S.Y.Agnon (July 17, 1888)

I don't know how I missed S.Y.Agnon in my list of heroes! He won the Nobel Prize in 1966 for a lifetime of writing fiction.

From the Nobel Prize Committee website:

Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1888-1970) was born in Buczacz, Eastern Galicia. Raised in a mixed cultural atmosphere, in which Yiddish was the language of the home, and Hebrew the language of the Bible and the Talmud which he studied formally until the age of nine, Agnon also acquired a knowledge of German literature from his mother, and of the teachings of Maimonides and of the Hassidim from his father. In 1907 he left home and made his way to Palestine, where, except for an extended stay in Germany from 1913 to 1924, he has remained to this day. 

At an early age, Agnon began writing the stories which form a chronicle of the decline of Jewry in Galicia. Included among these is his first major publication,Hakhnasat Kalah (The Bridal Canopy), 1922, which re-creates the golden age of Hassidism, and his apocalyptic novel, Oreach Nata Lalun (A Guest for the Night), 1939, which vividly depicts the ruin of Galicia after the First World War. Nearly all of his other writings are set in his adopted Palestine and deal with the replacement of the early Jewish settlement of that country by the more organized Zionist movement after the Second World War. The early pioneer immigrants are portrayed in his epic Temol Shilshom (Only Yesterday), 1945, considered his greatest work, and also in the nightmarish stories of Sefer Hamaasim (The Book of Deeds), 1932.

While these and other works such as Pat Shlema (A Whole Loaf), 1933, andShevuat Emunim (Two Tales), 1943, are enough to assure his stature as the greatest living Hebrew writer, Agnon has also occupied himself with commentaries on the Jewish High Festival, Yamin Noraim (Days of Awe), 1938, on the giving of the Torah, Atem Reitem (Ye Have Seen), 1959, and on the gathering of Hassidic lore, Sifreihem Shel Tzadikim (Books of the Tzadikim), 1960-1961.

Nobel Prize

Patrick Modiano has won the Nobel Prize. Although I try to follow French literature a little bit, I had not heard of him. His novels are often set in World War II era France and "themes of memory, alienation and the puzzle of identity." Modiano's father was Jewish, and many of the novels include the big issues of how the French treated the Jews during the war. I plan to read some of his works.

Doris Lessing (October 22, 1919 - November 17, 2013)

Among the many obituaries for Doris Lessing, who died yesterday, I found the one in the Forward very interesting, "Doris Lessing and the Jews: Charting the Influences of the Beloved Nobel Prize Winner" by Benjamin Ivry. I was always interested in the many and varied Jewish characters in her novels, especially the earlier ones before she began writing tales of distopian futures and other themes from fantasy or genre literature. The Jewish presence was not surprising in novels about communist and other left-wing organizations in the mid-20th century. After all, there truly were many Jews involved in these movements. Her treatment of them was always interesting. I wrote a little about that yesterday on my other blog here: Doris Lessing.

According to Ivry's article, Lessing's fictional characters were based, she said, on real individuals she had known. He identifies many of them specifically in his article; for example: "In 'Martha Quest,' Lessing writes of Joss and Solly Cohen, a shopkeeper’s sons of a shop-owner who send the heroine books, which help her attain a 'dispassionate eye' on her country’s misfortunes: 'This detached observer, felt perhaps as a clear-lit space situated just behind the forehead, was the gift of the Cohen boys at the station.'"

Even in some of her later fiction, after she broke with the communists and Stalinists, she retained interest in Jews. According to Ivry:

From Communism’s failure, Lessing drew the conclusion: “We need to learn to watch our minds, our behavior. We need to do some rethinking. It is a time, I think, for definitions.” 

This prudent, watchful stance was further expressed in a series of futuristic dystopias, five novels grouped as “Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979–1983).” The critic Robert Alter has praised them as a “combination of fantasy and morality.” The first volume, Shikasta, is presented as a documentary account of a planet in danger. In a preface, Lessing describes her inspiration from the Old Testament, adding with understatement: “It is possible we make a mistake when we dismiss the sacred literatures of all races and nations as quaint fossils from a dead past… It is our habit to dismiss the Old Testament altogether because Jehovah, or Jahve, does not think or behave like a social worker.” Such narratives as the Tower of Babel and Sodom and Gomorrah are paralleled, albeit with the addition of spaceships and other sci fi-style paraphernalia.

