I HAVE OFTEN ASKED MYSELF what it is that makes me a Jew. Since I have not celebrated my bar mitzvah, do not attend synagogue or take part in any of the feasts or fasts (unless it is as the guest of friends who do), the answer ought to be simple: nothing. Yet all my ancestors were Jews, and, as I grow older, I feel more and more affinity with Jews and with their (our) past. I may not be much of a Jew, but I suppose I am more of a Jew than anything else.
What then is a Jew? As soon as I try to answer that question I feel my mind clouding over and panic rising in my chest. Exactly the same thing happens when I ask myself: What is a man? Perhaps that is why I am a writer and not a philosopher. As a writer I feel the panic subside and the clouds lift as soon as I move away from such large general questions and start to tell a story. Nor does this mean that I feel I am shelving important questions for the sake of trivia. The narrative writers I love – Homer and Dante and Proust and Kafka and Muriel Spark – do not seem to me to be doing something more trivial than the philosophers. On the contrary, when I start to read them I feel myself to be much more closely in touch with things that are central to life than when I start to read Plato or Descartes. It is as though the food they provide were more nourishing to me than that of the philosophers. And in my own writing of fiction, when things are going well, I also get the feeling that this is what is important and truly nourishing for me, and that the doubts that often arise about the value of what I am doing must be seen as temptations to which I must not succumb.
When things are going well. That is the operative phrase. And when do things go well with my writing? ‘The idea you and George Balanchine have of doing a “ballet to end all ballet”’, Stravinsky wrote to Lincoln Kirstein when they were discussing what was later to become Agon – ‘well, limits are precisely what I need and am looking for above all in everything I compose. The limits generate the form.’1 Every modern artist knows just what he means. Other people may talk in grandiose terms of a ballet to end all ballet, but what Stravinsky wants is a set of precise limits: so many minutes, so many musicians, so many dancers. Every modern artist also knows, however, that three-quarters of the problem lies in finding those limits. It may be easier for the composer, who does, after all, get precise commissions (unless he is as famous as Stravinsky!), and thus knows in advance what is required of him, at least in terms of length and size of orchestra. Even then, for the modern composer, who does not have just one patron, the problem will be what commissions to accept and what to reject. For writers it is even worse, and one could say that what every serious writer has had to do is establish for him or herself the parameters within which to work for each separate project. One can see Proust groping for ten years for the right parameters for a long novel, which he starts in the third person and then abandons, starts again as a critical onslaught on the method of Sainte-Beuve and then abandons, and only then finally sees what it is he is really after. Even then the search continues, and the new Pléiade edition of A la recherche du temps perdu gives us nine separate versions of the opening page in its section on variants. Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary gives a marvellous account of the agony and excitement of the process by which The Waves came into being. More recent writers, like Robert Pinget, have talked about the terrible period between novels, when one gropes in the dark for a voice, never knowing if one will find it. What Pinget means by ‘voice’ is in effect a mode of telling: this way, not that.
In my own work I have found that what I always need is for two kinds of pressure to come together. These could be described as an existential and a formal pressure, or as the need to explore and understand something about the world and its inhabitants (myself included), and the desire to solve a particular formal problem through the making of something out of words. I have found over the years that when one of these pressures exists without the other, no matter how powerful that single pressure, I can never bring the work to a satisfactory conclusion. The desire to speak about something without the corresponding desire to make something, or the desire to make without the desire to speak about – this can keep me going for several weeks or even months, but sooner or later I discover that nothing genuine is emerging and I lose interest.
