`To Unriddle the Job-Like Vagaries of the Human Heart'

The most dispiriting book I can remember reading is While Europe Slept, by Bruce Bawer, an X-ray of a continent’s cowardice, hypocrisy and moral confusion. Bawer’s subtitle tells the tale: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within. Bawer is an American writer who moved to the Netherlands in 1998 and later to Norway. These are nations I, like Bawer, grew up thinking were civilized, sophisticated, liberal-minded democracies – in short, like us. Bawer demolishes our naïve image by documenting patterns of knee-jerk anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and capitulation to Islamic thugs. Out of fear of offending barbarians (ponder that phrase for a moment), the French, Germans and others have given their tacit approval to female genital mutilation, wife beating, murder and routine Jew-baiting. It’s that last point I want to look at. Here’s Bawer:

“…since 2000, anti-Semitism in France has been epidemic. Synagogues have been burned down, schools vandalized, shops attacked, rabbis beaten, children assaulted, school buses shot at, gravestones knocked over and defaced with swastikas and the name of Hitler. At Muslim demonstrations, shouts of `Death to the Jews’ have become common. (one thing I’ve noticed is that while Americans speaks of `Jews’ or, more often, `Jewish people,’ Europeans usually say `the Jews.’)”

One day before I started Bawer’s book, I ordered a copy of The Last Jew, a novel by the Israeli Yoram Kaniuk, published in 1982 in Hebrew and this year in English. I learned of the book at Nextbook.org, which published an interview with Kaniuk – a writer I had never heard of before. Sara Ivry, its senior editor, says to the novelist, “I could argue, though stretching's involved, you're not all that pessimistic. If there's always a last Jew, that means somebody endures,” and Kaniuk responds:

“Yes, but it's slowly becoming less and less. The world without Jews will not be the same. We produced Christianity and Judaism and philosophy and music, Mahler, and Schoenberg, the theater, we enriched the world in so many ways for centuries. So why do they hate us so much? Scholem Aleichem said, `Why didn't you choose someone else once? What harm did we do?’

Growing up in suburban Cleveland, I knew few Jews. None lived in my immediate neighborhood and I knew two or three Jewish girls at school. My father routinely denigrated Jews (and most every other group), casually dropping the conventional libels about greed and treachery. Once, after mowing the lawn, I was sweeping grass off the sidewalk. Angrily, he said, “Stop sweeping like a Jew.” He meant I was moving the clippings toward me with the broom rather than pushing them away – a gesture, in his mind, that echoed Jewish avarice.

My real education – books, especially, but television, too – had rendered me immune to my father’s prejudices. I started reading seriously at precisely the right time to appreciate the Jewish contribution to Western culture – and American literature. In the sixties I read Bellow, Malamud, Philip Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Karl Shapiro, Edward Lewis Wallant, Henry Roth, Stanley Elkin, Herbert Gold, Isaac Babel and Kafka, among others. Soon I added Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Proust, Joseph Roth, Wittgenstein, Edward Dahlberg, Hermann Broch, Paul Celan, Simone Weil, Elias Canetti, S.J. Perelman, Allen Ginsberg, Delmore Schwartz, Howard Nemerov, Anthony Hecht, Primo Levi, Cynthia Ozick, Bob Dylan and so on. No literate person, no person who values literature as the expression of humanity’s worthiest gifts and aspirations, can be an anti-Semite. I once heard Ralph Ellison say in a lecture that all Americans, culturally speaking, are African Americans. Likewise, we are Jewish Americans, and let’s be proud of both inheritances.

After I finish writing this, I want to read Ozick’s story, “What Happened to the Baby?” in the current fiction issue of The Atlantic Monthly. But first, let me encourage you to read While Europe Slept, dispiriting though the experience will be for thoughtful readers. Also, read the following passages – the first, from the Kaniuk interview; the second, from Ozick’s “Tradition and (or Versus) the Jewish Writer,” collected in The Din in the Head:

“I'm in love with Jewish culture. I read the Bible and the Mishneh and the Talmud and the kabbalah, but without belief, I don't believe any of these things. I don't believe in anything so I cannot be religious. I don't have faith—not in human beings, not in democracy, not in God, not in anything. I like Hasidic stories. In The Last Jew there are many things that I took from the Hasidic background of my father's family. I have all kinds of meshichim, all kinds of messiahs.”

“What is a Jewish book? A narrow definition – but also conceptually the widest – would include the Torah and the Talmud (the Hebrew Bible and the ocean of ethically transformative commentaries), and all other texts that strive to unriddle the Job-like vagaries of the human heart while urging it toward the moral life. A Jewish book is liturgy, ethics, philosophy, ontology. A Jewish book speaks of the attempt to create a world in the image of God while never presuming to image God.”