592
PARTISAN REVIEW
One day I was poking unbidden through the bookcase in my
grandparents' bedroom. And there, jammed in behind the Rabbinic
Code of Law - which I had already read to find the details of grown–
up bliss that awaited me in the arms of a pious man - I found the
poetry of Rachel, one of the most passionate and sensuous of the early
modern Hebrew poets.
I don't know when my grandfather came in the room. I saw his
tiny , shiny shoes next to my knee . I slammed the book shut. Ir–
religious though I was, I was well aware of the popular saying, "One
should burn the Torah before giving it to women." I tried to push
Rachel back to her hiding place. My grandfather stopped me , opened
the book and casually - almost oflhandedly - gestured for me to con–
tinue.
From that day on I was sure that he hung those backwards first
drafts, in his convoluted manner, for me-the irreligious child, the
rebel, drowned in her reading, writing and plagiarized poems full of
dot-dot-dot, that she might read his private diary, the longing
journeys of his fiery mind to some autonomous kingdom in the Tatra
mountains.
It
seems I was his only reader .
• • •
We are the last generation of literature , Saul Bellow once
said.
My students, who come to college in sports cars and Calvin
Klein jeans - or plan to do so soon - ask me quite frankly : Reading
professional literature is essential, but why do we need to know
Madame Bovary in order to achieve the American dream? I recently
heard a child complaining to his mother that he was the only kid in
his class who gave books as birthday gifts. In New York I find myself
meeting more and more people who apologize to me that they don't
read good literature , as though I were an ice-cream maker and they
were on a diet.
"Words, words, w.ords ," Hamlet replied to the pragmatic
Polonius - he who declaimed before his son Laertes the famous
farewell on "how to succeed in business and Elizabethan society."
Poetry, like life itself, is impractical. There was a time when
even God himself was an author, looking in the Torah he had writ–
ten and creating the world . This and more: "Golem"-lump of
clay-God said to man. "That which your eyes have beheld is writ–
ten in your book, the book of the generation of man ." Which is to
