Joshua Cohen's "Witz": Book Review

This reminded me of a post-Holocaust Kafka, combined with Joycean wordplay, Pynchonesque ideas, and Beckettian melancholy. The words derived from "Jew" never appear except in the subtitle, "The Story of the Last Jew on Earth." Their absence haunts this ambitious novel.

For Joshua Cohen's own version of a "lipogram," a work with a missing symbol, Benjamin Israelien's void after another, now total, global decimation of the Chosen People erodes him from the inside out. His inauthenticity as a Jewish survivor provokes the animosity of the rest of the world. Ben alone remains to become what turns out more the scapegoat than the Messianic harbinger with tidings of comfort and joy. Cohen stretches his somber saga over eight hundred pages.

The novel's span challenges neat summation. Briefly, his family and his birth-- full grown, bearded, hirsute--takes up the first couple of hundred pages with fine print and extended riffs. Cohen relishes food, babble, trivia. The demise of the Jews quickly gives way to their kitsch revival, "in a language nobody speaks but everybody's studying."

Cohen hurries over whatever sense would be in this catastrophe, oddly. He grants us a few powerful scenes of media coverage of this sudden death. Logic diminishes; a reader must put up with whatever Cohen dishes out to a put-upon Ben and the sketchily drawn cabal that unsuccessfully manages his marketing.

He makes us pay attention to the page. It takes patience to stay afloat amid so many verbal depth charges. Submerged into this book, you gasp for air. The force of Cohen's atmosphere presses down on you.

Ben stops at where he would have gone to school, "yet another inheritance deferred." There, "chalk remains from the happy clap of appreciative erasers smeared into the spirals of shoes out on permanent recess." Cohen can write, certainly. But does he write.

It's no wonder Kafka and his Castle edge into the setting at his re-created Whateverwitz, in an inverted "Messianic victory of the bornagain." Why the rest of humanity would wish to convert never gets answered. (Who supervised their conversions after the demise of the firstborn, with all those but Ben born-Jewish dead, I wondered?) People simply change, in a dream logic that pulls along enigmatic, infantile, behemoth Ben against this current of subversion.

I felt that Cohen insisted on a chiasmus -- an inversion of Jew and non-Jew, persecution and acceptance -- that left him no other choice than this for his story. This pace barely bothers with plot. Cohen's concern's not with character. Instead, Cohen determines to force us to accept his world based on ideas, language, and monologues more than dialogues. Perhaps as with Torah or Talmud, this text documents an anthology of human foibles and restrictions and pleas rather than a seamless literary narrative, despite (or in spite of) its very craft.

The firstborn before they will succumb to another plague wonder: "what is a question? How to answer. Will you be at all. Or will you opt out. Don't you want to be. When you're all grown up to dead. Their seder to be interrupted -- libelous, the matzah weeps blood. The seat at the head of the table is empty and will be forever. You'll get used to it." Passages like this may elicit emotion, but they nestle within adamantine blocks of prose. Chunked chapters may crush the patience of all but the few readers nimble enough to catch the Yiddish, the Hebrew, the Judaica tossed here into a tall, deep scrap pile.

In its messianic themes, breadth of Jewish references, and dense erudition, Witz recalls Arthur A. Cohen's In the Days of Simon Stern (1972). In its headlong final rush into the evocation of the Holocaust by its last survivor, Joseph Cohen, it echoes passages from George Steiner's The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.(1980). This stand-alone coda of thirty pages as one death sentence after a life lived in pain and struggle is titled "Punchlines." Breathed into one long recital -- after eight hundred pages of Ben's tale, which lurched about as its protagonist did in an unstable, wobbly gait -- the novel's last gasp finds its stand-up routine that knocks them dead, a negative correlation, its center of gravity.

In its demands, Witz nears Tolstoy's epics in length and Kafka's fables in tone. Combine these with Ben's character of gargantuan appetites, albeit one who eludes the sympathy of the patient, if baffled, reader. The result may be less successful than some of Cohen's storied predecessors, yet it may surprise you. A few readers may undertake Cohen's rigorous wake. It resurrects linguistic excavations and intellectual fixations as a narrative "Exodust" that burrows into a tome nine years in the making.