On the other hand, when the two do come together I find that the work races ahead and there are just not enough hours in the day. This happened to me with my first novel, where it was the title, The Inventory, that generated both the plot and the form. I had been wanting for a long time to write about people and their possessions, about the fact that we humans are the only creatures who hoard and yet what good does that do us when we die, as die we must? And when a person dies the possessions he leaves behind both mock those who loved him and act as triggers for their memory. I was drawn to the idea of objects holding the traces of their previous owners. When the title came to me I felt my heart suddenly beating faster, and when I asked myself why, I realised it was because the word seemed to go in two directions at once, to hold within itself the traces of the word invent, with its strong subjective connotation, and yet refer to that most objective of things, an inventory. It came to me that the book would deal with the relatives of a man who has just died gathering at his house to make an inventory of his belongings, and that in the course of doing this we would find them trying to make sense of their relations to the deceased, their memory or invention (but which was it?) triggered off by the objects in the house. At the same time I realised that my book would do without a single narrative voice but would move forward by means only of dialogue and inventory lists. As soon as I had made these decisions the writing of the book became a challenge rather than an imposition. As I worked I found that the challenge of the form helped me to find the meaning, and by the time I had finished I had said more than I knew and made something that pleased me.
Three novels later it was again a title that showed me the way. In Migrations I wanted to explore what it means to belong nowhere, to be constantly on the move, with nowhere to settle and nowhere to return to. Before writing the book I read quite a lot about nomads and about modern migrant workers. At the same time I wanted to explore the way in which, in the telling of any story, the elements that make up that story have difficulty staying in place, want to migrate from one area to another, and are usually only held in place by the writer’s firm commitment to some form of realism. This may be difficult to understand for someone who has not tried writing stories, so an example from the visual arts may help. It was Ernst Gombrich, I think, who pointed out that doodling is a much more primitive form of art than realistic representation. It takes a great deal of study to be able to draw a realistic representation. But it also takes a great deal of repression: the desire of the hand and spirit have to be subdued in the interests of realism. One way of looking at Modernism would be to say that the repression was removed – but then of course the problems of the limits of freedom arose with a new intensity.
In my own writing I found myself struggling with the overwhelming desire to let go, and with the need to keep some sort of order. What I wanted was a subject that would allow me to let go, to make letting go be a part of what the novel was about. In Migrations this became possible. The sense of having nowhere to settle and nowhere to go, but of having to be always on the move, became a condition both of the hero and of the narrative.
As I worked an image emerged and became central: that of Lazarus rising from the grave, wrapped in his grave-clothes, as I had seen him in Epstein’s great sculpture in New College Chapel in Oxford. But for me Lazarus did not have the connotations he had for St John and the Christian tradition. I imagined a Lazarus who rises from the dead and starts to unwind the grave-clothes from his body; he unwinds and unwinds, more and more cloth falls to the ground around him, but when all has been unwound there is no glorious resurrected body but only a little heap of dust beside the folds of cloth.
This image did not seem to me depressing, and I did not use it ironically or satirically. Rather, it represented for me a triumphant insight, what all the slow unwinding of the narrative had been driving towards from the start. For the first time since I had begun to work on the book I grasped clearly what it was I was trying to say: Our lives and our art exist between the fully hidden and the fully revealed: there is nothing hidden which needs to be revealed; revelation means only the gradual unwinding of narrative till the end is reached.
I had been reading the minor prophets and came upon a phrase of Micah’s that seemed so close to my sense of what I was trying to say that I immediately appropriated it as an epigraph: ‘Arise and go now,’ the prophet tells the Israelites, ‘for this is not your rest’ (2:10). This word rest, menuchah, is, I discovered, one that occurs frequently in the Hebrew Bible: the dove sent from the ark finds no rest for her feet, for example, and in the Book of Ruth Naomi tells her daughters-in-law: ‘Go, return each to her mother’s house… The Lord grant you that ye may find rest, each of you in the house of her husband’ (1:9). The word go, lekhu, is also a key one in scripture. It is, after all, the primal injunction to Abraham: ‘Get thee out of thy country,’ God tells him, ‘and from thy kindred and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee’ (Gen.12:1). Lekh lekha, God says to him, get up and go. And Abraham obeys, thus starting the long march of the Hebrew people, which is still going on and of which, willy-nilly, I am a part.
So, is the emphasis in the Bible on going or resting? Jon Levenson, in a fascinating book entitled Sinai and Zion, argued that the two mountains form two alternative centres to the Hebrew Scriptures, each exerting its pull over the surrounding material.2 The first, the Mountain of the Law, is associated with Wandering, the Wilderness, Moses and the covenant; the second, the Mountain at the Centre, is associated with sacral kingship, David and the Messiah.
