CZESLAW MILOSZ
467
where, in fact, is the key to my trauma?
That whole avant-garde was laughable; a few lost young people, ab–
solutely marginal in the daily life of a couple of university towns, even
more so in the life of the entire country. That daily life has vanished: the
jobs, the amusements, the loves, the marriages, the births, the undiscover–
able stories of millions of individuals. Then a literary critic comes along,
and confers reality on what must take the place of that distant real life,
solely because it survives in language. Even though it's no longer possible
to verify what deformations reality was subjected to in the thoughts and
writings of the avant-garde poets, who were probably rife with assorted
traumas, just as I was. My imagination conjures up particular individuals
who, contemporaneously with me, experienced the world in a totally
different dimension than I did, through different ideas and different sen–
sual perceptions.
Isaac Bashevis Singer writes about Poland in the 1930s in his autobi–
ographical
Love and Exile.
I was never in the Jewish writers' club in
Warsaw, but even so I had formed an opinion. It was a time when
young Jews were leaving the faith and customs of their fathers, not for
freethinking and liberalism, but directly for Communism and the
fanatical hatreds between Stalinists and Trotskyists that arose out of that
new faith. There is no lack of similarities between my alienation and
Singer's. The son of a rabbi, he had had a religious upbringing, was
already secularized, but was sufficiently complex to perceive the cult of
Moloch within the Communism of his fellow writers; he did not get
along very well with the Zionists and developed an art of distance in a
void: a writer in Yiddish, but for whom? When Hitler came to power in
Germany, Singer's milieu was certain that Germany would soon occupy
Poland. Singer left for America in 1934 and for many years, as he himself
says, he suffered from an inability to write - the logical outcome, it
would seem, of a loss that turned out to be providential, because in
sea rching for the ground under his feet he discovered the traditional
Jewish world of his childhood. And, most of all, the great metaphysical
questions that had preoccupied him since childhood.
I,
too, during my
emigre crisis, searched for the forever-lost country of my childhood.
Throughout his life, Singer, whose narrative gift I truly envy, circled
around one question: How can God permit so much evil? The Jewish
tragedy, Job 's crying out on behalf of the millions of victims, is trans–
posed in his work, concealed, although his revulsion at sinful humanity,
complicitous in the crimes of Hitler and Stalin, openly erupts in his short
late novel,
The
Pen itent.
The indictment of God, the palpable awareness
