Fervor, page 14
“I suppose I meant fascism. Primarily.”
“You suppose. So you’re saying that the ideology of Mussolini’s thuggish party influenced writers diverse as Joseph Conrad, living in Pimlico, and William Faulkner in Alabama? Seems a bit odd. What did they care what was going on in Italy?”
Conscious he’d been slouching, Tovyah lurched up. “More that the ideas that fascists in Italy, in Italy and Germany I mean, the ideas they later adopted were already prominent in artistic circles in, erm, Europe generally. And in America.”
The man pushed his glasses back onto the bridge of his nose to read the sheet further. “In, erm, Europe generally. Can you give me an example?”
The silence coarsened. Tovyah had lost the thread of what was being asked.
“An example of a European country?”
“Haha. No. An example of the ideas that were prominent in artistic circles in Europe. That’s what you said, isn’t it?”
“Anti-Semitism, for one.”
The word, so heavy, slipped out before he realised what he was saying. The regret was instantaneous. Why hadn’t he brought up Nietzsche or Darwin? How boring to play the part of the marginalised Jew, offended by men who lived a hundred years ago. Complaining now, as if he wanted special treatment.
His stomach shrank. And with the man’s next question, it shrank further.
“You’re Hannah Rosenthal’s son, aren’t you?” he asked. “I read her book. About your grandfather, isn’t it? Quite good, I thought. When it wasn’t being mawkish.”
Concentrating on the matter at hand was getting rapidly harder. How was his mother relevant? He wondered if it was against the rules, bringing her up like that, but said nothing. What rules? Eric’s voice echoed in his head. When the person who makes the decision arbitrates the justness of that decision, there is no law. Only the whims of personality. See also Hitler and Stalin. See also Papal Infallibility. Now the man exchanged a glance with his colleague, and it was she who took up the line of questions.
“So you’re saying anti-Semitism was a constituent part of Modernism? I’m not saying you’re wrong, just trying to understand your position.”
Tovyah was hot now and wanted to remove his jumper. He needed to focus.
“Not consciously, no, but it keeps coming up. I mean, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, they all shared the same casual Jew-hatred. Yeats was an admirer of the far right—”
“Hang on, you’re being a bit selective there,” the man pounced again. “It’s true, Eliot wrote about ‘the rat underneath the piles, the Jew underneath the lot,’ but he was never a fascist. Made great fun of Mosley’s Blackshirts in his play The Rock. And what about the other writers who don’t fit this picture? Auden was a communist, an outspoken opponent of the Nazis. Thomas Mann fled the country to get away from Hitler. Virginia Woolf was married to a Jew. Hence the lupine name, eh? And James Joyce’s key novel, the central text of Modernism in English, has a semitic protagonist.”
Ever since the man had mentioned Hannah, Tovyah found his mind wandering. If only he wasn’t such a coward. If only he had the guts to tell his parents that he found their way of life intolerable and then live with the consequences. Instead, he had put up with everything, always pretending to be something he wasn’t. Even with his father laughing in his face, he’d stood there and said nothing.
And this, right now, was the way out. Here was the chance to escape both his parents’ mad religiosity and the ignorance of his peers. Not fucking it up was imperative. So let the man call Leopold Bloom “semitic” if that makes him happy. Let him call Leonard Woolf “lupine.” Let him gleefully quote Eliot’s hateful verses.
The woman was speaking again. “Which is not to mention the writers, especially in Europe, who were Jewish themselves. Proust, for instance, Elias Canetti, Franz Kafka—”
“Kafka was an anti-Semite,” Tovyah broke in. It was the first time he had interrupted either of them.
“He was what?” the man asked.
“An anti-Semite,” Tovyah said again, more confident now.
“You are aware that Kafka was from a Jewish family? His father was a show-shit.” Tovyah had no idea what this last word meant, and the man went on to supply the definition: “a ritual slaughterer. The man who makes sure everything’s kosher, as it were.” At that stupid joke, rage coursed through him. Of course he knew what a shochet was. What’s more, he knew how the word was pronounced. What did this goy academic know?