Both, it seems still exert their pull, on Christians as well as Jews. Some will see themselves and their history in terms of desert and wandering, or its Christian analogue of pilgrimage – ‘we are pilgrims even as you are,’ Virgil tells the souls he and Dante meet at the foot of Mount Purgatory; and Kafka, in a late diary entry, writes: ‘Moses fails to enter Canaan not because his life is too short but because it is a human life’(19 October 1921).3 But others will stress the goal, either the Heavenly Jerusalem or the actual city of Jerusalem as the capital of a Greater Israel, Judaea and Samaria. Naturally, my own sympathies are with Sinai rather than Zion, for I can see the fanaticism and hatred engendered by the latter, but I have to ask myself whether my total lack of feeling for any kind of Zion or the advent of any Messiah is only the sign of my unredeemable secularity.
Be that as it may, I felt, when I came across that sentence of Micah’s in the midst of my work on Migrations, that here, if anywhere, was the heart of a kind of Jewishness I myself could understand and imaginatively identify with. Micah does not say where rest is, only that this is not it, and this, I wanted to say in my novel, is never going to be your rest; while the belief that somewhere, sometime, there will be such a place of rest is misguided and misleading, only brought into being by a nostalgia similar to that for the fleshpots of Egypt which Moses, to his sorrow, found so prevalent among the generation he had led out from the bondage to Pharaoh.
Not only could I understand Micah’s remark, or God’s command to Abraham, but I found comfort and strength in the thought that something that was so central to my own experience and so alien to those amongst whom I found myself should also be so central to the Bible. It brought that book alive for me across the centuries and made me feel that if Judaism was somehow related to this then it was less foreign to me than I had hitherto imagined.
Central not only to my experience but also to everything I had been told about my family; for as far back as it can be traced my family has been doing what Jews everywhere have always done: leaving one place to go to another. My father’s grandfather left the Romanian town of Iasi to seek his fortune, first in Constantinople, where he married, then in Egypt. My mother’s great-grandfather must have left his native Ferrara as a young doctor a little earlier in the nineteenth century and, with the help of a whip-round organised by the local rabbi, sailed across the sea, also to Egypt. My mother’s father, after studying medicine in Berlin, and having been wounded in the Russo-Japanese war, left his native Odessa and settled in Egypt, where he set up his practice. My parents in their turn left the Egypt in which they were born to study in France, where I was born on the last day on which my parents could have escaped from war-torn Europe. It was to Egypt that my mother returned with me after surviving the war in France, and from Egypt that we both came to England in the summer of 1956, so that I could in my turn pursue my studies.
I do not feel myself an exile, for an exile has a country to which he longs to return (but then neither did Abraham consider himself an exile). My home is not France, where I was born, nor Egypt, where I spent my childhood, nor England, where I have lived for three-quarters of my life. The feeling of a Stravinsky or a Nabokov for the Russia of their youth is quite alien to me. There is no land or language of which I feel I have been deprived by historical circumstances, nowhere to which I dream of one day returning.
If that leaves me without the bitterness of exile, it also leaves me without his sense of a lost paradise or of a native language. This is not a comfortable state to be in. What made it worse was my discovery that what I wanted above all was to write, for a painter or composer can more or less choose his ‘language’ today, but that privilege is not given to the writer. I write in English because that is the language I am most accustomed to by now, but of course I have none of that inwardness with English and its various registers that a native speaker would have, nor any of that inwardness with English culture (in the anthropological sense) that a native Englishman would have.
When one is young one is easily discouraged. ‘How can I ever write as I had hoped to do when the cards are so stacked against me?’ I thought. What saved me from despair was the discovery that my case was not unique, that other people had had to face similar difficulties. Thus I read with a quickening pulse Kafka’s diary entry for 24 October 1911, in which he examines why the German language, which is the only one he really knows, is incapable of expressing in the word Mutter his own (Jewish) sense of his mother; or Proust’s description of Marcel’s despair at not being able to express his sense of joy at the way the sunlight strikes the river, which leads to him banging his umbrella on the ground and crying ‘Zut zut zut!’ in frustration.
