Enlightenment, Romanticism and the Jewish Diaspora

Amos Oz again, A Tale of Love and Darkness. There’s an aspect of his subject-matter that’s certainly of general historical and cultural interest, but is also relevant to my current preoccupations with what underlies our ideas about the teaching of English in schools.

The Jews he writes about, including his own parents and ancestors back to the eighteenth century, were divided on the Enlightenment, either loving or hating it – loving it as releasing them from what was seen as the superstition of orthodox and mystical religion, with the fearfulness and devious it was thought to promote in Diasporic Jews, or hating it as threatening the appreciation of all that could not be encompassed by rationality.

Oz’s father was decidedly of the rationalist Enlightenment persuasion. He despised Shmuel Agnon as a ‘Diaspora writer’: ‘his stories lack wings… they have no tragic depth, there is not even any healthy laughter but wisecracks and sarcasm… pools of verbose buffoonery and Galician cleverness’ (66). (Galicia: ‘a historical region in East-Central Europe, currently divided between Poland and Ukraine’ – Wikipedia.)

Note that ‘healthy laughter’: Enlightenment – away with stuffy and fussy conventions, euphemisms, avoidances and indirectnesses – abandon waistcoats, ties and old world formality for the open necks and shirt sleeves of the blonde and tanned young Kibbutzniks. Away with ‘sarcasm and cleverness’, ‘the complexes and complexities so typical of the shtetl’ (36). Against the unhealthy Agnon contrast Tchernikowsky, the admired poet who wrote ‘shamelessly about love and even about sensual pleasures’.

‘In keeping with his temperament of a rationalistic Lithuanian Misnaged [opponent of Hassidic Judaism], he loathed magic, the supernatural and excessive emotionalism, anything clad in foggy romanticism or mystery, anything intended to make the senses whirl or to blinker reason’ (66). Hasidic tales were cases of the despised ‘folklore’.

‘My mother used to listen to him speak and instead of replying she would offer us her sad smile, or sometimes she said to me: “Your father is a wise and rational man; he is even rational in his sleep.”’

At the end of his life, though, Oz’s father ‘gradually succumbed, like someone finally releasing his grip on a handrail, to the mysterious charm of Peretz’s stories in particular and Hasidic tales in general’ (37).

(And, as an aside: where did the previous generation, still in Eastern Europe, think the Enlightenment was to be found? Where else but in Germany:

Some eighteen months before the Nazis came to power in Germany, my Zionist grandfather was so blinded by despair at the antisemitism in Vilna that he even applied for German citizenship. Fortunately for us, he was turned down by Germany too. So there they were, these over-enthusiastic Europhiles, who could speak so many of Europe's languages, recite its poetry, who believed in its moral superiority, appreciated its ballet and opera, cultivated its heritage, dreamed of its post-national unity and adored its manners, clothes and fashions, who had loved it unconditionally and uninhibitedly for decades, since the beginning of the Jewish Enlightenment, and had done everything humanly possible to please it, to contribute to it in every way and in every domain, to become part of it, to break through its cool hostility with frantic courtship, to make friends, to ingratiate themselves, to be accepted, to belong, to be loved ... (101))

But an Enlightenment rationalist outlook like that of Oz’s father could coexist with a variety of romanticism. His mother, on the other hand, had been formed by a different, debilitating version:

Both my parents had come to Jerusalem straight from the nineteenth century. My father had grown up on a concentrated diet of operatic, nationalistic, battle-thirsty romanticism (the Springtime of Nations, Sturm und Drang), whose marzipan peaks were sprinkled, like a splash of champagne, with the frenzy of Nietzsche. My mother, on the other hand, lived by the other romantic canon, the introspective, melancholy menu of loneliness in a minor key, soaked in the suffering of broken-hearted, soulful outcasts, infused with vague autumnal scents fin de siècle decadence. (241)

Something in the curriculum of the school she had attended in the twenties in Lithuania,

or maybe some deep romantic mustiness that seeped into the hearts of my mother and her friends in their youth, some dense Polish/Russian emotionalism, something between Chopin and Mickievicz, between the Sorrows of Young Werther and Lord Byron, something in the twilight zone between the sublime, the tormented, the dreamy and the solitary, all kinds of Will-o'-the-wisps of 'longing and yearning', deluded my mother most of her life and seduced her until she succumbed and committed suicide in 1952. She was thirty-eight when she died. I was twelve and a half. (203)

Amos Oz on Israel and Arabs

Like many of us I imagine, I've been in discussions and arguments and even falling-outs over Israel. From my youth I remember the image of idealistic kibbutz; I don’t remember taking much notice of the 1967 Six Day War. I paid little more attention until recent years when I've read one book and a few articles about the history of Israel. A few months ago I read a piece in one of the papers about Amos Oz and gathered that his A Tale of Love and Darkness (trans. Nicholas De Lange, Vintage 2005) gave a detailed personal account of being on the inside of that history.

So that was my big holiday read. As it turns out it’s far more than a personal memoir, going into his family history before the various moves to Palestine and back into the nineteenth century in Eastern Europe.

I wasn’t in fact clear when I started whether it was a memoir or a novel – the blurb didn’t say; the clarity and detail of scenes from his very early childhood and even from episodes before he was born are of a sharpness we associate with novels. The book is about all sorts beyond his own life: characteristics of Diaspora Jews, the feelings of Jews in countries like Poland and Latvia about the ‘real’ Europe to the west, what Jewish children were taught in Jewish schools in Lithuania about Israel, attitudes to the Enlightenment and religion, anti-semitism in Europe; the shabbiness and poverty of the actual Palestine the émigrés encountered (‘The Levant is full of germs,’ his grandmother declared on landing) compared with the image presented in the propaganda, growing up in Jerusalem, the contrast between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Ben-Gurion and Begin, the end of the British mandate and the shameful conduct of the British…

The big question people like me have about Israel concerns, of course, the rights and wrongs of its occupation of a land which had previously been more or less Arab, in so far as it was occupied at all and acknowledging that there were still some Jews who had lived there from ancient times. About the legitimacy of Jewish demands for their own state, a homeland, I had no doubts: after their experience of the ‘civilised’, ‘advanced’ states of Europe in the 1930s and 40s, who would say they should trust to their citizenship of any of existing state? But about their relations with the Arabs? Well, one passage in Oz’s book was, I thought, sane and helpful on this and it’s the account I’m inclined to subscribe to until I’m taught otherwise.

Here it is, from pages 418-19: