The Angel of History

Angelus Novus, or
"The Angel of History" by Paul Klee, 1920

The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem by Stéphane Mosès is a challenging book about the concepts of historical time in the works of three German-Jewish philosophers/historians. "The Angel of History" in the book title refers to the painting Angelus Novus by Paul Klee. The work was alternately owned by Benjamin and Scholem, and is now owned by the Israel Museum.

The Angel of History
by Stéphane Mosès (1931-2007)

Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), and Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) are three writers that I find very fascinating, though their works are very difficult. Thus I was tempted by this book, and I found it very interesting. I enjoyed the comparison of the philosophic views of time and how they are reflected in Jewish history, as well as the biographical details that the author provided. I was interested in the comparison of their perspectives with some of the ideas expressed by Kafka. However, I'm not up to attempting to summarize the complex views of history that are covered in the book.

Out of pure laziness, I'm going to violate my usual principles and copy the relevant Walter Benjamin quote from Wikipedia!

"A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." -- Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History", p. 249

Yosef Haim Brenner (September 11, 1881)

In anticipation of the birthdate of Yosef Haim Brenner, I read his novel Breakdown and Bereavement. Brenner was an early pioneer to Israel, where he first settled in 1909. He attempted to work in agriculture, but most of his life there was in Jerusalem where he was a typesetter, a translator, and a novelist. My knowledge of Brenner prior to this project was one fact: he died in an anti-Jewish riot in Jaffa in 1921.

According to a biography: "In addition to his original works in Hebrew and Yiddish, Brenner translated Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky, as well as works by Tolstoy and works in German, Brenner was the most prominent literary figure in Eretz Israel in his day, and was responsible for moving the center of Hebrew literary activities away from Europe." ("Joseph Haim Brenner: 1881-1921")

The novel especially appeals to me because of its first-hand descriptions of the life of Jews in Ottoman Palestine. Their lives are difficult and disappointing. They face poverty and discouragement, humiliation at having to accept charity from abroad, and an erosion of their self-respect for many reasons.

The first character described in the book, Yehezkel Hefetz, tries to work in a Jewish agricultural colony (prior to the invention of the kibbutz according to p. 7 -- the word kibbutz doesn't appear in the book). Hefetz is immediately injured while working, also contracts malaria, and is sent to Jerusalem for medical help. He then has a nervous breakdown -- a "psychic disturbance."

During his breakdown Hefetz is hounded by fear, especially fear of the Arabs: "He spoke of their national awakening and of their hatred for the Jew he was obsessed ... by the possibility of a pogrom, over which he wracked his brain, soliciting advice and making endless plans for rescue and relief." (p. 14) I assume this means that underlying fears of the Arabs were in everyone's mind, and that Brenner was both in touch with the fear and terribly unlucky.

After a stay in a hospital, Hefetz returns to life in Jerusalem; the major part of the book treats his relationship with a family who are eking out a living, barely, relying on charity. I found the plot less interesting than the details about the characters' daily lives -- their fear of being evicted for not paying their rent; their reaction to the few Jews who were somehow becoming rich; their relationships with the dispensers of charity from abroad ("the dole"); the attempts by older men among them to continue with the exact sort of scholarly Jewish lives they had led in Russia; their reactions to the development of Hebrew as a spoken language (they believed in the new choice of Sephardic pronunciation but couldn't do it well; in fact were not polished at speaking it at all). The characters in this book had a relatively conventional religious life like the one they had left behind in Russia, though they are aware of the secular and idealistic pioneers with a completely different attitude.

Each character in Hefetz's life offers the reader of 100 years later a variety of hard facts about life in Jerusalem before World War I. One for example, Reb Yosef, spent much of his time in studying, but most of his valuable books had been lost during his immigration because he couldn't find the money for the customs duties.

As we first encounter Reb Yosef, "He munched on a piece of bread, chewing his cud and looking at his book, whispering the words out loud and chewing on them too." (p. 37) Later, "Reb Yosef popped a pickled green olive and about half an oliveweight of soft bread into his mouth. As he talked he cut away the crust, which was too hard for his worn teeth to bite into, and left it on the table. For a moment his face lit up ... " and he discusses a wide-ranging set of philosophical topics, beginning with Spinoza's Ethics. (p. 43)

Reb Yosef's daughter Miriam longs for learning, but we see her cooking soup while speaking to the young man who tutors her and worrying about her responsibilities to provide a meal to various people as well as for cleaning the house. (p. 52-54) She was disillusioned because men thought "that a woman was good only for cooking ... and cook was all she did: the life wasn't fit for a dog! Forty mouths to feed, and each with its own pretensions and demands: one wanted sour cream, another four eggs in his omelet, another stewed fruit, another pudding every day." Her thoughts run on and on about the wrongs she feels and the way the men treat her. Cooking becomes a metaphor for what's wrong with both Miriam and with Hefetz, I think. (p. 65)

Her father ignores her; she doesn't get along with her sister; eventually both of them become involved in some way with Hefetz or at least in his slightly mad thoughts or anticipations. She takes on his care as he goes through another bout of illness (malaria?). He has dreams, seemingly in response to Miriam's hard-to-digest spinach cakes and refuses to drink water -- "Toadstools and spinach cakes!" he cries out, hoping in his feverish state for "a miracle." (p. 81-82) He also has weird dreams later including thoughts of tomato stew and a horse that is fed halvah. (p. 116)

As Dara Horn says in a review of the book (published by the Yiddish Book Center): "Hefetz finds that his Diaspora-fed neuroses are not so easily left behind." The characters become more and more depressed as the book continues. Horn points out how the readers at the time reacted: "Brenner’s novel astonished its Jewish readers in the Diaspora – even those whom one would least expect to take offense at its despairing tone. Franz Kafka, one of its eager readers, expressed his consternation with the novel in a letter to a friend with a single phrase: 'Sadness in Palestine?' But the sadness in Brenner’s Palestine goes beyond shattering myths."

The continuing plot of the book involves several instances of the characters attempting to run away from life in Jerusalem by moving to Jaffa and Tiberias. As I said, I found the character development less interesting than the details of daily life and of the exhausting and inadequate means of travel by horse-drawn carriage on terrible roads, with stops at Arab inns. But as Horn puts it: "The ending is stylistically awkward, and its disjointed nature is part of a larger artistic flaw in the novel – one best described as an authorial sense of urgency, in which what Brenner needs to say often overwhelms his eloquence in saying it."

Brenner wrote the book in 1914. It was first published in 1920. The translation I read dates from 1971. According to the introduction, "World War I radically changed the landscape of Palestine and opened up to Zionist settlement possibilities, previously only dreamt of, that were not long in being exploited." Thus the portrayal of pre-war life was already historically interesting by the time the novel was published, and all the more now!

Golems keep coming up? A review with digressions

“You’ve got something in common with Kafka, there,” says an old man in the tale Kafka’s Leopards by Moacyr Scliar. “When I told him the story of the Golem, I warned him: we shouldn’t create things we can’t control. And fiction is just that, something that can’t be controlled. You start to write, to imagine, and who knows where it’s going to end? And then, more books for what? Everything important has been written in the Torah.”

Yesterday afternoon I read Kafka’s Leopards. It’s a fantastic story: I mean really a fantasy, as well as highly enjoyable and imaginative. Like many fables it reads very smoothly on the story level, and begs you to read in a variety of meanings – like the one in the paragraph above.

In the tale, for rather involved reasons, Benjamin, a poor tailor from Chernovitsky (a Bessarbian shtetl near Odessa) travels to Prague, thinking he has an assignment from a revolutionary cell led by Trotsky. His trip to Prague is challenging – World War I is going on in between the two places and (like my father also a poor tailor in his story of going from his own shtetl to Pinsk) Benjamin must first overcome a challenge: to cross a river by hiring a ferry rowed by scary men who could easily steal his money or push him into the river. Realism in the middle of the story? Or is a ferry boat symbolic? Real to me.

Once in Prague, Benjamin has no idea what to do to complete his mission for his idol Trotsky, but thinks he’s supposed to contact a leftist writer and obtain “a text.” He left his instructions on the train. But somehow, he goes to a synagogue to find out – and the author he hears of is Kafka. The shammes of the synagogue, who gives tours in exchange for tips, tells him of Kafka and much else, including what Kafka said. Benjamin asks for Kafka’s response: “What did he say?”

