Rivers which Cannot be Crossed and the ‘Gate of the Law’
These images of skies of blue and columns of people in black being swallowed into the confines of the crematoria and disappearing in clouds of smoke, the corridors of lights leading to the Metropolis of Death, the terms ‘Metropolis of Death’ and ‘Homeland of Death’, all of which are so close to me; landscapes to which I escape as one escaping into the landscapes of childhood, feeling in them a sense of freedom, protected by that immutable law of the all-pervasive dominion of death, by the beauty of summer landscapes – all these things are part of a private mythology which I am conscious of, a mythology that I forged, that I created, with which I amuse myself and in which – I will not even say I am tormented, I am not tormented – I find an escape when other things haunt me, and even when they don’t. This Homeland exists and is available to me always. But it is a myth, it has its own mythological language, and what I am doing here actually runs contrary to all my decisions, all my feelings, the whole awareness of my limitations, or former limitations that came to mind: limitations of language, primarily doubts of my ability to intermix these mythological landscapes with landscapes that are receptive to communicative transmission. These doubts, or the avoidance of involving these landscapes in any other aspect of my everyday life, and also rising above or making an intellectual effort to understand the world and explain it, which I do to the best of my ability almost daily as a teacher in one of our respected academic institutions, one of whose aims is to confer interpretation and meaning on human existence in the past and in the near past – my area of specialization – all these things, along with this separation, this avoidance of mixing one sphere with another, stemmed from an unshakable determination and were my guiding light.
Thus, until now only the pages of my diary shared with me the trips to that mythic Homeland, to that Metropolis. I won’t say that I didn’t try to share – not actively but passively, like any thinking person anywhere – I won’t say that I avoided entirely trying to share in others’ attempts to evoke those landscapes, or those seeming landscapes, by others who considered this a mission and did meaningful things and transmitted the message. Here and there I tried, by which I mean – let me put it the other way around – I in fact refrained, and continue to refrain to this day, from reading anything literary or artistic that describes or tries to describe Auschwitz, the concentration camps, this chapter of the ‘Final Solution’ or the history of the Jews within its unfolding, namely the violent end. I have similarly refrained from visiting exhibitions or museums, and however much time I spend in various archives and libraries, including the Yad Vashem Archives and the Yad Vashem library, I have not visited, and probably will not visit – will not be capable of visiting – either the exhibition or this great memorial site of Yad Vashem or other such exhibitions and memorials. I have not seen the film Shoah, which so many have made part of their intellectual or experiential property. Why I avoided seeing the film and always put it off and in the end did not see it, was not always clear to me. Nor do I see other films on these subjects and never gave myself an accounting as to why. It is certainly not, as the usual interpretation might have it, because it would cause me suffering or make me flinch. Of course not. But my stance of remoteness, which I developed in dealing with the history of this period, perhaps obliged me to avoid over-involvement in regard to that final violent stage.
That was what I thought for a long time, though without ever actually giving myself a convincing explanation. But there is a convincing explanation. I arrived at it about three years ago, and I think it also exists in one of the diary entries, maybe from 1989. However, even if it is not recorded there, or is formulated differently from the way I see it today, I want to conclude this chapter with an attempt to clarify, to interpret things as they came to me in a moment of enlightenment – the light by which I live in these mythic landscapes of my private mythology, these home landscapes of Auschwitz, the Homeland of Death, the Metropolis, and all the rest.
It began with the following episode: a university colleague invited me to attend a lecture on the subject of the Holocaust in literature. Common courtesy forbade me to decline the invitation, and I heard what I heard. The feeling of alienation was overwhelming. These are two different languages: one language which I do not understand, and a second language through which I live that period. Nevertheless, I went ahead and read one of the books that were mentioned in the lecture. After all, some of the books were written by people here whom I know – excellent writers, who are frequently quoted – and there are excellent writers elsewhere who have obviously confronted the subject and deserve to be subjects of research and analysis. I took one of these books, perhaps one of the finest of them, and started to read – about Auschwitz: a description of a situation the author experienced. To my appalled astonishment, all I felt, all I read and saw in that evocation, in those descriptions, was utter alienation. Between the description of a world, the description of landscapes, the description of a reality which was divorced from the images, the scenes, the landscapes, the experiences, the presence of the past that is perpetually part of my present, there are rivers that cannot be crossed. In no way can I connect and integrate these things into those landscapes.
Here I asked this naive question: after all, for the whole world, or for the whole reading public everywhere, that book and many others like it, and many works of cinema, theatre and art, offer a way to understand and experience Auschwitz, its universe, the ghettos, that final stage, that reality. And everyone reads these books – they sell thousands of copies – so they obviously speak in a uniform language to all those myriad readers. Yet I cannot find in them what they seek to convey! It’s a completely different world! The only response I feel able to express is alienation; all that is authentic is the authenticity of the alienation. Therefore I ask: in what am I different? Something is wrong with me!
And then, as so often, as almost always during periods of distress, I escape to Kafka, either his diaries or his other works. At that time, I again opened at the ending – I always open randomly – I opened at the ending of the wonderful story of the man standing before the Gate of the Law. This man who stands before the Gate of the Law actually asks the same question – and it is one of the last questions he asks, driven by his insatiable curiosity, as the gatekeeper jests. He asks: ‘Tell me, after all this is the Gate of the Law, and the Gate of the Law is open to everyone.’ To which the gatekeeper says: ‘Yes, that is so.’ Then the man says (if I remember the text correctly): ‘Yet in all the years I have been sitting here no one has entered the gate.’ And the gatekeeper nods his head and says: ‘Indeed.’ The man asks him to explain this puzzling fact, and the gatekeeper does him this one last mercy and says: ‘This gate is open only for you, it exists only for you, and now I am going to close it.’
Accordingly, everything I have recorded here – all these landscapes, this whole private mythology, this Metropolis, Auschwitz – this Auschwitz that was recorded here, which speaks here from my words, is the only entrance and exit – an exit, perhaps, or a closing – the only one that exists for me alone. I take this to mean that I cannot enter by any other way, by any other gate to that place. Will others be able to enter through the gate that I opened here, that remains open for me? It is possible that they will, because this gate that Kafka opened, which was intended for only one person, for K., Josef K., is actually open to almost everyone. But for him there was only one gate into his private mythology.
I don’t know whether this analogy is valid here, but this is the only meaning I can find for the puzzle of the occupation of my present with that past, which I experience constantly, in which I create constantly, to which I escape constantly, in which I create landscapes intermixed with scenes of childhood reality and time and of the onlooker, of the big boy looking with puzzlement at all this, and who, before it is shut – before that gate is shut – asks these questions and, at least to this mystifying matter, seems to have found an answer at last. It’s not much, a marginal thing, really, but it is impossible not to convey these things, not to puzzle over them, not to believe in them, for without that belief the whole memory of my childhood landscapes, the landscapes in which I always find freedom – my last but one freedom – would be lost.