Feathers / Plumoj & Esperanto (7)

Beʾer, Haim. Feathers [Notsot]; translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press; Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004. xiii, 235 pp.

I finally pulled this book off the shelf and read the novel (10-15 February). I found two additional references to Esperanto, quoted in my previous post. Feathers (published in the original Hebrew in 1979), like several contemporary Jewish novels, uses Esperanto as nostalgia for lost utopian possibilities. But what about the novel itself?

My initial reaction was: why the National Yiddish Book Center named this one of the 100 greatest works of modern Jewish Literature eludes me. This is deemed a classic of Israeli literature, but it just could not hold my interest or attention most of the way through. Perhaps my inattention is my own fault, but I was just not motivated to care. Stylistically, the novel is marvelous, but still . . . You might think I would be more interested in a collection of eccentrics and crackpots, but I just couldn't care about this Jewish cohort in Jerusalem. Note, however,  . . .

There are two outstanding features I should point out, the second of which is more compelling to me. In all of the scenarios covered, from the war of independence to the Yom Kippur war, not limited to actual wars, there is the constant presence of death and funerals. The title itself suggests the fragility of Jewish life and dreams.

The second feature is the Jewish gift for scorn and sarcasm. Here is one characteristic passage that also pertains to philosophy, autodidacts, utopians, and cranks:

"Now that you are a father yourself, how can you rationally explain such craziness?" How a boy who lacked nothing, whose teachers were men of such stature that some eventually became university lecturers, whose friends came from the very best of houses--how such a boy could have fallen for a shiftless low-life Leder was more than she could comprehend.

Since the conversation annoyed me, I replied that no one, not even I could know what had gone on in my mind and soul as a child. Nevertheless, I added, I believed that Leder was in his own fashion a philosopher, though an autodidact of course, and that my imagination had been fired by the world of utopian thought he had opened up to me.

My mother sarcastically repeated my big words and declared that even though she had no schooling and had never even been able to attend the Saturday night lectures at the community center, she knew enough to understand the difference between Leder and a philosopher.

"We're both adults now," she went on as we crossed the busy Jerusalem-Jericho road, "and it won't hurt you to hear the truth for once." She blamed Leder for my having dropped out of school. "You went to college thinking that a philosophy department was a lot of wise men sitting around with laurel wreathes on their heads and discussing Kant and Spinoza while solving the problems of the universe with hot air." [p. 42]

Various ideological factions in the Jewish community of the historical periods covered are mentioned: Zionists, anti-Zionists, Bolsheviks, rightists, Europe-oriented monarchists. The key figure is Mordecai Leder, disciple of Karl Popper-Lynkeus and leader of the Nutrition Army, dedicated to bringing the utopian project of minimal consumption into being.

This might be a fluke of my attentiveness, but I finally got absorbed in the novel with the death of Joseph Stalin. The anti-communist insults hurled at the Jewish Bolshies in Jerusalem are hilarious.

Leder becomes disillusioned with peaceful persuasion when Albert Schweitzer declines his invitation to become titular head of the movement, picks up a gun at the moment when Israeli right-wingers riot in protest of Israel's reparations deal with Germany, gets arrested, and goes downhill from there. The narrator's life with Leder ends in the 1950s, but the connection comes back to him in the final chapter when burying the dead from the Yom Kippur war.

So, despite my initial indifference, there appears to be something to be gleaned from this tale, the generalities if not the specifics: the craziness of dreamers, or perhaps the futility of all dreams, the discrepancy between people's self-conception and their lives, the interweaving of humor and tragedy, the evanescence of Jewish and all human life, the absorption and disappearance of the world one once lived, disorientation and memory, feathers scattered from living beings and blown all about, signalling the disruption of a fleeting existence.

Feathers / Plumoj & Esperanto (6)

Beʾer, Haim. Feathers [Notsot]; translated from the Hebrew by Hillel Halkin. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press; Hanover: University Press of New England, 2004. xiii, 235 pp.