It was Stravinsky once again who most perfectly summed up the paradox. He remarks somewhere that had Beethoven had Mozart’s lyric gift he would never have developed his own remarkable rhythmic talents. In other words, what is required is that we make the most of what we have and do not mourn the absence of what we do not have. Because circumstances have caused certain roads to be blocked to you, you are forced to discover others, which might never have been found had it not been for you and your circumstances. For what do Kafka’s and Proust’s remarkable fictions, Eliot’s remarkable poems, emerge from, if not the profound sense that all the known ways were blocked to them?
I had to accept that I was not and never would be an English writer. Nor was I a French or an Egyptian writer who happened to write in English, as Julian Green was an American writer who happened to write in French and Wagih Ghali an Egyptian who happened to write in English. But what was I then? A Jewish writer? The answer, it seems to me, is a little complicated. Balzac is a French writer and Dostoevsky a Russian writer, but is Kafka a German writer? The word clearly covers two quite different meanings. Balzac writes in French and he is French; Dostoevsky writes in Russian and he is Russian. Kafka writes in German but he is not German. Nor is he, like Rilke, simply a native of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire who, coming from an educated family would, until 1918, have naturally had German as his first language. But if Kafka is not German he is not Czech either. Is he then a Jewish writer?
There are, I think, two categories to which the term can be applied. There are Jews who write about Jews and Jewish culture as they haved grown up with it, as Balzac and Dostoevsky wrote about French and Russian culture. The most distinguished representatives of this category in our century are I.B. Singer and S.Y. Agnon, who wrote in Yiddish and Hebrew respectivedly about a world and a tradition that were as familiar to them as nineteenth-century France and Russia were to Balzac and Dostoevsky. To me all these writers, though they may move and interest me, seem equally alien. For I am as unfamiliar with the worlds Singer and Agnon write about as I am with the worlds of Balzac and Dostoevsky.
But Kafka seems to be different. When he writes: ‘What have I in common with Jews? I have hardly anything in common with myself’, and talks about ‘the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing German, the impossibility of writing differently. One might also add a fourth impossibility, the impossibility of writing’,4 I feel I know exactly what he is talking about. And the same is true of Paul Celan when he says: ‘Perhaps poetry, like art, moves with the oblivious self into the uncanny and strange to free itself. Though where? in which place? how? as what? This would mean art is the distance poetry must cover, no less and no more.’ His translator, Rosmarie Waldrop, elaborates: ‘He always finds himself face to face with the incomprehensible, inaccessible, the “language of the stone”. And his only recourse is talking. This cannot be “literature”. Literature belongs to whose who are at home in the world.’5
By this token Singer and Agnon write ‘literature’, Kafka and Celan do not. Singer and Agnon are at home in their world, at least as much at home in it as Balzac and Dostoevsky in theirs – and that world includes assumptions about what constitutes art, novels, and so on. Kafka and Celan are in flight from all such assumptions. But the paradoxes multiply, for their remarks could be paralleled by those of many modern writers from Mallarmé to Beckett. Does this suggest that we should abandon my division of Jewish writers into two categories? That we should think of Singer and Agnon as Jewish writers and Kafka and Celan as international Modernists?
