Asking the Right Question

In the last online issue of the Tablet, there is a very challenging article by one of my favorite contemporary American Jewish authors, Dara Horn, about a topic which unfortunatelly will never get old and obsolete: the reactions to outside anti-Semitic pressures. 

We have the story of Purim versus the story of Hanukkah, both narratives successful, but as Viktor Frankl said in Man's Search for Meaning: 'Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way'. Which also means that some people might decide to be on the wrong side of history. Everything is about making choices, assuming it, no matter what. 

An episode of this long story is Yevsektsiya, an institution created in the Soviet Union, designed by Jews from very learned educated (including religiously) families that helped the local authorities to destroy Jewish life - schools, Hebrew-speaking institutions, religious centers. In Horn's words they were looking to make the other Jews 'cool' - I so don't like the term, but it suits ironically the context and the circumstances -, in the long tradition of court Jews. In the end, they ended up in Siberia, a dirty prison cell, a bullet in their head, in the best case scenario completely isolated.

I've heard and meet all my life such people in Eastern Europe. People that willingly accepted to be 'cool' part of an establishment that from the very beginning hated them. Deeply. They were never accepted but used and abused. People that turned against their own people, wrote extensive reports for the 'intelligence' services against their people, sometimes their relatives too. Nothing new under the son, as under the Greek Empire, there were many notable Jewish families that encouraged the same behavior and openly repudiated their religion - including by practicing foreskin restoration for the sake of the Hellenic 'beauty standards'.

Most of them ended up like the Yevsektsiya members, dead - both spiritually and physically. Those who survived the communist times and caught some fresh democratic air, were just a shame for themselves and their community. No one really wanted to deal with them and they didn't look keen to ask for forgiveness either. In many respects they failed, as the communities and synagogues they tried to destroy were still there, against all odds.

Purim and Hanukkah are two sides of the story that I both loved and which offered to those people two noble alternatives. Either be like Queen Esther - be part of the establishment but save your own people - or like the Maccabees - fight openly against the oppression. I've meet many Queens Esther but always secretly envied the Maccabees. Smart is to know when the spirit of the times requires you to be Queen Esther and when the Maccabees.

But although I listen or read stories of assimilation and integration, observed people blindly involved in their activities and their dismise - or disparition, Dara Horn raises a very important question: Did those people find actually the integrity they 'so desperately wanted'? 

This question it's the key and as usual, a question is completely enlightening the whole context. It completely changes the perspectiv and challenges the mindset. Personally, I know that the Queen Esthers were driven exactly by those integrity values. The rest, it remains to be found, if ever.

Book review: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Dara Horn

My first literary encounter with Dara Horn was an unforgettable blast, although the other two novels by her I've read were a bit deceiving. However, A Guide for the Perplexed, her fourth, is one of those books which haunts you for a long time, because of the intricated web of symbols and meanings openly expressed or hidding in plain sight. It is the kind of books that stays with you many days and even weeks after you finished it because it seems that regardless how many riddles you solved already, there is still something else left somewhere unanswered. 

Computer prodigy Josie Askenazi created a complicated Internet program called Genizah where memories can be stored and therefore, you can create and preserve a complete life story. Because 'Everything is absurd until one learns to code'. However, busy to save snippets of information, we may be too distracted sometimes to live the moment as it is. When she is invited to the National Library of the post-'revolutionary' Egypt for a presentation of the program, her less brilliant sister Judith encourage her to go. In her last day of the trip she is kidnapped and brought into the Death City of Cairo, where her death is recordeded and aired, although she is still secretly kept to create a home variant of the Genizah and also a virus that can destroy the archives developed by the Egyptian police using the system. As a 2.0 Scheherazade, she is trying to lure her kidnappers and win one more day and one more day of her life by using her strongest asset: her coding wisdom. 

Meanwhile, her sister is having her short-lived moment of glory, moving on with her husband and taking up the role of mother for her daughter. A short message Josie succeeded to send to the mobile of one of her kidnappers to both her husband and sister will change, although a bit later, the entire story and she will finally escape, with her sister killed during the events.

At the same time, there are another two stories taking place in the novel: one of the author of The Guide of the Perplexed, Moses Maimonides, searching for a cure of the asthma in the ancient Egypt, and the adventures of the 19th century Jewish researcher Solomon Schechter who discovered the famous Genizah in Egypt, a deposit of old documents and holy books aimed to be stored for preventing human destruction as they bear the name of Gd. 

