Fervor, page 5
* * *
I had not set foot in a synagogue since, and so had no idea how to behave now. Thankfully, a round, motherly woman saw me hovering and asked if I wanted to join her.
“Rabbi Michael is a wonderful man,” she said. “And they get some terrific after-dinner speakers.”
I asked if Schultz had arrived yet. She pointed me to the far end of the room where an old man sat with his eyes lowered. Was that the face I knew from the inside flap of dust jackets? He looked exhausted. The curved ridges in his cheeks and his forehead were deep enough to slot a playing card and leave it standing. There was no food in front of him, and he showed little interest in speaking to the people on either side.
Moments later, after a polite but stuttery introduction from the rabbi, Schultz rose from his seat and shuffled to the front of the room. A man with a complexion like a split pomegranate held him by the elbow. Once Schultz opened his mouth, however, he required no more assistance.
“I wish to begin with an old tale. Cast your minds back to the middle of the eighteenth century, what we call the Age of Enlightenment. All over Europe, tremendous advances in natural science, in philosophy, and in political thought were taking place. These were colossal rearrangements in both the human imagination and the social order. Somewhere in the Kingdom of Poland, Israel Baal Shem Tov still numbered among the quick, telling stories by the fire and winning new followers every day. Some men, then, raising their voices over the din of progress, talked of magic and of miracles.
“One evening, two masters were travelling a country road. Their names were Rebbe Elimelekh and Reb Zusia. It was a Friday night much like this one, with a light wind up and a fierce chill in the air, and as the sky darkened, the two men knew they had to find somewhere to rest and observe the sabbath. Soon they came upon a small inn where they agreed to spend the night, huddled by the stove downstairs. They had no money to pay in exchange for a room but were permitted to stay. This was the antiquated custom of offering shelter to strangers in case they were disguised angels. After the two masters lay down to sleep, silence spread through the village. But in the middle of the night, both woke at the same instant. Rebbe Elimelekh turned to his brother and said he felt an inexpressible terror. Zusia felt it too. ‘Shall we leave?’ asked Elimelekh. ‘Yes, we must leave this instant,’ said Zusia. And even though it was a starless night, cold and dangerous, they set out with nothing but the pale moon to see by. What happened next is anybody’s guess. But I can tell you where the two men had stopped. A small town in Southern Poland called Oświęcim. Or, as it came to be known to the world some hundred and fifty years later, Auschwitz.”
A few people around the room nodded, indicating that they had heard such accounts. Years hence my friend Jim Baranski would tell me a variation, the tale inverted. Baranski was an oboist and had played across Europe. Once in Vienna, he and his fellow musicians had gone to an old beer hall to celebrate an opening night. This was the late seventies. Amidst the laughter and high-spirited conversation, Baranski was overwhelmed by a sudden pain in his chest, as if pressed in a vise. He was so short of breath, in fact, that he worried he wouldn’t be able to perform the following night. He went outside and confided to a friend, not one of the players, but a local woman he’d met the first time he came to Austria. She told him that the bar had been a Nazi stomping ground. Rumour had it there was a sadist who once brought in a Jew and ordered him to lie on the floor so a stool could be placed on his chest. He then invited his friends to climb onto the stool one by one until the Jew was crushed to death.
“What can we make of such a story?” Schultz asked. “What does it tell us? That to the tzaddik there is no distinction between past and present, that if you see with God’s eyes you can look back on the future, and sit with the past before you? Then why could it not be stopped? God knew what was coming. Surely, then, God let it happen. What to do with such a thought? How can we still live as Jews, how can we go on lighting the sabbath candles, separating milchedig from flayshedig, circumcising our children?”
Night had fallen. Schultz’s aging face glowed bronze in the smoky light. I looked about me hoping, if I’m honest, to see other non-believers who had come to the lecture but not the dinner. I thought a confederate or two might alleviate my growing unease.