It may be that in a strange way the condition of Modernism meshes with the condition of Jewishness, just as the condition of English Romanticism meshed with the condition of being a rooted denizen of the English Lakes. This I think is what the painter R.B. Kitaj was getting at in the fascinating series of jottings he has called his First Diasporic Manifesto. Kitaj feels able to talk about Jews and Modernists in the same breath because he finds in both the marks of displacement. He sets Modernism against Romanticism as the art of rootlessness against the art of rootedness: ‘To my mind,’ he writes, ‘the very deeply rooted Provençal Cézanne… had baked Impressionism into the final synthesis of his great southern baking machines, to which Picasso replied as a young relocated Spaniard in the Demoiselles d’Avignon.’6
I am sure there is something in this, but I can also see how such formulations can lead to misunderstanding, for it might look as though the terms ‘rooted’ and ‘rootless’ were purely descriptive and thus miss the tension (desperation might be a better word in some cases) in Modernism and in such Jewish writers as Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Paul Celan. It would be an understatement to assert that Kafka was not happy with the thought that he had ‘nothing in common’ either with himself or with Jews. If he was profoundly critical of his father’s Judaism, which he saw as a religion of mere external conformity, he was also profoundly aware of the fact that his father just might be right and that his own inability to accept the externals of Judaism cut him off not only from others but from Judaism itself. Similarly his longing to settle in Palestine was perfectly genuine, and if he could not finally bring himself to do so it was himself he blamed and not Palestine. In a moving letter to Else Bergmann, who, as late as 1923, was trying to arrange his passage there, he confessed:
I know that now I shall certainly not sail… Even assuming that I could carry out anything of the sort, it would not have turned out to be a real voyage to Palestine at this time, not at all… but in the spiritual sense something like a voyage to America by a cashier who has embezzled a large sum of money… No, I could not go that way, even if I had been able… That is how it is, and what a pity, but in the final analysis nevertheless quite right.7
We could say that what we find in Kafka is a continuing and powerful desire for rest, whether it be rest in marriage, in the religion of his fathers, or in the land of Palestine, along with an equally powerful sense that such rest was simply not an option for him. ‘Nothing is given me,’ he writes to Milena (admitting, in his usual way, that he may be exaggerating), ‘I have to acquire everything, not only the present and the future, but even the past, that which is given to all men as of right, that too I have to acquire. It is perhaps the hardest task.’8
Each destiny is unique and it would be foolish to pretend that one can generalise from Kafka’s life and his anguished twistings and turnings. Nevertheless it is striking that we find many of the same ambivalences in the lives of Walter Benjamin and Paul Celan. Both flirted with the idea of settling in Palestine/Israel and neither could, in the end, bring himself to do so. Yet their tragic ends suggest that staying in Europe was no solution either.
I sense that Kafka, Benjamin and Celan all recognised that the idea that the true role of the Jew was to be a wanderer could itself be seen as a sort of nostalgia, a clinging to what one knows and a refusal to take the decisive step that would lead one out of the wilderness and into true community. Not for them Richard Shusterman’s blithe remark that we can live as we choose, that ‘we can just as well choose not to make anything of our Jewish identity without being guilty of trying to escape or deny it.’9 The idea that we can make ourselves in any way we want, which Shusterman ascribes to Nietzsche and labels ‘Postmodern’, would have made no sense at all to them. Each of them had a longing for rest, for an end to wandering, which was as much a part of themselves as their impulse to refuse this rest or that. Shusterman would say that this was because they were still clinging to ‘Modernist’ notions of unity and the realisation of the self. I wonder.
At the same time there are many voices, especially in Israel, claiming that Kafka, far from being representative of Jewry, was representative only of the kind of impotent Jewish self-hatred bred out of centuries of ghetto life and now finally put behind them by those Jews who have had the courage to return to the Promised Land. After all, God’s injunction to Abraham does not stop with his telling him to get up and go. Go, says God, ‘unto a land that I will show thee, And I will make thee a great nation, and I will bless thee and make thy name great’ (Gen. 12:1–2). Is it not irresponsible to take the first part of the injunction to heart and not the second? Is not the condition of exile bound up with the notion of homecoming?10
That Kafka would have agreed with this criticism is no proof that it is right. I am aware of the element of masochism in Kafka, but I am aware too that to try to ‘place’ him by the use of terms like ‘masochist’ or ‘neurotic’ simply will not do. There is something too profound, too generous, too pure in his life and writings. It judges us, and it is a failure of our own imagination to think we can judge him by the use of terms drawn from any narrow discipline, psychoanalysis or theology or philosophy.
What both the Postmodernist and the Zionist position fail to register is the strength and richness of the tension we find in both Kafka and in Modernism. What both the Postmodernist and the Zionist imply is that the feeling of ‘having nothing in common with myself’ can be easily cured. But can it? Should it? Is that not itself a Romantic myth?