“Yes, I know he was Jewish. But all the same he had anti-Semitic views,” Tovyah said. He was surprised by the tone of his own voice. Angry now, practically growling. “He wrote a letter to a woman, some girlfriend. Marina, or Elena, or something.”
“Milena,” the woman put in.
“Whatever! And in this letter, he says he would like to murder the whole Jewish people, including himself. Did you know that?”
He knew that aggression would not play well. But it felt good to be angry, better at least than bumbling through, restarting each sentence midway. The man looked ready to laugh. The woman rushed in before he could speak.
“I don’t recollect the letter you’re referring to,” she said, “but by the sounds of it, I think we can assume Kafka was joking. He had a strange sense of humour, very morbid. It is important to bear in mind that we are reading with post-Holocaust eyes. Such chance comments read very differently to us than they would have done to Kafka’s contemporaries. There is little doubt that had he lived to see the rise of Hitler, Kafka would have been appalled. After all, his whole body of work is a condemnation of the abuse of power, is it not?”
Tovyah stalled. The trouble was, he agreed with her. Kafka was no genocidal monster. He was a fantasist of extraordinary gifts, a seer troubled by dark visions. Tovyah had known this all along, and he didn’t need some gentile to explain it to him here, in Oxford, in this medieval college. But he was still burning with indignation. The man scoured his personal statement for the next avenue of discussion.
“It’s pronounced, sho-cheyt,” Tovyah said. Neither of them seemed to know what he was talking about.
* * *
In his second interview, he wrestled with an unseen poem and then discussed Shakespeare in terms that afterwards made him sick. At six o’clock, an update was posted on the notice board; Tovyah was not required for anything further. The Scottish girl he’d met earlier stood next to him at the board—she been asked to stay overnight for a third interview at another college. “Hopefully see you next year!” she said as he left.
He didn’t stop at the Eagle and Child to buy himself a drink and bask in the atmosphere of literary heritage as he’d planned. He didn’t call his parents or his brother to tell them how it had gone. He didn’t even swing by University College to check out the statue of Percy Bysshe Shelley that Ms Zhang had urged him to visit.
As he stood on the platform, awaiting the train for London, he made a resolution.
* * *
When he let himself into the family home, he was surprised to find both his parents and Elsie waiting to see him. He didn’t realise she’d been discharged. There was a cake in the middle of the dining table, and a bottle of sweet sherry with three glasses in a triangle before it. The cake was white, with black frosting on top in the shape of a mortarboard.
“What’s all this?” he said, shaking off his coat.
“Your mother’s idea,” Eric said. “For the record, I voted against.”
Elsie ran up to her brother, threw her arms around him, and kissed his cheek. “When did you get so clever?” she asked.
Hannah was working the cork out of the bottle. “Ignore your father. We’re proud of you. All of us.”
Eric held a large bread knife towards Tovyah and clapped him on the shoulder. “I never said I wasn’t proud. Can’t I be proud and disappointed at the same time?”
“I don’t want any cake,” Tovyah said, refusing the knife.
“You shouldn’t bat away an olive branch,” Eric said.
Hannah put the bottle down. “It probably went better than you think. Some of the worst interviews I’ve done, I’ve ended up getting the job.”
She looked at her husband. “Tell him.”
“Tell him what? I still think he should have gone for law.”
Hannah rolled her eyes. “We don’t know anything yet, so let’s hope for the best. There will be plenty of time for commiserations later.”
She nodded at Eric, who cut into the white icing atop the cake and split the mortarboard in two. Inside were alternating layers of jam and custard. After commenting on the outrageous price of the cake, he handed the knife to Tovyah. “Go on, cut a slice.”
Tovyah braced himself. If he didn’t do it now, he might never make the leap. He did not cut into the cake. He turned to face his family, crowding in around him. “I don’t believe in God,” he said, just quietly that first time. Everyone had heard. Even so, he said it again, a little louder, “I don’t believe in God anyway.”
His mother took a step towards him. “Tovyah.”
Tovyah moved away from the table, holding the knife out in front of him.