(This version to Amazon US 6-21-10. Longer version to my other blog, "Not the L.A. Times Book Review" 6-21-10 and PopMatters.com 6-25-10.)

David Mamet's "The Wicked Son": Book Review

Mamet's brief defense of Jewish pride against his fellow Jews preening their self-loathing meanders, yet, as with much of his drama and film, his barbed messages prickle your complacency. He argues that the sadly familiar figure of today's secular Jew delighting in demeaning Torah, mocking synagogue, and defying tradition is rooted in the "wicked son" who challenges the family, the tribe, at the ritual recital of the Seder. He suggests that the Torah itself's addressed to such a skeptic or rebel.

He wonders about the Jews whose favorite role model's Anne Frank, with nobody in second place. The Jew that idolizes a Japanese tea ritual but who cannot bother to remember if Rosh Hashanah precedes Yom Kippur. The Jew who tells the anti-Jewish joke while insisting on telling it to the Jews he claims to separate himself from, but with whom he's impelled to keep parading his childish nonconformity.

He challenges those denouncing the IDF's "reprisals" and "retaliations" to come up with a better plan of defending an entity the size of Vermont against a billion who are taught that Zionism above all can be blamed for all evils against Islam. He links the pro-forma leftist denunciation of Israeli actions to the "blood libel"-- that Jews "delight in the blood of others" peddled for so many centuries. (11)

Mamet's on less firm ground when it comes to psychological explanations for Jewish self-loathing. Who else would take in one who hates his own family, his own tribe? This commonsensical question leads him into tangents about Santa Claus and solstice sacrifice of children, as he struggles to understand the "conflicted winter Jews" who celebrate their apostasy. He sees this as part of "a universal desire to revert to paganism" that shows why Chanukah bushes are invented to imitate Christmas trees. He muses: "Religion came into being to supplant the anomie and excess of paganism." (29) He finds religion, Christianity or Judaism, to each his own, battles this regression to the pagan with the comfort of the tribe, the people, the ritual.

He finds many of his fellow Jews lost. He wonders poignantly if in five generations, as people may with a great-great-grandmother who was Cherokee, our descendants will reflect on "Jewish blood" way back in their assimilated, probably secular or Christian, family. Yet, for now, he figures Jews are far too close to their five thousand years of observance "for any lapsed Jew to feel anything other than self-loathing of its Doppelganger, arrogant assurance of his escape." (46)

From this Jewish heritage, he finds solace and strength. "Judaism, as a spiritual, ethical, or social practice, has at its core a mystery so deep that not only is its existence hidden from the uninitiated but its very practitioners are hated and scorned, reviled and murdered as necromancers. What is the fear the Jew engenders and that manifests itself as hatred? Perhaps it is caused by his historical, absolute, terrifying certainty that there is a God." (60)

This passage shows Mamet at his best. The short chapters, however, roam about the self-hatred analysis without coming to much more of a resolution than this eloquence. Maybe it's impossible to go further into the mystery. The remaining two-thirds of this short book has its moments-- Mamet's great at showing the conviviality of the film set and how membership has its privileges in a common pursuit-- but the topics then blur and scatter.

He often puts down yoga-practicing, life-coach employing, analyst-addicted, Buddhists once Jewish. I'd add gently-- as Rodger Kamenetz in "The Jew in the Lotus" and "Stalking Elijah" (both reviewed by me last month here and on Amazon US) reports-- that many Jews can combine meditation and mystical pursuits with an eclectic, Orthodox-tinged or Renewal-affiliated, version of Judaism that works for them. One need not adhere to Mamet's analogy of the AA meeting-- "you go because you want to go; you go because you don't want to go"-- to sitting in shul and making yourself like it despite the fact you may not. I agree with his defense of attending temple for those wishing to reconnect, but there are many temples and many ways Jews can practice beyond the ossified norms. He, given his chapter about the poor shul by the freeway or that about his rabbi who refused to put up donors' names on plaques, needs to be aware that many of his fellow Jews are bored by the conventional service, and may seek other venues as they adapt Torah to contemporary mindsets.