In an early letter Kafka recounts something that has recently happened to him:
When I opened my eyes after a short afternoon nap, still not quite certain that I was alive, I heard my mother calling down from the balcony in a natural tone: ‘What are you up to?’ A woman answered from the garden, ‘I’m having tea in the garden.’ I was amazed at the ease with which some people live their lives.11
Kafka was so affected by this scene that he included it in one of his early, unfinished stories, ‘Description of a Struggle’. It begins, as ‘Metamorphosis’ and The Trial begin, with the narrator waking up from sleep, unsure of who or what he is. It goes on, like those other stories, to show us the narrator as outsider, listening and watching but forever debarred from ‘the natural’ in which others seem to live their lives. We have all undergone similar experiences. At the same time we can be certain that if others seem at times rooted and natural to us, it is doubtful if they feel that way to themselves. Most novels, though, in the very way they are told, even if they are in the first person, present life as if it was natural. But Kafka’s tormented narratives – including the narrative of his own life as it emerges in his letters and diary entries – feel liberating rather than constricting precisely because they speak of what we normally have no words for: the sense of disorientation that results from the sudden feeling that nothing is given one, that it is only others who seem to lead their lives ‘naturally’. At the same time it makes him – and his reader – recognise the wonder of life itself: even having tea in the garden is a kind of miracle.
Kafka’s sense of his life as a state of ‘in-betweenness’ – between tradition and secularity, between East and West, between childhood and adulthood – gives him his sense of his own unnaturalness, but also of the wonder of the natural. And though of course it springs from his own unique temperament and circumstances, it is also perhaps closer to the mainstream of Jewish tradition than the unitary views of his critics. For if, in the Bible, certain absolutes are presented to us, such as strict adherence to the law on the one hand, and whoring after strange gods on the other, the Israelites are shown wavering uneasily between the one and the other, as the Jews of the Diaspora will later waver between an impossible adherence to the letter of the law and the ever-tempting embrace of assimilation. And if the prophets are the mouthpieces of the one view and certain kings emblematic of the other, those to whom the Bible gives most space – Jacob and David, for example – also hover between the two.
‘In-betweenness’ also seems characteristic of the lessons that the feasts of the Jewish calendar seek to inculcate. On Passover night Jews are enjoined to eat unleavened bread to remind them of their former captivity: ‘This is the bread of affliction which our fathers ate in Egypt.’ It is as if the celebration of true freedom must start with a remembering of bondage, not a denial of it. At the same time the Passover service is designed to elicit the question from the child: ‘Why is this night different from all other nights?’ It is meant to make the child understand that what he had simply taken for granted, his own existence, is the product of a miracle: had that not happened then, you would not be here now.
Again, on Sukkot, Jews are enjoined to build booths to remind them of their wanderings, but also of the fact that life itself is fragile, that we cannot ever build walls that will protect us completely.12 And the Sabbath is seen as a day of rest not simply because on that day all labour stops, but because on that day will be celebrated God’s own rest from his self-imposed labours. The institution of that day suggests the difference between God’s making of the world and the ceaseless toil of the Israelites in Egypt. The daily prayer too, by insisting that this day is given by God and that it is a celebration of that ‘perfect rest wherein thou delightest’, transforms the notion of rest from being merely the cessation of work to being a day of active renewal in communal recognition and praise.
