IS THERE A CURE FOR ANTI-SEMITISM'
373
which there is no genuine art. I wonder whether such reckoning is not
connected with nationalism and especially nineteenth-century romantic
nationalism. Perhaps there was an echo of this in Agnon's opinion that I
should have my books translated into Hebrew. Teasing was his Jewish
way of being serious. What he was really saying was that the soul of the
Jew must turn away from Europe and contemplate wisdom
(Hochma)
in
the promised land. Yes, but can the Jews confine themselves to Israel?
The Israelis are greatly attached to Western science and culture. After so
many centuries abroad, they seem unable to be completely happy within
their new and limited boundaries. I don't deny that it would have been
agreeable
to
study wisdom at Agnon's feet. He said that if I had had
enough Hebrew to understand him I would have longed to see him
again. But he told me this in Yiddish
(voltnach mirgebnat ihr volt nach mir
gebenkt),
and Yiddish is or was a European language.
Jews have written over the centuries in Greek, Latin, Arabic, Spanish,
German, Russian - in Tamil, for all I know. If you were born in
America, all essential communications, and your deepest communications
with yourself as well, would of course be in American English. You will
neither tell the truth nor lie in any other language. Without it, no basic
reckonings are made. Y
Oll
will not reflect on death in Hebrew or
French. Your language is the principal instrument of your humanity.
When the doors of the gas chambers were shut, the German Jews - and,
for that matter, the Polish Jews - called upon God in the language of
their murderers, for they had no other. Your language is your spiritual
base. Yes, I know the word "spiritual" is in disrepute, but what I am
saying can, if you like, be framed more acceptably if you put it that exis–
tence is, finally, a mystery, a radical mystery graspable, if at all, by lan–
guage.
Well, in our gorgeous, powerful, and confused country, this paragon
of popular democracies and shaper of the future, there appear novelists,
writers, or if you prefer, literary phenomenologists, of English, Irish,
Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Scandinavian and Negro extraction. For what
they do, these are not the best of times. We are witnessing a vast melt–
down. There are more and more hybrids, fewer and fewer true-bred
types
(meteques).
Some writers are still thinking of high culture and of
past masterpieces; others feel that they should be satisfied with rough re–
sults. The odds against finding the elements of a new synthesis do not
look encouraging. Yet it is possible now, in the middle of this melt–
down, to have a thoroughly independent look at the human situation as
it affects the Jews.
When I was young, cultural structures were still firm or looked firm
to
Jewish artists, who had to prepare to love these tightly held Christian