 Ivry writes: "Throughout her long life, Lessing maintained a genial bonhomie towards Jews, telling the Associated Press in 2006 that when the American Jewish feminist Betty Friedan visited her in London, Lessing found her to be a 'good Jewish mother, we got on like anything.' She had a more mixed view of Allen Ginsberg and his Beat Poet pals, whom she found 'extremely likable, but this isn’t how they wanted to be seen… they weren’t as frightening and as shocking as they wanted to be. They were mostly middle-class people trying to be annoying.'”

DIaspora Museum

I've been to the Diaspora Museum on the campus of Tel Aviv University, though I haven't thought about it much recently. This article in "More Intelligent Life" about a visit to the museum is very thought-provoking:

CHILDREN OF ISRAEL

Authors on Museums: at the Museum of the Jewish People in Tel Aviv, the novelist Adam Foulds could be one of the exhibits. Going back there for the first time since his gap year, he finds it forces him to think again about who he is.

The author describes the museum in great detail, along with his thoughts as a not-very-religious British Jew. He writes of his visit:

"I am a party of one. I have arrived at opening time when the museum is pretty much empty apart from a group of schoolchildren, seven-year-olds in bright yellow polo shirts being arranged cross-legged on the floor by their teacher, ready for their early induction into Diaspora history. I feel a twinge of affectionate sympathy for them: I know the weight that will shortly be settling on their small shoulders. The Jewish world has for some time been committed to teaching children about the Holocaust both as a proper memorial and to inculcate vigilance. What you have drummed into you as a Jewish child is that it has happened once and can happen again. You are introduced at an early age to some of the most horrifying crimes of violence and degradation ever perpetrated. Inevitably, they haunt you. More than that, they come to structure your imagination and moral understanding. You grow up asking questions about how you might have acted in the ghettos or camps, or who among your friends could be trusted to hide you in their attic if push came to shove. Moreover, you are left with the conviction that, in extremis, this is how humans are: a little hyperinflation, some food shortages, and man will be a wolf to man. This is what these seven-year-olds are about to learn—and who is to say, as the bodies pile up in Syria and the Congo and elsewhere, that it is wrong?"

And he draws these conclusions from one of the final exhibits --

It's a relief to move on to the endearingly outmoded displays on family and religious life with their plaster-cast models of studious children, festive meals and rites of passage. The coherence of Diaspora life that kept it robust enough to survive for 2,000 years is located here, in piety, recitation and repetition, the daily prayers, the dietary restrictions, the bar mitzvahs and marriages under ceremonial canopies, the funeral rites. For many who define themselves as cultural Jews, this raises a question. How can this identity be preserved in the absence of religious observance? The museum doesn't have an answer. I walk through the dimly lit displays among new arrivals at the museum, drifting between wall displays and glass cases. In a later gallery, I see celebrated Jewish contributors to science, music and literature. I watch the faces of Saul Bellow, Nelly Sachs, Nadine Gordimer and other Nobel literature laureates flash up on a screen. Leonard Bernstein waves his baton, Freud looks grave, Kafka haunted, and Einstein turns his dopey face to yet another camera. Figures from the great flourishing of assimilated, post-Enlightenment Jewish life, they are almost all of them non-religious. Consequently they disrupt, even terminate, the story that the museum tells."

A big conversation is going on in the Jewish press and sometimes more in public these days, between the rabbis and representatives of various traditional Jewish lifestyles and Jews who are forging new identities, particularly about the choices made by mixed-background families. Example, Being 'Partly Jewish' in the New York Times. What strikes me about them is that the traditionalists seem so focused on convincing the others to change, to dictate the choices of those who have taken a different path. This author is interesting in how he doesn't pay any attention to what they say.

Elias Canetti (July 25, 1905)

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1981 was awarded to Elias Canetti "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power" -- from the Nobel Prize website.