I finally read the novel (10-15 February). I will report on it further, but here are two additional references to Esperanto I found:

Leder often reminisced to me about his years in the imperial capital. On one such occasion, we had walked as far as the train station at the beginning of the Valley of Refaim when he interrupted a formal lecture on the importance of Esperanto in the future Lynkean state to announce that he wished to rest for awhile beneath one of the shaded branches in the square outside the station. [p.36]

And:

The heavy winter rains had ruined them. [Leder's books] Their fancy cloth and leather bindings were waterlogged and cracked, and strips of Viennese newspapers from the turn of the century had peeled loose from their backings. The pages were stuck together in clumps as hard as bricks. I poked around in the pile like a hyena scavenging a dead lion. A brown manila envelope lay buried beneath the books. Its bottom had decayed into the soft, damp, verminous earth, but the black-bound notebooks inside were unharmed, apart from a pinkening at their edges from the moisture. The "Constitution of Lynkeania" announced the title page of the topmost notebook in Leder's handwriting. Yet apart from Popper-Lynkeus' minimum social program copied out from one of his books, some attempted translations from Esperanto, and a few sketches of the Lynkean state seal, the notebooks had nothing in them. [p. 218]

Jewish utopian nostalgia & Esperanto in fiction: 2 reviews

This seems to be a trend in Jewish novels for a number of years now. Looking backward, reflecting on dashed hopes and lost possibilities, ideals failed or betrayed: Jewish fiction is casting Esperanto in a utopian role.  Here are my two latest reviews:

• Is Emigration Good for Soviet Latvian Jews? David Bezmozgis, The Free World reviewed by R. Dumain 


• Amos Oz Mourning Jewish Utopia: Between Friends reviewed by R. Dumain

Amos Oz: Esperanto among the Kibbutzim

Famous Israeli author Amos Oz, who lived on a kibbutz for decades, has written a book of connected stories about kibbutzim, Between Friends. The publication release date for the English translation is September 24.  One of the stories in the book is titled "Esperanto." Here are excerpts from two reviews.

Amos Oz explores the daily lives behind utopian dreams in 'Between Friends' by Michael Walsh, Daily News, September 18, 2013

 The collection concludes with a masterfully rendered story called “Esperanto,” which has an atmosphere so rich it can almost be considered a character itself. It focuses on Martin Vandenburg, an anarchist who teaches Esperanto, the easy-to-learn constructed language that was crafted to transcend nationality and promote peace.

Between Friends by Amos Oz – review by Alberto Manguel, The Guardian, Wednesday 8 May 2013

The Esperanto teacher declares that "imprecise words poison relations between people everywhere, and that's why clear, accurate words can heal those relationships, but only if they are the right words spoken in a language that all people can understand". One of the students observes that Cain and Abel "probably spoke the same language too"; another says nothing but thinks that "the sorrow in the world was born long before words".

Vandenberg believes humans are essentially generous and kind-hearted but corrupted by their environments. He wants states to be abolished and replaced with an international, pacifist brotherhood of Esperanto speakers.

“When all human beings speak the same language,” he tells his class, “there will be no more wars because their common language will prevent misunderstanding among individuals and peoples.”

This claim reveals an ideological rift. Students question his belief with instances of violence between people who spoke the same language: Cain and Abel, German Jews and Nazis.

One student sat quietly, thinking “the sorrow in the world was born long before words.”

If that young man is correct, then the feeling of sadness, miscommunication and pain existed long before anyone uttered those nouns, which are essentially metaphors for something intangible.

On this web page are two videos and links to the story "Esperanto" in Italian and Hebrew:

Video. Amos Oz, Esperanto (Festival Internazionale delle Letterature 2012 – Basilica di Massenzio, Roma )

In the second of these videos, Oz recites the story in Hebrew, accompanied by music and Italian subtitles.  The first is an interview in which Oz summarizes the story "Esperanto," which you can view right here:

Esperanto photo archive at Harvard Library

Harvard Library Visual Information Access can be searched for 'Esperanto', yielding 6 results. All photos originate from the Central Zionist Archives.

Results #5 & #6 actually consist of two images apiece. # of these are apparently identical photos of L.L. Zamenhof; the last is apparently a photo of his father, Marc Zamenhof. #5 dates the Zamenhof photo at 1908.

#1 is a photo of Zamenhof's grave.

None of the above photos are of good quality. However, there are 3 photos of excellent quality.  They are, respectively, from the 5th (1943), 6th (1944), and 7th (1945) Palestine Esperanto Congress, Jerusalem.

I had no idea that there were Esperanto congresses in Palestine, let alone during the Holocaust of World War II whilst European Jewry was being exterminated.  There's a story here.