Still, this section from "Well Poisoning" deserves sharing. He wonders why "Moslem extremists may not bomb New York, bur rational human beings-- some, to their shame, Jews-- hold that jihadists may bomb Jerusalem. The apologists are or pretend to be incapable of differentiating between the lamentable and decried death of civilians in a military reprisal, and the targeted strategic murder of schoolchildren." Subsequent events in Lebanon and Gaza only repeat this scenario of what the critics if not Mamet label "moral equivalency" or "proportionate response" against terror.

He continues: "This license is precarious, for the Palestinians, raised by unsettled Western thought to superhuman status, enjoy that status only as a counterpoint to the bestiality of the Jews. Should the Palestinians choose, in their uncontrollable sorrow and extremity, to bomb New York, they would find their license revoked." (145) One wonders about this alternative storyline.

This assault against complacency reminded me of two books I reviewed this week here and on Amazon US, Oriana Fallaci's post-9/11 "The Rage and the Pride" and Bernard-Henry Levy's "Left in Dark Times." Like Fallaci and Levy, Mamet rises to what's become among the media and the chattering classes and opinion-makers and professoriate an unpopular cause. His book, like the two others, will probably incite many to lash out against them and anyone who agrees with a modicum of their liberal discourse in the name of tolerance and defense of "tough Jews."

But, such voices deserve an audience, and one finishes this book not knowing much at all about why Mamet shifted, apparently, towards a more assertive embrace of his heritage. This will reveal nothing personally about his choice-- I recall reading when it came out an interview with him conducted with a Jewish newspaper as he ate a bacon sandwich. Out of such idiosyncratic gestures, perhaps the restive Mamet creates his own way of being Torah-true for today, if not by tradition.

Rodger Kamenetz' "Stalking Elijah: Adventures with Today's Jewish Mystical Masters": Book Review

This sequel to "The Jew in the Lotus" continues his quest for meaning, integrating Tibetan Buddhist aspirations towards silence and emptiness with Jewish traditions of kabbalah, meditation, and non-intellectual search for the ultimately Unknowable One. "Our knowledge of God is passive," he's told.

That is, according to Rabbi Art Green: "We do active things to reach the place of the passive knowledge of God." (220) Green tries to get to the place, as a liberal, that only the ultra-Orthodox assert, the way to grasp God interiorly. Kamenetz twice imagines the Jews burdened into the wilderness, dragging "fleischik" and "milchik" pots, carrying multivolumed commentaries on their backs. He admires the Tibetan emphasis upon the inner search, and his book takes him to the rabbis and teachers who try to recover, or invent, ways in which modern Jews-- the 85% who are no longer able to be "naive" believers in the God of history after the Enlightenment, assimilation, secularism, and the Shoah-- can try to regain, as Green models, a way to get beyond the legalism of the "ba'al teshuvah" neo-Orthodox. The problem with simply "returning" to the shetl is that today's Jews who do so have not learned from their grandparents how to live as Jews; one cannot gain this from a stack of commentaries or a practice tethered to legalism.

Rodger Kamenetz interviews different teachers of Jewish meditation, kabbalah (the non-Madonna marketed glitzy kind), and alternative, counter-cultural influenced rabbis who try to get beyond the impatience, anger, chatter, and kibbitzing of "Jewishness" to find a more calm, silently lurking, and personally meaningful "Judaism" that may appeal to those not ready to accept Orthodoxy as the only way, but who may shrink from synagogue routines, boring prayers recited aloud, facile God-talk and touchy-feely platitudes. "It's not a simple dilemma, the struggle between humility and chutzpah, between equanimity and passion, between Jewish and Judaism." (210) Kamenetz uses his own interest in Tibetan Buddhism (this book follows his "The Jew in the Lotus"--recently reviewed by me on this blog & Amazon US-- about the 1990 encounter of Jewish rabbis and teachers with the Dalai Lama) and his own skepticism as an assimilated, largely secular Jew trying to connect with mystical and spiritual paths into whatever God might, or might not, be.