I have read parts of Canetti's famous memoirs, because I wanted to know about the Bulgarian Jewish community in which he grew up. I've not really figured out why he's considered a great writer. Evidently there's no consensus on that, as illustrated by Clive James in "Canetti, Man of Mystery." He finds Canetti vastly overrated! Here's a sample of what he has to say:

"While living in Britain, Canetti wrote three books of memoirs about his life in pre-war Europe. He wrote them in German. (All three volumes are now available in English, although readers are warned that the translations lose some of the effortless pomposity of the original.) ...  

"Canetti spent the last part of his life in Zurich. In his last year he was at work on his memoir about London. (Now, in Elysium, he is probably working on his memoir about Zurich.) The unfinished book, Party in the Blitz, is the story of his years in and around Hampstead during the war and just after. We are fortunate that there is no more of it, lest we start wondering whether Canetti should not have received another Nobel Prize, for being the biggest twerp of the twentieth century. But a twerp must be at least partly stupid, and Canetti wasn’t even a little bit that. Instead, he was a particularly bright egomaniac, and this book, written when his governing mechanisms were falling to bits, simply shows the limitless reserves of envy and recrimination that had always powered his aloofness."

Andrei Sakharov (May 21, 1921)

Sakharov was a very famous Soviet-era Russian physicist and human rights activist, who died in 1989. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.

From an essay by Sakharov:

"In this pamphlet, advanced for discussion by its readers, the author has set himself the goal to present, with the greatest conviction and frankness, two theses that are supported by many people in the world. These are: 

"[1] The division of mankind threatens it with destruction... Only universal cooperation under conditions of intellectual freedom and the lofty moral ideals of socialism and labor, accompanied by the elimination of dogmatism and pressure of the concealed interests of ruling classes, will preserve civilization... 

"[2] The second basic thesis is that intellectual freedom is essential to human society -- freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such a trinity of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship. Freedom of thought is the only guarantee of the feasibility of a scientific democratic approach to politics, economics and culture." -- (from the New York Times, 22 July 1968, quoted in American Institute of Physics biography)

Gertrude Stein Again

The New York Review of Books has a very interesting review of several Gertrude Stein works: Missionaries by Michael Kimmelman. The author is particularly interested in understanding the influence of her brother and sister-in-law, Leo and Sarah Stein, on her taste as a collector of modern art. He concludes that after the break between the siblings, Gertrude's judgement was never as sharp as theirs.

Kimmelman makes several statements about Gertrude Stein's attitude towards her Jewish identity that seem important to me. Especially important are those based on the reviewed work Unlikely Collaboration by Barbara Will, documenting the relationship between Gertrude Stein and Bernard Fäy, a collaborator with the Vichy government of France, who probably saved her and Alice Toklas from the Nazis. Kimmelman writes:

"The friendship contributed to Stein’s Vichyite leanings and was helped, considering Fäy’s anti-Semitism, by what Will calls the 'fluidity' of Stein’s Jewish affiliations. Assimilation buttressed her modernist bona fides, or so Stein believed. She came to see Christianity as the salvation of France. Jewishness became for her 'a form of transgressive identification,' as Will puts it, a view acknowledged in private 'in intimate moments with Toklas.' She sounds from this account like a classic self-hating Jew, whose ticket to acceptance was a perch in high culture."

Still more disturbing, he says:

“'Hitler should have received the Nobel Peace Prize,' she meanwhile told The New York Times Magazine in 1934, and, alas, she apparently meant it. 'He is removing all elements of contest and of struggle from Germany,' she explained. 'By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.'”

The main focus of the article is on the art work that the Steins collected, particularly on the exhibit of this that's currently at the New York Metropolitan Museum. However, I'm most interested in these views of Stein's thought, and why she was such a radical in literature while so admiring of Hitler, even of his hatred of Jews. Very disturbing, as he says.

Henri Bergson (October 18, 1859)

Henri Bergson was born to Jewish parents in France, but became an original non-Jewish moral philosopher (famous in his day, winning the Nobel Prize, now basically forgotten). He said he would have become a Catholic except for the persecution of Jews that he witnessed at the end of his life. He died in Paris – where he had lived his entire life -- in 1941. Although he was offered a sort of honorary non-Jewish status to protect him from the persecutions that were about to occur, he refused the "honor" and stood in line to get a Jewish identity card just a few days before his death. Maybe that makes him an unusual secular Jewish hero.