What all these feasts suggest is that we can understand something only by understanding what it is not. In Aharon Appelfeld’s wonderful novel, The Age of Wonders, the hero, whose childhood in an assimilated Jewish home in the 1930s we have followed in the first part, returns after the war to his native town somewhere in central Europe. He wanders in a sort of ghostly underworld not because so little of the town has survived but, on the contrary, because so much of it is still there, looking as though nothing had happened. And in the town he comes across the ghosts of men, too, for the Jews who have survived have done so through another sort of death, by converting, denying their Jewishness. They are, in one sense, alive, but in one sense only. They are no better than Achilles would have been had he escaped his destiny at Troy and fled back to Greece. That, of course, is not a choice Achilles would even contemplate, for how we are asked to view a man’s life in Homer’s epics does not depend on the length of his years but rather on the kleos andron, the fame of men, how he will be spoken of in times to come. Bruno’s home town may seem far indeed from Homer’s Troy, but that is perhaps an illusion. In contrast with the ghosts Bruno meets there is his memory of four brothers who, though converts already, chose to join the deportees when the moment came:
The way they stood by themselves in the locked temple stirred the hearts of the beaten people with wonder for the last time. There were four of them and all the way to Minsk they did not remove their caps… All night long Bruno continued to see the converts standing at attention in the temple like reprimanded soldiers. And afterward too, in the cold and close to death, they did not utter a sound.13
The brothers had to choose. Not for them the delightful Postmodern freedom advocated by Shusterman. (One is tempted to say that in their choice they found themselves, as Achilles would find himself in his. But that is too positive, suggesting as it does the triumphant overcoming of suffering. None of us is permitted to say that of them and for them. All one can say is that in their choice they did not lose themselves forever, as the survivors that Bruno meets have clearly lost themselves.)
Most of us, fortunately, do not have to make such choices. But, as the example of Kafka shows, there is such a thing as coming closer to oneself or the contrary, falling away from oneself. Interestingly, though Kafka insists again and again on his inability to find true rest, there are places in his diary where something of the sense of Sabbath renewal comes through strongly. The first is when he reads aloud to a small gathering a speech he had written on the Yiddish language; the second is when, in one night, he writes the first story he truly acknowledges as his own, ‘The Judgement’: ‘The fearful strain and joy, how the story developed before me’, he writes, ‘as if I were advancing over water… How everything can be said, how for everything, for the strangest fancies, there waits a great fire in which they perish and rise up again.’14
What I find, then, in Kafka, in Celan, in Appelfeld, in certain parts of the Bible and the liturgy, is the articulation of something that I myself have felt, but that I would not have been able to recognise and accept had I not seen it expressed in the words of another. Their words speak to me across the centuries and the miles, helping me to understand what I feel about not belonging, having no language, always being on the move; they make me realise that these are not things to be denied or overcome but are part and parcel of what I am, to be lived with and put into the service of that creativity which I recognise as a gift even if I cannot bring myself to believe in a Giver.
1 Igor Stravinsky, Selected Correspondence, Vol. I, ed. Robert Craft, London, 1982, p.287.
2 Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible, Minneapolis, 1985.
3 Dante, Purgatorio II.63; Kafka, Diaries, ed. Max Brod, Harmondsworth, 1964, p.394.
4 Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, Franz Kafka, tr. Richard and Clara Winston, London, 1978, p.289.
5 Paul Celan, Collected Prose, tr. Rosmarie Waldrop, Manchester, 1986, pp.44–5; vii–viii.
6 R.B. Kitaj, First Diasporic Manifesto, London, 1989, p.87.
7 Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, pp.373–4.
8 Letters to Milena, ed. Willy Haas, tr. Tania and James Stern, London, n.d., p.118.
9 ‘Next Year in Jerusalem? Postmodern Jewish Identity and the Myth of Return’, in Jewish Identity, ed. David Theo Goldberg and Michael Krausz, Philadelphia, 1993, pp.291–308, 306.
10 For a forceful assertion of this view see Jonathan Sacks, ‘A Challenge to Jewish Secularism’, Jewish Quarterly, 36, no. 2 (Summer 1989), pp.30–7.
11 Letters to Friends, Family and Editors, p.17. I have modified the Winstons’ translation, which is clumsy here.
12 See the comments of Irving Greenberg, The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays, New York, 1988, passim.
13 The Age of Wonders, tr. Dalya Bilu, Boston, 1981, pp.246–7.
14 The Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Max Brod, Vol. I (1910–13), tr. Joseph Kresh, 25 February 1912; 23 September 1912. Peter Handke, in his beautiful poem, Gedicht an die Dauer, Frankfurt, 1986, brings out well the difference between the kind of rest given by a glorious holiday and that given by working regularly at what satisfies one in one’s normal environment. He calls this ‘true duration’, but I think we are talking about the same thing.