SUSAN MIRON
645
for Italian Jews, who "with sufficient funds, apprehension, and the gift of
foresight settled in some of the more deserted parts of the island to wait
out the storm. People talked very little and then in whispers of these un–
usual newcomers, as if they already knew that the Jews' fate would de–
pend on silence. During these four years, when the world was covered
with blood and tears and encompassed by fire and suffering, life on the
island followed its usual course."
A 1903 letter sent by Franz Kafka to Oscar Pollack provides this story
with a lengthy epigraph, laconically signaling Herling's abiding concern
with the universality, if not inevitability, of human loneliness, and suffer–
mg:
When you stand before me and look at me, what do you know of my
sufferings and what do I know of yours? And if I fell at your feet and
cried and told you, would you know any more about me than you
know about hell when they say it is hot and sets one shivering?
Therefore we men should stand before each other with as much awe,
thoughtfulness, and love as before the gates of hell.
It's somewhat uncanny that both Herling and Andrej Szczypiorski,
rarely thought of as linked - Herling has lived for thirty-five years in
Naples, and was for decades banned in Poland, while Szczypiorski stayed
behind, helping to found the Solidarity Congress of Polish Culture - have
fixated in their books on the suffering ofJews, medieval plagues, and the
monstrousness of history. Szczypiorski, best known for his novel
The
Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman,
has set his political allegory,
A MassJor Arras,
in
the Middle Ages, and based it on real historical events. (Setting one's tales
in the distant past was a common strategy deployed by dissident writers
before the fall of Communism to avoid trouble with the censors.
Szczypiorski began
A MassJor Arras
in 1968). According to history, three
years after a plague and famine killed one-fifth of the population of Arras's
citizens as well as its crops and cattle, the townsfolk descended into an
orgy of anti-Semitism and witch-hunts known today as the "Vauderie
d'Arras."
It
appears a scapegoat must always be found, and the Jews in
Szczypiorski's books seem fated to live by this deadly rule. We watch
Arras's paroxysm of madness and anarchy through the eyes of Jan, a
Christian intellectual, an adoring pupil of the priest Albert, a proto-fascist
demagogue who rules the town. After the plague breaks out, the gates to
the town are "bolted fast from the outside and anyone planning to escape
into the world made an easy target for the bishop's guards. The citizens ..
felt their desolation and misfortune so keenly that they were disap-