“And yet, the reverse position is equally compelling. It is recorded that in the camps there were those who fasted on Yom Kippur, men and women already living under the tyranny of starvation who still refused their soup rations in order to honour their spiritual commitments, fully aware it would bring their deaths a whole day nearer. Who are we to turn our backs on God, after those human skeletons kept faith?
“We have arrived at a paradox. To live as a Jew is impossible, and not to live as a Jew is equally impossible. Both paths are obscene, both insult the dead. Our subject today is whether it is possible to speak intelligently about the Holocaust. There are men who have claimed, some with great authority, that it is not possible—”
“And women,” muttered my companion, provoking a loud shhhh from someone nearby.
“—Theodor Adorno told us that after Auschwitz there could be no poetry. Hell has sprung up on Earth, now something must give. So, no more sonnets, no more ballads, no odes, not even elegies for the dead in their graves. How fitting, we might think, how just. And yet the fact remains that much good and even great poetry has been written in the last half century. In English alone there has been Ted Hughes with his strange, mythical imagination, there are the furious songs of John Berryman, and there is the keen intelligence of Elizabeth Bishop. Was Adorno simply wrong?”
Here, Schultz paused and ran his eyes over the listeners, implying that the question was not wholly rhetorical.
“We can go further. The ingenious poet-chemist Primo Levi himself walked out of the camps in forty-five and went on to write hundreds of pages about what had happened there—the living corpses, the conveyor belt of slaughter. And even he says that the survivors were not the true witnesses, that the only ones in possession of what really went on, the real horror, are those that left the camps through the chimneys, those that blackened the air and littered the ground with their ashes. The drowned, the starved, the suffocated, and the crushed. The only truthful account, he proclaims, is silence. Another paradox! A lifelong atheist, Levi it seems had an instinct for Talmudic contortions.”
For the first time, Schultz smiled.
“And what am I doing now, you might ask. Have I come to speak or to remain silent? If silent, then why did I come? But if I intend to speak, what can I tell you that Primo Levi cannot, I who was never there?”
With the candle flames and the packed seats, it was growing hot in there, and I felt sweat tickling my neck. Schultz’s voice, lightly accented by his native Yiddish, was sharp and clear. He spoke without notes, his eyes now fixed on some high point on the wall behind me, though his fatigued pupils sometimes drifted slowly downwards before snapping back up. A few people fidgeted in groaning seats. Schultz developed his central themes, what he called the “impossibility of witness,” and the simultaneous futility and necessity of remembering, before he built to a soaring climax.
“In the face of evil, our last defence is memory. Orwell knew this. Big Brother’s final victory is not the destruction of human sexuality but the obliteration of the past. History itself, sinking down those little memory holes. Shakespeare knew this too. What are the Ghost’s last words to Hamlet? He has just revealed that the throne has been usurped by a pitiless fratricide, a dangerous opportunist. A sixteenth-century Hitler, perhaps. And yet the Ghost’s parting words are not what you might expect: avenge me—slay the usurper, and restore the rightful order. No, he makes a more modest request, far more touching: remember me. Remember me, he says, and then recedes once more into death’s dateless night. Remember me. Remember. We must always remember. It is the only defence we have.”
I was enchanted. It didn’t matter how much the woman sitting next to me tutted under her breath, or how many restless congregants squeaked in their chairs. This impassioned speech was unlike anything I’d heard in faculty lectures. Schultz did not question what is meant by the term literature anyway, or whether intention was a fallacy. Instead, he delivered nothing short of an exhortation to seek in the wisdom of the dead the means to resist evil. This, it seemed to me, was what it was all about.
Alongside my exaltation, however, a shadow extended. I had come here alone and remained an interloper. I knew no Hebrew and had only the most superficial understanding of Jewish beliefs and customs. My grandmother had no choice but to hide who she was from the world. But at what hidden cost had she swapped Kohn for Dupont?
