Vol. 50 No. 1 1983 - page 158

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PARTISAN REVIEW
whole generation of Jewish (and non-Jewish) intellectuals. Even the
young Scholem, in Mandatory Palestine, was not immune to this
mood of disillusionment, writing to Benjamin in August 1931 that
"we were victorious too early" and that this victory in the visible
realm was "the real demonism of Zionism." In the middle of some
penetrating reflections on Kafka, it is instructive to read Scholem's
own agonized reappraisal of so-called political solutions to the
Jewish question .
Between London and Moscow we strayed into the desert of
Araby on our way to Zion, and our own hubris blocked the path
that leads to our people . Thus all we have left is the productivity
of one who is going down and knows it. It is this productivity in
which I have buried myself for years, for, after all, where should
the miracle of immortality be concealed if not here?
Following the Arab revolt of 1936 and Scholem's renewed out–
burst of pessimism, Benjamin-himself shocked by the growth of
French anti-Semitism-wrote back that "a cosmopolis like Paris has
become a very fragile thing, and if what I hear about Palestine is
true, a wind blows there in which even Jerusalem may start swaying
like a reed ." As is clear from this letter of February 1937, Benjamin
had still not completely abandoned thought of emigration to
Palestine, though even Celine's wildly anti-Semitic
Bagatelles pour un
massacre
and its reception by the French left-wing intelligentsia could
not shake his love of Paris . However, the shock of the Hitler-Stalin
pact in 1939 struck deeper and may have contributed to reawaken–
ing Benjamin's latent suicidal inclinations . A bitter, veiled allusion
(in a letter to Scholem of 11 January 1940) to the" activities of the
zeitgeist that have provided the desert landscape of these days with
markings unmistakable for old Bedouins like us" suggests some–
thing approaching terminal despair. Unable to swim with or against
the tide in a shipwrecked Europe, trapped by the historical-political
nightmare of encroaching Nazism and his own interminable bad
luck, Benjamin put an end to his own
lif~
in September 1940. As
Scholem puts it in a brief but moving final chapter on Benjamin's
years in emigration, his suicide "was not a surprising irrational act
but something he had prepared inwardly."
ROBERT S. WISTRICH
I...,148,149,150,151,152,153,154,155,156,157 159,160,161,162
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