the Torah.

This is the light that renders those stories timeless, perennial, and authentic. Of course the brilliance of Torah, the mother of stories, has been considerably diluted over the ages, and the countless narratives that have borrowed the splendor of the archetypal tales (mea culpa!) have worn that splendor rather thin. Still it's pretty to think that in the truest endeavors of the Jewish literary art—Franz Kafka, Nachman of Bratslav—it remains possible to recover flashes of eternity from the sparks of holy light that can yet be extracted from them. And by that light you can see, if you dare, forever.

It's interesting to note that both Kafka and Rabbi Nachman wanted their fictions destroyed at their deaths. Why? Was it a selfishness that wanted to deprive us of the stories the way the angel deprived Adam of his prophetic light? Or perhaps the pair of them, Nachman and Kafka, having themselves evaded the Angel of Forgetfulness's fillip under the nose at birth (my theory), had inherited the angel's instinct to protect us from the pain of remembering, which is the original definition of nostalgia. They intended to turn their own shimmering truths back into amnesiac dreams, leaving us shadows for whose substance we might yearn our whole lives through. Whatever the case, we deem it fortunate that they were both betrayed, Kafka by his friend Max Brod and Nachman by his scribe Nathan, who preserved the tales. Which puts me in mind of a myth from another tradition, the one in which the knight Sir Bedivere, whom King Arthur appointed to throw his magic sword back into the lake, disobeys his master and then lies to him. In the end, however, he does fling the sword, and the arm of the Lady of the Lake breaks the surface to seize it.

A modern romantic might maintain that somewhere the sword and the hand are still visible, though the lake may have become a polluted backwater as clotted with muck as the Gowanus Canal. That muck is the shmutz of history and psychology that has encrusted and even obscured our myths over time. It cakes with the same detritus the Excalibur, the Ark of the Covenant, and Aaron's Rod, which is perhaps a blessing—because to scrape such items clean of their grungy insulation is to risk being overcome by their dormant power. To harness that power with a view toward reintegrating the past into the present, you need the boldness and imagination of a Rabbi Akiba, which who has anymore? There is, by the way, a version of the Nachman legend in which his stories are in fact destroyed, while his disciples breathe the smoke from their burning so that their master's tales become mortally entwined with the helix of their own DNA.

A quaint notion, but let's face it: it's a long way from Rabbi Nachman, who lived in intimacy with the Law, to Franz Kafka, who lived in exile from it, making Kafka the avatar of the longing that is our legacy. Lamenting the loss of collective memory in his seminal work, Zakhor, Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi speaks of writing a history of forgetting. Zakhor! Remember! is the ancient biblical injunction, and Yiddish has its corollary in the curse: Zolstu krenken un gedenken, may you sicken and remember, as if memory were itself a symptom of a disease. George Steiner in Bluebeard's Castle calls Jews the great remembrancers, and insists that Hitler's primary motivation in murdering them was his conscious wish to murder memory, thereby killing the conscience of the West. He might have spared the six million, since memory has a way of eroding its own corpus. Grace Paley once said, albeit a bit glibly, that the Jews were not meant to occupy space but endure in time; Abraham Heschel called the Sabbath "a palace in time." Thus do we measure the Jewish year from holiday to holiday, so that the temporal is held in place by an armature of the eternal, and we may live in cozy contemporaneity with mythical events. But there's nothing cozy about the world of the archetypes.

Twenty years after "Lazar Malkin," I'm more ambivalent than ever with regard to the act of remembering; wearier and chastened, I'm no longer the intrepid time-traveler of the mid-1980s; Huckleberry Finn, ce n'est pas moi. These days, abundantly distracted by the tohu vavohu (chaos) of 2005, I'm more inclined to satisfy myself with a sentimental nostalgia for a mythical past I never knew. But then the echoes start up again, and I feel like that half-senile Ulysses in the Tennyson poem, compelled despite everyone's better judgment to mount yet another voyage. There's a passage in Kafka's diaries where he begins and abandons a story about the golem. In it the wonder rabbi is slovenly and overweight, his underwear visible beneath sagging breeches. In a smelly ghetto courtyard in full sight of his curious neighbors, he rolls up his sleeves like a washerwoman and begins to knead his lump of clay, and that's where the sketch leaves off. Could it be that the potential eruption of magic in such a fallen milieu frightened the skittish Franz away from his story? Personally, I don't blame him. But what if, instead of an aborted story, the maestro intended to leave us writers of Hebrew extraction with an assignment: that we should each, according to our means, try our hand at finishing his tale?

I believe that a story, if it's truly kosher, should function as a kind of cosmic template, its language tracing a prototypical pattern the way a rubbing traces the relief on an ancient tomb. Then, thanks to the conjuring power of language, the story stirs the inanimate; the tomb sculpture rises up and walks abroad like a golem aspiring to humanity. Of course, in the bracing old legends golems have the strength to overwhelm us and elude our control. A book may echo the Book more sonorously than the primary noise, a rude awakening but an awakening nonetheless. In the hands of the ideal Jewish storyteller, a narrative is a map leading back to the narrative's own source, and as in the process of tikkun, which is the reparation of the rift between heaven and earth, the words return the sparks like a guilty Prometheus to their original flame. The flame illuminates those places in our consciousness that have since gone dim, but unlike the burning bush, this flame can consume; revelation implies the peril of immolation. (Kafka: "A book should be an axe to break the frozen sea within." Or a flame to melt it.) This is the flame that gave Adam, whose formless clay was the original golem, his brief vision of eternity, the light that allows us, here at this darker end of creation, to view the earth in all its manifest beauty and terror from the vantage of Paradise. Then we quickly close the book, extinguishing the flame, though we remain vexed and disturbed ever after by its stupefying brightness.

Steve Stern is the author of several works of fiction, including Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven, which won the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American fiction, and The Wedding Jester, which won the National Jewish Book Award. His latest novel, The Angel of Forgetfulness, was published last March by Viking Penguin.

Source Citation

Stern, Steve. 2005. Radical nostalgia: Some thoughts on a Jewish literary sensibility. Tikkun 20(6):68.