“Woah,” Elsie said. “Kid brother thinks he’s in a slasher. About to spill some red stuff.”
Eric told him to put the knife down and go to his room.
“But you need to hear this,” Tovyah said.
Elsie’s eyes were gleaming. “What’s the truth, kid? I wanna hear it!”
Hannah put a hand on her daughter. “Shhh, darling.”
“This foolishness stops right now,” Eric said. “Go upstairs and we’ll talk in the morning.”
“Slice him up!” cried Elsie. “Slice him up!”
“Look at her.” Tovyah was pointing the knife at his sister. “If nothing else gets through to you, just look at her. What God would do that? To a child. What sick fuck? There is no Yahweh! Don’t you see? It’s all bullshit. No Yahweh, no nothing. Just nothing.”
“Tovyah—”
“NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING, NOTHING!”
* * *
All the next day, Tovyah’s throat burned. The thing that cost him most, however, was that he had pronounced God’s true name, the ancient Hebrew word that the Orthodox will not write down, let alone speak aloud. Phone calls were made. To friends, to Grossman, to extended family. What do we do with our deviant son? At her most exasperated, Hannah said she was ready to sit shiva.
At length Eric talked her down, and a shaky truce was established.
Back at school, Tovyah was disengaged in English. For a while, Ms Zhang tried to reconnect with him, asking for his opinions in class, offering to lend him books. But he kept pushing her away and before long she gave up. She couldn’t stand people who sulked.
The following September, with the agreement of his parents, Tovyah put in an application to study History at a newer, less prestigious Oxford college, whose alumni did not include world-famous poets, or disease-conquering scientists. By now he had taken his A Levels and received excellent results, and in December the college wrote to offer him an unconditional place.
This time, there was no bottle of sweet sherry, and no cake.
TWELVE
A couple of weeks after lunching with Tovyah’s family in that French bistro, he and I went for coffee at the top of Blackwell’s bookshop, where he told me about his first, unsuccessful application to the university. We had just browsed through the poetry section, taking down several volumes before each deciding to buy nothing. I was hard up as ever, and Tovyah thought that pretty much all contemporary writers were simply terrible. As for the older poets, he was in no mood to pay money to replace books his parents had taken from him.
After he’d related the story, I asked if he ever made a formal complaint about the interviewer. He didn’t understand.
“The man’s behaviour!” I said. It was, at the very least, inappropriate, and I thought you could make a case he was being actively anti-Semitic.
Tovyah flared his nostrils. “So?”
“What do you mean so? If you’d made a complaint, someone might have done something. They might have changed their decision.”
Now he laughed. “Haven’t you been paying attention? No one gives a fuck about anti-Semitism.”
* * *
Since I’d met his mother and sister in the first week of term, Tovyah and I had become inseparable. “How’s your weird friend?” people would ask. Having established that we got on, it was difficult to see why we had spent so long circling each other.
We spoke about everything: families, relationships, books. Our long talks were, for me, a second education. For instance, he brought my attention to various strands of esoteric Judaism, from the Merkabah Mystics of the first century right through to the school of Isaac Luria, and modern Hassidism. He taught me about the lineage of False Messiahs—beginning, of course, with Christ—those bearded impostors who claimed to speak with the voice of God. Despite himself, Tovyah loved these stories. His favourite took place during the Napoleonic Wars. A conspiracy of three holy men sought to hasten the end of days by invoking God to take the part of the French Emperor, whom they saw as the incarnation of Gog and Magog, the arch-nemeses of light. Once Bonaparte had subdued all the nations of the world, the true Messiah would be forced to make his long-awaited appearance to defeat his great adversary, thus bringing about the final salvation of the Jewish people. According to legend, the plan failed only because Napoleon spoke disparagingly of the Seer of Lublin, leader of the holy men. This hubris led to his defeat, humiliation, and exile.
I asked him if his parents believed this sort of stuff. “Surely not, right?”
“You’d be surprised. They think everything that happened to my sister is some weird punishment from God.”
“Ok, that’s also mad. But, sorry for asking, what exactly has happened to Elsie?”