Screenwriter turned "maggid," or storyteller Paul Woolf tells him how the best characters are those in denial. We and our planet share this denial: "About who our creator is and what we should be about." Those who are Jewish, Woolf affirms, must work from within their community and tradition to find their soul's home even if "God is not Jewish." For, "Judaism is our way to God." (173) Yet, bickering and jockeying continue to separate wrangling Jews on Torah's path. For instance, Woolf-- after an "endless discussion" about whether Orthodox or non-Orthodox "are doing it right" and his own struggle with reconciling an inability to conform to Jewish tradition even as he seeks its meaningful messages-- offers Kamenetz this analogy.

"Our ancestors, who were all Orthodox, went on an adventure. They found a pristine, beautiful, endlessly deep lake with the purest sparkling, azure blue water. They mapped out a path to this lake and it was very precise. Turn left here, go right here. They said, 'If you want to reach this lake, follow this map, because we worked on it and we're not bullshitting you-- this works.' Then somewhere along the line somebody who wouldn't follow that map found the lake and told the other mapmakers about it. They said, 'You're crazy. You couldn't possibly get there without this map.' They started to argue about it. They argued and argued for centuries-- and nobody went swimming. That's what we're doing. Nobody's going into the lake. Go into the lake!"

He continues:

"I say to my Orthodox friends who want to argue with me, 'I tell you what, I'm not going to convince you and you're not going to convince me. Go in the lake. That's the most important thing. That's where you're supposed to be. Go in the lake!" Paul paused and added, 'And if you see me in the lake, don't be too surprised.'" (175)

Woolf's teacher, Jonathan Omer-Man, who accompanied Kamenetz to Dharamsala in 1990, remains along with fellow rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi the guide for Kamenetz in this sequel. With his own pain and struggles, his diffidence and his reserve, he provides a telling counterpart and contrast with the exuberant Zalman. Omer-Man provides a fascinating analogy of his own.

So far, the book intermittently had kept my interest; I have no attraction to kabbalah and the lack of exoticism that made the Indo-Tibetan travelogue naturally captivating makes much of this sequel more mundane. This speaks well to the struggle to find the core meaning of Judaism beneath the superficial glitz of the renewal rabbis, but it does make for a less dazzling meeting of minds than Dharamsala. It's as if, with Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill," the settings of the sensational East tend to look awkward or bizarre when plonked beside a congested freeway or strip-mall. Yet in such locales, Kamenetz listens and begins to understand ancient truths.

That may be the point: how difficult it is to bring home captivating Jewish teaching into staid American practice. Trying to explain kabbalistic cosmology (which provides a leitmotif in this narrative, if not always in the most scintillating manner despite the patient efforts of rabbis and the yearning writer to make this esotericism clear to the general reader), Omer-Man hits upon the pertinent image that for me made these rarified concepts of time, space, and life finally more relevant.

Flow of energy from on high is punctuated into breaks akin to bytes of information. "There are packets, but the space between the packet determines the nature of the packet." As Kamenetz elucidates, in the gaps of non-communication, of lack of connection, the energy received is defined. Similar to the silences revealing more than the words spoken in conversation, this helps Kamenetz (and me) with his problem. Ever since he met Rabbi Zalman, with his insistence on God's reality, the writer balked. Now, Kamenetz realizes that his "absence of connection I felt to God-- the beeper out of range-- is itself an essential element of the communication." (197)

So, while the first couple hundred pages of this narrative moved fitfully and to me erratically as Kamenetz delves deeper into his own troubled relationship with a personal God that he finds lacking in his own experience, learning from Jonathan Omer-Man, and then Green, he stumbles closer to entering the "sha'ar harachamim," the "gates of mercy," by his own chance encounter with a nameless Israeli, the Elijah figure he cannot stalk but who will find him when least expected: when Kamenetz returns five years after his 1990 visit to the Dalai Lama, in his Indian exile in Dharamasala. While there's no grand epiphany, the book gradually tapers off with an account of how Kamenetz interpreted the seder ritual for Tibetans there, and continues the first book's groundbreaking attempt to instruct one people in exile by another, how to survive and endure and continue their practice.

There's plenty of ideas to reflect upon in a wandering account that appropriately finds Kamenetz at one point screaming by the side of the freeway and then finding solace in his own mini-desert exodus. Much of this book might have worked more as shorter essays, although themes build bit by bit, if not always followed through. This mimics the author's own trek, but it may frustrate readers wanting a neat resolution to what must be a honest teller's rambling tale that cannot end so neatly.