The shammes answers, “Nothing. Didn’t say anything. Didn’t pay any attention to me. … Speaking of treasure and tips, you could contribute a bit more.”

Soon afterwards, Benjamin actually meets Kafka and asks him for “a text.” Kafka gives him a mysterious piece of writing – later explained as a contribution to a Yiddish newspaper, one of many mix-ups in the tale. While the story is pure fantasy, the one-sentence Kafka story is a real Kafka story: “Leopards break into the temple and drink up the offering in the chalices; this happens again and again; finally, one can predict their action in advance and it becomes part of the ceremony. – Franz Kafka.”

The remainder of the story is about the poor tailor’s experience in Prague, his return to Chernovitsky, and finally about the end of his life in Puerto Alegre, Brazil (where the first few paragraphs of the story had already given away his end – as the uncle of another radical in an oppressive country – repeating his own experiences, sort of). And about a variety of ways to look at Kafka’s "text."

You can read all sorts of meanings into it. Or not. After all, it’s a story by a Brazilian Jewish magical realist twentieth-century writer, what would you expect?

Though Scliar's work was written long ago (and he died last year), the story was only recently translated into English. Sad that he’s so unknown and underappreciated. And so sad that this book is published so obscurely and at such a high price. Another digression: the sad state of publishing, where this single story less than 100 pages long costs $26.07 on amazon.com (88 cents off list price), no Kindle edition. Lucky for me the library had it.

Jacques Offenbach (June 20, 1819)

Chances are that you can hum at least one melody by Jacques Offenbach. Probably you can whistle the iconic tune that signifies naughty 19th century Paris: the Can-Can -- if you can whistle. Maybe you know the Barcarole from The Tales of Hoffman. Maybe you can sing a song from one of his many other operettas (he's credited with inventing the operetta form). In all, he wrote over 100 musical works for the stage.

Offenbach was born into a Jewish family in Cologne, Germany, but made his name in Paris as a performer (cello) and composer. When he married, he converted to Catholicism. Despite his German accent and Jewish heritage, he created the musical voice of his era in Paris. This is especially true for his work La Vie Parisiennne. In it, according to the description by the American Symphony Orchestra: "Offenbach holds up the mirror to his times... . And what does his mirror reflect? The excitement, the giddiness that Paris inspires in its visitors. The work's theme is simple: everyone wants to go to Paris, live in Paris, love in Paris."

Recently, Bartlett Sher, director of a recent production of Tales of Hoffman at the Met in New York commented on Offenbach's sense of being an outsider. An article on the Met web page explains how at the end of his life, Offenbach determined to write a serious opera -- "and chose the fantastical and often enigmatic stories of German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann as his material. As a creator of light entertainment, Offenbach longed to find a place in the world of high art. As a German Jew living in Paris, he was an outsider in another way—just like the protagonist of ... Les Contes d’Hoffmann."

“Why, so late in his career, did Offenbach feel this need to be accepted?” asked Sher... "That led me to consider Offenbach’s sense of being Jewish and an outsider. Whatever group he was in, he always appears as an outsider who never feels like he belongs, never feels like he’s connected."

Sher compared Hoffman to Franz Kafka: "another German Jew, living in Prague. In both E.T.A. Hoffmann and Kafka’s work, sinister, shadowy powers haunt the lead characters. And in each of Hoffmann’s tales that make up the opera’s three acts, the protagonist tries to break into what seems to be a closed world." Sher explains: "It’s a matter of how an artist can feel accepted and rejected at the same time."

Philip Glass (January 31, 1937)

What's Jewish about Philip Glass? Probably nothing except his Lithuanian-Jewish ancestors, but I don't really know. I very much like his music, though, and find it amusing that he wrote an opera about Einstein. And he performed with Allen Ginsberg, having written music for the poem “The Wichita Vortex Sutra." Glass is currently writing an opera based on a Kafka story, The Trial, and has written one based on another of his stories. So he associates with a variety of my secular Jewish heroes.