Our lecturer, of course, had his own story of flight from Europe. He was an only son, whose parents got him out of what was then Czechoslovakia in 1939. After the war, Schultz returned to the country of his birth just once, aged sixteen. When he left, he was ten years old, and now he learned that every one of his classmates, down to the last boy, was dead or missing. An entire cohort of Jewish children, rubbed out by Hitler. Their pale faces could still be seen in a commemorative photograph: a classroom of ghosts arranged in two rows, the taller boys standing at the back, the shorter ones seated in front. And perched in the centre, with moustache and pince-nez, as dignified as he was powerless, the schoolmaster.
Near the end of the evening, Schultz passed on some advice he had been given by his grandmother, more than seventy years earlier, and which he credited with his survival and his long life. “If you’re a Jew,” the ancient woman had said, “and you’re sensible, you do two things. Learn languages and collect passports.”
This was met by murmuring assent. Schultz assured us that his grandmother’s wisdom, vital in the thirties, was valid today. “Life, after all, is still life. And men, I’m afraid, are still only men. To put that into theological terms, the Mashiach has yet to come.” This remark, though it sounded quite solemn, provoked warm laughter from the audience. It was only then that I noticed Tovyah on the far side of the room, rocking back on his chair, unsmiling. On his right sat an elderly gentleman whose strong jawline hinted at a face that had once been handsome. I thought I could see a faint resemblance to Tovyah: both had a sharp turn near the bridge of the nose. Untroubled by convention, the old man flouted the Orthodox dress code, wearing instead a loose white kaftan, with his shoulder draped in a blue and white scarf, ornately decorated with frills at the edges. As I looked closer, I saw the garment was damaged, abruptly torn off on one side. Now he bent towards the speaker and rested his hand on Tovyah for support. In response, Tovyah brought all four chair legs to the floor with a clap.
Meanwhile, I’d lost the thread of what Schultz was saying, and now he was winding down. He ended with an apology. He worried that he had failed to express what he had come here to say, but hoped it was worth coming all the same.
“I’ll leave you with one last thought,” he said. “It’s an idea I had, possibly quite useless. But worth trying, perhaps. I ask you to find ten names, just ten out of the six million. The lists are widely available. And if each one of us in this room today commits ten names to memory, then that’s something. Not a lot, but something. And every now and then, you should recite the names to yourself and ponder what happened to them, the people whose names were stolen and replaced with a number seared into their arms. Those names that were supposed to plunge into oblivion, never to be restored. We must all try to remember. What was Hamlet’s response to his father’s valediction? Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe. Let us always remember, as long as memory holds a seat. Shabbat shalom.”
There was a short, startled silence, then a clatter of applause while the rabbi dashed up to help Schultz. Once seated, he angled himself towards the Torah Ark and lowered his head.
The rabbi thanked us all for coming and invited us to stay and enjoy a drink. I was keen to get going anyway when I noticed Tovyah heading to the exit. It seemed odd that he was leaving without the man he’d sat with, but when I looked, there was no one dressed head to foot in white to be seen.
FIVE
Outside, members of the congregation hovered, some kitted up in the full regalia, others more casually dressed, smoking. As I passed, they muttered something in my direction. The woman I’d sat next to walked up behind me. “They’re only saying Gut Shabbos. It means ‘happy Friday,’ more or less.” I thanked her and she said she hoped to see me again. The doorman tipped his hat when he spotted me, then called out, “Sort of!”
As I walked away from the group, I became aware of shouting across the road, just audible over the traffic. Turning my head, I saw a group of men standing outside Wetherspoons, each sporting the acrid yellow of Oxford United, no jumpers despite the weather. “Hey, yids,” they called out. “Fucking yids.” One skipped a few paces forwards, something gripped in his hand, then let loose; a plastic cup came pinwheeling overhead, swerved towards me in the wind, and, as it dipped, I felt a cold spray against my neck. Drying myself with my sleeve, I looked up to see a man darting through traffic.
He stopped about a foot away from me, bent to catch his breath, and said, “I’m so sorry, love.”
“You’re what?”