Throughout, Kamenetz and his fellow seekers urge more silence, less talk. More peace, less anger. These are not easy for Jewish people used to wrangling and debate, as he admits readily. Yet, inspired by his Buddhist-grounded understanding of insight, Kamenetz begins to apply this to a more communally based Jewish outreach. As he meets Green, he wonders: "how can I connect this being, who escapes language, with the very concrete stories of the Jewish people? It was harnessing a soap bubble and hoping to rise to heaven." (246)
(Posted today to Amazon US & my blog; see author's website.)

Joshua Cohen's Wrong Heaven: Forward interview excerpts.

Snipped and redacted from the January 18, 2007, "Forward," that paper's formidable critic's conversation with his friend Daniel Elkind printed as "The Wrong Heaven." I guess the logrolling's excused, when your buddy gets to ask you about your fourth novel of a very esoteric nature from a small press and then your employer prints the schmooze, but a forgivable fault in the cause of furthering our Republic of Letters. There's a philosophical depth inherent here as these two intellectuals chat which certainly does prove their lament about the absence of such arcane yet relevant ideas in most of our nation's current literature.

Compare Cohen's somber text to the mass-market Jane Smiley version (reviewed on my blog and on Amazon yesterday) of another discourse filtering through American eyes a vision of Middle Eastern war and death. Cohen, as I can gather from the tiny portion of "The Heaven of Others" on his website, evokes what feels translated from Central Europe-- a densely allusive stream of consciousness vs. Smiley's half-educated, half-blithering chatter. I guess same as it ever was for what sells.

And, I admit, without this elegant blurb in article form, how else would I have found out about such an eschatological exploration? Not where I found Smiley on my public library's new book shelf. That's the Jewish intelligentsia's predicament vs. the bestselling publisher. Yet, both Smiley and Cohen do the book tour, dutifully, emissaries to the curious hinterlands of American bookshops and campus towns, I suppose-- the last holdouts for the life of the mind. Smiley's, after all, a former professor, and in academia and literate bastions Cohen seeks the audience that will appreciate his demanding work. Same as it ever was?

[. . . .]

“A Heaven of Others,” Joshua Cohen’s fourth book of fiction, is an Israeli boy’s account of the wrong heaven — the Muslim heaven of his murderer, a young Palestinian suicide bomber. Mistakenly transported to an afterlife of oases, obliging virgins and ravenous serpents that dwell in valleys of nails, 10-year-old Jonathan Schwarzstein narrates his attempted pilgrimage to the heaven of his own people, even while leading the reader through memories of his life on earth, with “Aba” and “the Queen” in their home on Tchernichovsky Street, Jerusalem. Full of holiness and profanity, “A Heaven of Others” (Starcherone Books, $16) is a story of an individual in the modern world, and beyond — a victim both trapped and free in his eternal victimhood. In Brooklyn, I [Elkind]spoke to Cohen about Israel, America and the complications of life and literature.

------------------------------------

Dan Elkind: “A Heaven of Others” is a book about life, the afterlife, and the spiritual identity or soul that mediates between. Your idea of Jonathan maturing even after his murder — “maturing to infinity,” as you put it, and so becoming in heaven a person whose wisdom and insight have soared beyond anything earthly — seems to entail an entire philosophy. Even in heaven he is an individual, beyond what you’ve called, elsewhere, “the consolation of cult.” How easy is it to break free of that “consolation” today, and how do you think such cultural elopements are viewed by mainstream society?

Joshua Cohen: Blown up in a suicide bombing, Jonathan transcends Judaism with relative ease: He dies. Those who attempt to reposition themselves with regard to the religious or political identity they’re born into, and to do so without being killed, have it more difficult. Martyrdom is reductive; the daily exigencies are far more complex.

Children of Jonathan’s age, especially boys, are always told: “Just wait until you’re grown,” “You’ll mature.” As if humanity might age to a biological wisdom, or soundness of judgment — the “mainstream,” you’ve called it, which doesn’t exist. The section entitled “Maturing to Infinity” posits such a process, but infinitely, eternally: “In heaven maturation is unending. Maturation is ripening not to rot but to riper.” On one rung of the ladder, we’ll shed our prejudices; on another, religion. This cosmology is ridiculous, of course. But it does suggest that religion has an element of childishness to it. God will always be a negligent parent.