Juda kosmopolitismo, Zamenhof, & la aktuala morala krizo

La aŭtoro maltranvilas pri la stato de la juda popolo kaj naciismo. Li deziras, ke judoj denove funckiu kiel liberaliga pontopopolo inter diversaj kulturoj. Li pensas pri la aktuala konflikto pri islamanoj en eŭropaj landoj.

The results of this closing of the national soul are very sad. For the first time in millennia, we are not at the forefront of influence on the world. In the past, there was hardly an era in which we did not have an influence. Take Jesus, for example. His teachings and values sprang from the Jewish core of the Second Temple period. Those who sowed the European renaissance included descendants of Jewish Marranos, who brought the wisdom and achievements of ancient Greece, which had been preserved by the moderate and tolerant Muslim philosophers, back home.

It is impossible to decipher the codes of modern times without Spinoza or Moses Mendelsohn. And what would the previous century have been like without Marx and his communism, on one hand, or Freud and the individual soul, on the other? That period also produced Trotsky, Zamenhof and others, and their dreams.

SOURCE: "The Jewish people's new task" by Avraham Burg, Haaretz, 10.09.07.

Alternate history, Jewish cognitive dissonance, & the Yiddish revival

Two State Dissonance
Gershom Gorenberg | The American Prospect, June 11, 2010

Meyer Landsman lives in the Hotel Zamenhof. Landsman is the hero of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union, in which the Jews lost the 1948 war in Palestine and have taken refuge in a Jewish autonomous region of Alaska. The run-down hotel is named for L.L. Zamenhof, the Russian-born Jew who invented Esperanto in order to bring world understanding and peace. In other words, Landsman's residence is a liberal Jewish dream that has seen much better days.

The turn to alternate history fiction is seen by Gorenberg as the outcome of cognitive dissonance among frustrated liberal Jews who can't see themselves in today's Israel.

What strikes me as I listen to the family fight between the hawkish Jewish establishment and other American Jews—the pro-peace Zionists, the furious anti-Zionists, the "don't ask me about Israel" non-Zionists—is that they're all dealing with a shared family problem: They have a hard time fitting Israel as it actually is into some of their deepest assumptions about the world. The easiest way for me to explain runs through Philip Roth's The Plot Against America and Chabon's Yiddish Policeman's Union.

While most Jews repress the disparity, Roth and Chabon make it very clear—by describing the world as it would be if the facts lined up with the beliefs. Roth describes an America that fits the assumption that Jews are at peril everywhere. Chabon invents a world in which the Jews are still weak and homeless. On one level these visions are dystopian—but on another they are somehow comforting, homey, because the gap between different things we "know" is gone.

I'm not going to comment on the rest of Gorenberg's political meditation. The non-religious Yiddish revival belongs to a different mental universe from what has become of the revival of Hebrew, itself a remarkable accomplishment, now associated with a powerful state far removed from the shleppers who might have once fantasized about it.

See also:

Yiddish is no joke
Antony Lerman, The Guardian, 5 March 2010

"The revival of this death-defying language shows that Zionism has failed to consign other forms of Jewish life to oblivion"

The Zionist movement was no friend to Yiddish, but now Yiddish is making a comeback. There's one comment on Zamenhof, Yiddish, and Esperanto.

Public Movement, Performance, Ideology

The Israeli performance group Public Movement is featured in an article, Performing Politics for Germany by Daniel Miller (Frieze Magazine, 13/07/09). Miller describes performances in Tel Aviv, Berlin, and Lodz and Warsaw in Poland. Themes presented involve the Irgun, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and other political themes. Their performance art, which evidently doubles as political commentary, has been challenged and questioned. There was one allegation that the group is a front for Israeli militarism. Its street theater does seem rather dodgy, however you interpret it. Anyway, here's the relevant passage for us:

In choreographing Spring in Warsaw Public Movement included a quasi-Islamic prayer, a flag-planting ritual at the site where noted Jew L.L. Zamenhof invented Esperanto, a mass public kneeling before the Willy Brandt memorial (a third order of representation, as the statue was originally built in honour of the German chancellor after he knelt in front of Nathan Rapoport’s Ghetto Heroes Memorial on his visit to Warsaw in 1970) and a synchronized dance backed by Justice vs. Simian’s ‘We Are Your Friends’ (2007) in front of the memorial itself.