“You must think we’re disgusting. Three–nil tonight, so spirits are down. I guess we had a few too many. Anyway, he never meant to get you.”
“Well, he did.”
“That’s why I’m apologising, isn’t it! And there’s no need to look so scared. I’m being nice, now, eh.”
The man was my age or thereabouts, though I suspected not a student at the university. He had a gold stud in his ear and immaculate eyebrows. He asked if he could buy me a drink.
“Please leave me alone,” I said.
“What’d I do?”
I inclined my head towards his friends, who were still hurling abuse.
“Nah, love, nah. You’ve got it all wrong. They’re not shouting at you.” He pointed at the crowd outside the synagogue, now some twenty feet away. “It’s that lot winds us up.”
“But I’m one of them,” I said.
The man folded his arms. Then scratched his head. Finally, he burst into laughter. “You almost had me there, love! All right, then, Miss Goldberg, how’d you like to get something to eat?”
After I declined this offer, he followed me to the end of the street, repeating his apology between stabs of laughter.
“Sure you don’t know want to grab a bite? What about a drink? It’d be a good story for the grandkids.”
I was quite sure, and at the corner he let me be. “Goodnight, Miss Goldberg!”
It wasn’t long before I saw Tovyah, heading back to college. I had to run to catch him and then tap him on the arm to make him stop.
“You didn’t want to hang around with the Hassids then?” he said.
So he’d seen me. Was that why he rushed off? I was tempted to recount my interaction outside the synagogue but feared it would come out wrong, like I was somehow boasting. Instead, I asked, just as the United fan had asked me, if Tovyah fancied a drink. “We’ll be passing the King’s Arms in a minute.”
I only said it for form’s sake, confident he would decline. But after a few moments’ internal deliberation, he nodded.
Though the pub was crowded, we nabbed a small table next to some boys in dinner jackets, one of them slugging back his pint in a single, fish-like glug, while his friends cheered. Tovyah raised his eyebrows, and I went to fetch us a pint of ale and a vodka coke.
Until now, our conversations had taken place while we lingered in doorways before returning to work or as we waited for the kettle to boil in our shared kitchen. They were spontaneous and brief. This was different. It was a Friday night, and still early. I could think of several better ways to pass my evening than sitting here with Tovyah Rosenthal.
At least we had something to talk about. “So the lecture was pretty great, huh?”
“Was it?” Tovyah said. He gulped his beer. “Can’t say it did much for me.”
I was astonished. I didn’t think anyone, let alone a religious Jew, could have sat in that room without being powerfully moved. Inspired even. The way Schultz had sewn history and literature together, blending criticism and belief, seeking in the humanities a profound defence against violent regimes.
Trying not to let Tovyah’s coolness affect me, I asked what he didn’t like.
“His whole approach is bogus. Oh yes, it sounds all right when he lays it out, all those pretty little sentences, but it doesn’t hold up. Learn ten names by heart and whisper them to yourself before you go to sleep. Fucking hell.”
“I think that’s a bit unfair.”
“You’re going to do it, then? Memorise your names?”
I wondered if I could find a list of the Kohns of Vilna. “Maybe,” I said.
“No you won’t,” Tovyah said, flicking his hand at an insect. “If the names meant something to you, you’d know them already. Meanwhile, there’s Schultz acting like a little poetry, some Shakespearian verse, can stand up to guns and bombs. It’s just nonsense, nonsense.”
This was how he behaved in tutorials, then, the sneering tone and the barrage of words I’d often heard about but not witnessed.
I started to say something about the power of symbols, but he cut me off.
“Trouble with Eli Schultz is he’s a sceptic who wants to believe. He sentimentalises the religion. Look how he talks about the Yom Kippur fasts. All that reverence. Didn’t it occur to him that it wasn’t pride, not piety, but some more desperate motivation? Those poor creatures, all their hopes ripped away, were trying to save themselves with what, an ancient ritual? A fucking magic trick? Fasting was the only thing they could think of to appease their own monstrous God.”