The net of the story is so intricated that one feels that it is no details out of place. Horn has a serious Jewish knowledge which permeates the smallest details of the novel, from the details and commentaries of The Guide of the Perplexed until the history of Jews in Egypt or the various interpretation of the story of Yossef and his brothers. I've personally found fascinated the game of the double: The two Askenazi sisters, the twin sisters that brought prof. Solomon Schechter to Egypt, Schechter's relation with his estranged brother, Maimonides' brother who died during one of his oversea trips. This dual relationship applies even to the family names: Jossie Askenazi is married with Mizrahi.

A less clear connection for me was the asthma element: Maimonides wrote a Treaty of Asthma. Jossie suffers of asthma too, and her daughter too, as well as Schechter himself. I've only found a relatively obscure psychoanalitical explanation of this long-term lung condition according to which it is caused by the supressed cry of the child for the mother. 

Another aspect that was probably missed was the fact that after the killing of Josie is announced, her death is relatively easily accepted, and there are no efforts to rescue her body or find more about her whereabouts. 

The entire discussion about memory and how the past can shape the present and the future, including by repeating episodes from the past, although in different combinations and concentrations is worth at least another books. How much we can control our life memories, with the help of technology ? How much we can control our present and future? At what extent those memories saved are accurate and not just another story our minds avid for creating realities are longing for?

A Guide for the Perplexed by Dara Horn is a fascinating Jewish novel of the kind I would love to read more and more.

Rating: 5 stars 

Book Review: The World to Come, by Dara Horn

Thanks to this book, I reconsidered and reconfirmed many of my ideas about writing. Actually, the World to Come is what I call a good book.

As in a Chagall's painting, you are flying over time, countries, doubts and misunderstandings. The whole book it's a spiritual mystery you don't grasp always the sense or the meanings. As in real life: do we understand always the chains or are we always able to find the missing links? Life is art and art is life and sometimes there is not an obvious meaning in what we are doing or what it's happening to us.

The story is based on a real fact: Chagall's Study for Over Vitebsk was stolen from a gallery in NYC during a cocktail. The study represents a bearded man moving over the houses of a snowy street. He looks like a shadow flying and hurrying up. Where is he going to? Where is he coming from? What can we do in this respect abour ourselves?

In the book, Ben Ziskind, the former wonder-kid, recently divorced and currently making quizzes for a TV show, stole the 1 million-dollar painting during a cocktail for singles at the Museum of Hebraic Art from New Jersey. The painting belonged to his family, his Russian grand-father Boris Kulback being a former pupil of Chagall during his teaching time in an orphanage for Jewish children. There, Chagall befriended the Yiddish writer Pinkhas Kahanovich called the Nister (The Hidden One) writing Hasidic stories with a hidden key. Some of his stories were hidden on the back of some of the paintings.

Ben's mother, an illustrator and writer of children book, sold the painting after the death of her husband - former Vietnam veteran - for offering to Ben and his twin sister Sara a good education. Doubts are surviving regarding the authenticity of the painting and till the end of the book we gather a bunch of unanswered questions most of them built around the painting: how the painting was brought to Europe from Russia, was it faked in Russia by the expert that used to be Kulback's neighbor?

The key for all our answers is in the world to come, a Chagall-tailored world where the old souls are together with the new ones, the only moments when we can have authentic answers to our overwhelming questions.

From a generation to another, the parents are always missing: Kulback was orphan, his daughter will survive alone after he is imprisoned by the Soviets and Ben and Sara should overcome the death of their father and after, their mother's. The parents are transmitting to their children mysteries to solve and the mystery if the world to come. As in Chagall paintings, we are flying from the Soviet Russia and its revolution, to the Vietnam War and the daily American East Coast life.

From the beginning to the end, the pieces of the kaleidoscope are rearranging over and over again. In the middle of the stories, we are transposed to dreams about singing paradises with colourful butterflies or fluid universe of the world as it is before we are landing on Earth.

What it is all about? Each moment, we are the making our present and future: we are taking decisions and actions. The world to come is the world we are building carefully while waiting for the world to come.

A wonderful story, perfectly fitting the special time before Rosh HaShana.