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PARTISAN REVIEW
of the murderous Arab attacks on the Jewish population of Palestine that
began in 1936. The ideological tension between Jewish militants, like the
underground group to which Herbst's daughter Tamara belongs, and the
pacifists of the Brit Shalom organization at the Hebrew University, is fre–
quently involved. On the European horizon that has the most urgent thematic
relevance to all that transpires in the Jerusalem setting of the novel, Herbst's
German homeland is preparing the machinery for genocide. In a world
moving rapidly from episodic terror to systematic mass murder on the most
unprecedented scale, mere private experience-the staple of the classic novel–
dwindles to insignificance. Adultery can no longer be even the illusory
personal adventure it was in nineteenth-century fiction, and the very premise
of the linear plot of the novel of adultery is called into question: Herbst's in–
volvement with Shira cannot go anywhere as a developing chain of fictional
events; instead, he circles around and around the idea of Shira, or, what
amounts to the same thing, around what Shira's disturbing presence has re–
leased within him.
Let me state this in terms of the quest for knowledge that is a central
issue in the novel. Herbst and his fellow cultivators of the grove of academe,
equipped with their index-cards and bibliographies and learned journals, sed–
ulously pursue the most esoteric and distant objects of knowledge-the burial
customs of ancient Byzantium, the alphabets oflong-lost languages. The pur–
ported sphere of these objects of knowledge is history, but do these historical
investigations, beyond their utility in advancing the careers of the in–
vestigators, tell us anything essential about the historical forces that are about
to move the German nation to gun down,
gas,
and incinerate millions ofmen,
women, and children? The European perpetrators of these horrors are, after
all, at least in part products of the same academic culture as Herbst and his
colleagues. The most troubling question a Jewish writer after 1945 could
raise is variously intimated here, particularly in Herbst's nightmares and
hallucinations: could there be a subterranean connection between forces at
work, however repressed, within the civilized Jew and the planners and ex–
ecutors of mass murder who are, after all, men like you and me? At the
beginning of the novel, Herbst is unable to write that big second book which
will earn him his professorship because he has a writer's block.
As
the effects
of his exposure to Shira sink in, he is unable to write it because it has become
pointless, such knowledge as could be realized through it felt to be irrelevant.
Instead, Herbst hits on the desperate idea of writing a tragedy, for his
experience with the radical ambiguity of eros in his involvement with
Shira/poetry leads him to sense that art, unlike historical inquiry, has the ca–
pacity to produce probing, painful self-knowledge, and is able to envisage
history not as a sequence of documented events but as a terrible interplay of