Harold Pinter (October 10, 1930)

Pinter, an English playwright and Nobel laureate, had Jewish parents, but like many English Jews, did not retain a public Jewish identity. According to Jewish Virtual Library, Joshua Cohen of Forward said, “Pinter is too much of a Modern to define himself as a Jew,” and that he “has downplayed his Judaism many times in conversation, and has consciously ignored it in his characterizations.” In what I see as an excess of pride, some Jewish critics have tried to assign Jewish sensibilities or motives to Pinter's writings. I am not convinced.

Pinter, sad to say, was not the only successful English Jewish intellectual to attack Israel and to assume as his own the left-wing attacks on Zionism and the defense of all Palestinians no matter what they did. I can only think about the caricature of this type of person in Howard Jacobson's book The Finkler Question.

Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918)

Feynman was an undisputed genius in physics and other sciences, with many solid accomplishments and a Nobel Prize. People who watched the hearings investigating the Challenger disaster are unlikely to forget the way he convinced everyone that there was a real cause being hidden by NASA: the O-rings that didn't stand up to take-off conditions.

Sometimes I wonder why Feynman had to write books like Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, inventing a clever, quirky, irreverent persona to go with these solid accomplishments. Bongo drums. Lock picking. Rejecting Japanese because different people had to use different levels of language. All kinds of bad-boy stuff. (A really good read!)

Feynman's self-characterization includes being a secular Jew: completely non-believing and non-observant. When he was applying to college in 1939, anti-Jewish quotas in Ivy League schools meant he couldn't get in to many if them, despite his obvious gifts -- he received his education at MIT. Perhaps his flamboyant self-image later in his books owes something to having been rejected earlier. Perhaps not.

Jewish Daily Forward founded on April 22, 1897

The Forward, or Forverts, was a secular Jewish paper, dedicated to the huge immigrant community of Yiddish-speaking Jews in the US around 100 years ago.

In their own words:

"The Forverts is a legendary name in American journalism and Jewish life. Launched as a Yiddish-language newspaper on April 22, 1897, the Forverts(Jewish Daily Forward) fought for social justice, helped generations of immigrants to enter American life, broke some of the most significant news stories of the century, and eloquently defended democracy and Jewish rights. Under the leadership of its founding editor, the charismatic Abraham Cahan, the Forverts embodied the voice of the Jewish immigrant."

"By the early 1930s the Forverts had become one of America's premier metropolitan dailies, with a nationwide circulation topping 275,000 and influence that reached around the world and into the Oval Office. Thousands more listened regularly to the Forward's Yiddish-language radio station, WEVD. The newspaper's editorial staff included, at one time or another, nearly every major luminary in the then-thriving world of Yiddish literature, from the beloved "poet of the sweatshops," Morris Rosenfeld, to Sholem Asch, Avrom Reisin, and the future Nobel laureates Isaac Bashevis Singer and Elie Wiesel. " -- From the Forward Online

And the Forward is still going strong on the web! 

Paul Krugman (February 28, 1953)

Economics Nobelist Krugman’s NYT column and associated blog are widely influential – he was voted “Most Influential left-of-center European thinker” (Social Europe Journal) even though he’s not European. He refers to his “current role as public intellectual” – that is, a writer for the general public. And says:

"The great thing about the column is that it more or less forces me to keep learning new tricks, to keep scoping out areas I’d never thought much about before. Then it forces me to find a way to talk about those areas in plain English." (The Joy of Research)

I read Krugman's blog and column every day, and find his insights into the whole political sphere, especially with regard to economic affairs, quite important in figuring out what's happening.  Sometimes he’s ironic about being Jewish -- and his point of view as an outsider who understands what’s going on is fun to read, especially when he reminds his readers of how he predicted one mess or another that the government is getting itself into. His first triumph was understanding Enron before anyone else did.

Isaac Bashevis Singer (November 21, 1902)

I. B. Singer is the only Yiddish-writing Nobel prize winner. He was also a hands-on participant in translating his work into English, and consciously became a literary voice for the lost culture of Eastern European Jews. He wrote about their religion, their superstitions, their peculiarities, and their lives, and for me this makes him heroic even if he spun too good a tale. My father vastly preferred the more political and realistic works of his brother I.J. Singer.