D.E.: As an American Jew, it must have taken some time to convince yourself that you’re qualified to write about Israeli culture in the era of terrorism, that you can follow an Israeli boy to the Muslim heaven and beyond. Given the irreverence of your literary imagination, how do you think Israelis will receive this book? What does your American perspective consist of?

J.C.: What qualified me to write about Israel was that I wanted to; it took no time to convince myself. The only reservation I had was about heaven: I wanted to write about the Jewish heaven, but did not feel qualified because I did not and do not believe in “it,” though I should. Swedenborg mapped the Christian heaven. The Muslim heaven features prominently in the Quran, Arabic poetries and Hadith. The Jewish heaven, though, is still a mystery; it’s mystic. Jews believe in olam haba — literally, “the world to come,” which is, accurately, this world if and when messianically perfected, and not “the next world,” or any other world, for that matter, past or future.

How did I reconcile myself? I found, strangely, I had no reservations writing about the Jewish heaven under the guise of a Muslim heaven — in the mirror of “A Heaven of Others.” As for how Israelis will receive this book, I don’t know, as there hasn’t yet been a translation. My American perspective, as you put it, consists of being indulged in my irreverence, only and entirely.

[. . . .]

D.E.: Your taste is especially influenced by European literature, though the heart of your expressiveness is American — I mean improvisatory, inclusive, unpretentious. Why do you think American literature has become so isolated from the rest of the world, so self-reflexive, to the point of developing almost its own arbitrary rules of what can and can’t be done on the blank page? Why do you think it avoids big ideas and themes in favor of the mundane? Why this detachment and half-adherence to stories of quotidian experience?

J.C.: The answer is Karl Marx’s. Money, which has become everyone’s jealous God. We oversell and we underestimate. If we were as insipid as most of the television programming, movies and books made by us and for us, we would be dead. Our civilization would cease to exist.

American literature isn’t the worst of all possible literatures, though. Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad. This is a dangerous reality — especially for someone who makes his living as a book critic, and so sometimes has to praise or damn disproportionately, or against the standard, if only to keep working and sane.

D.E.: “A Heaven of Others” is your fourth book of fiction. How do you see it in relation to your other books?

J.C.: They’re all the same book, essentially: the book before the book — in the style of the Quran, which was said to have been written in heaven in its entirety, before being given down to Muhammad…. [. . . .] It took three years to find a publisher for “A Heaven of Others.” One agent wanted no virgins. Another agent wanted the boy to be rewritten as, to quote from his e-mail, “a handsome young Israeli army commander.” One prospective publisher said if I depicted Muhammad, I’d be killed in a suicide bombing myself. I don’t think any book of mine will ever come as close to pure fantasy as “A Heaven of Others.” I’ll never again set a book in a world, or after-world, in which it’s impossible to buy a cup of coffee, or take an undisturbed afternoon nap.

D.E.: You’ve been at work on a novel about the last Jew on earth. How do you view Jews, especially American Jews, in the world today, and the state of American-Jewish literature?

J.C.: “Graven Imaginings” is a novel about the last Jew on earth. The last Jew in the universe. From New Jersey, America…“Joysey.” Call him Benjamin Israelien. The last Jew on earth will have a portentous name; he is overweight, and was born with a beard and wearing glasses. What else is there to say? Israel is the moon to me, and Europe a cemetery more impressive than even the fair, and fairwaylike, wilds of Union County, off the Garden State Parkway.

That the ideal of an autonomous Jewish literature in America is itself kitsch doesn’t mean its perceived paragons — its individual novels, and stories — have to be, too. It’s not that all of the chances have already been taken, it’s that all the safely remunerative chances have; and the rest, far from being commentary, might be more dangerous and destructive than our writers can or would want to attempt.

http://www.forward.com/articles/12481/

Image: book cover from author's home page; Michael Hafftka's powerful illustrations and a brief excerpt from the novel can be viewed here: www.joshuacohen.org/home