I’d been curious about his sister for a while. Though I knew she’d had a difficult life, I was ignorant of the specifics. Now, for the first time, Tovyah sketched a timeline of events.
“She was the brightest kid you could hope to meet,” Tovyah began. “Then everything somehow went wrong.”
No one ever found out where Elsie went when she disappeared. Or why she’d gone. Was she unhappy? Scared? Did she want adventure? No therapist could get her to open up. Eventually, she was diagnosed with depression, and prescribed 20mg of fluoxetine.
Later that year, she was expelled from her school for “anti-social behaviour.” On her charge sheet: destroying another girl’s property (she dumped a copy of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets in the toilet on the grounds that it was stupid), fighting (she stabbed a girl in the thigh with a pair of compasses), and emotional bullying (everyone, her teacher said, was frightened of her). At fifteen, having been kicked out of two more schools (for stealing and bullying, respectively) she tore up a copy of the Hebrew Bible and told her parents she hated God. The following year she kidnapped some chickens from a neighbour’s garden and slit their throats. In November, Hannah’s first book came out: Gehinnom and Afterwards. Elsie wrote a blog post claiming the whole thing had been an invention by her money-grabbing mother and had nothing to do with the true events of her grandfather’s life. She wrote that her grandfather had been a sort of wizard, a powerful Kabbalist, who evaded Nazi persecution through ancient mystical techniques. Even now, his spirit outwitted oblivion and could still be seen around the house.
“This would have been 2002ish,” Tovyah said, “when everyone was suddenly into LiveJournal and the whole world started vomiting their opinions online.” It hadn’t occurred to me that the Rosenthals kept pace with internet trends, but once again, I’d mischaracterised them. It was easy to forget that Hannah was far more at home in the modern world than she let on; whatever cultural moment this was, she was thriving.
In any case, Elsie’s blog was discovered by one of Hannah’s detractors and reposted, amplifying the readership and the family’s embarrassment a hundredfold.
It was around this time that Eric said to his daughter, before the whole family, “Who are you? I don’t recognise this person.” To which Elsie broke into a laughing fit. Then threw a full wine glass against the wall; a red streak ran to the ceiling. Then she attempted to walk barefoot across the shattered glass, stopping only when her older brother manhandled her out of the room.
At sixteen her anorexia was judged life-threatening, and she was hospitalised. There she attempted to kill herself with a smuggled safety razor. When the family’s rabbi visited her bedside, she spat in his face and told him he was a fraud. Remarkably, she managed to sit her GCSEs after she was discharged, but she never attended another school. She was now taking 75mg of venlafaxine, having given up on both citalopram and sertraline (the former “didn’t do anything,” and the latter made her violently ill).
In the following years, Elsie continued to bounce between her parents’ home and psychiatric hospitals. She drank whenever she could break out and find someone to take pity on her. A scrawny teenager with big, dark eyes, she didn’t struggle to find them. Her venlafaxine dose was increased to 150mg. The doctors were quietly optimistic that with the stronger prescription, her moods might start to stabilise. “Not her life, you understand, just her moods.”
By the time Tovyah had finished this tale, his eyes were shining. I said how sorry I was.
Tovyah scrunched his nose. “Don’t be. It’s like Tolstoy says. Each family gets fucked in their own way.”
Just behind the beat, I asked, “Tolstoy said that?”
There was a pause, then Tovyah said my name.
“Yes?”
“Let’s go get something to eat.”
* * *
As the term ran by, the weather brightened. I made it my mission to integrate Tovyah into college life, and there was a period when I regularly got him out, if not always to the house parties and social occasions, then at least to pubs and to various cultural events: art shows, film screenings, concerts. Friends of mine remarked: “He’s actually not so bad, when you get to know him.” And: “Sometimes, he can be quite funny.” I can still picture his face on a certain spring night, when a few of us gathered in the White Horse on the corner of Broad Street. Several beers in, when his eyes were no longer able to hold their focus, he made a pronouncement. “If every night were like this, then I’d know what the fuss was about.”
