HOW TRUE TO LIFE IS BIOGRAPHY?
2S
out of it, either into oblivion or into another "heretic," "deviating,"
"truer" unfolding, is always possible, as it was in the case of Christian–
ity, Islam, or other sects. I will not deal here with these "external" sto–
ries.
I'll
just say briefly that not only the details of their "plots," but the
very status and nature of their story differ from the jewish Biography.
Let us have another look at the term
alilah,
"plot." In Hebrew as well
as in English or in french
(intrigue)
the term means both the line of
related events and a complor. In Hebrew, with its way of opening a
thick field of contradicting subconscious meanings around the same
root,
alilah
mea ns "work of creation," "deed," "plot," but a Iso "slan–
der" and "defamation." The Hebrew expression
alilat dam,
literally
"blood ploning," mea ns "blood libel." Here language em phasizes the
double-edged quality of any plot. It seemingly represents what hap–
pened, but in fact, we will never know what "really happened." The
subversive reading of the term "plot" in the Midrash reminds us that
every story is the product of interested manipulation, that the very same
"objective" data-facts, photographs, events, told with a different
accent, can be turned into slander, defamation, a false accusation. It is
precisely this abyss between controversial plots that dominates the his–
tory of tensions between the three monotheistic religions.
I am not going to tell you the full jewish Biography with all its lav–
ish scenes right now. For that we will have to sit here for a whole
Passover Seder. So, I'll skip a few thousand years and immediately zoom
into the twentieth century. What happens to the plot and promise once
the community distances itself from the purely religious terms? Does the
Jewish Biography vanish, or is it articulated in other, secular forms?
Who replaces God, "the plotter"? And how are the boundaries of the
story redefined? I'll follow the lives of my parents, representing two
major trajectories of recent jewish Biography.
My father's family lived the Zionist story. Four generations went
from the Ukraine to Palestine during the
1920S,
all carried by another
variation of the Zionist ideal, and with a deep belief that this constitutes
the right and true unfolding of the jewish Biography. My great-grand–
father, lzik Hajies, was a pious Hassid, part of the group of "the mourn–
ers of Zion," who on Sabbath afternoons would gather in the shtetl to
lament the destruction of the Temple in jerusalem. He immigrated to
jerusalem, to the ultra-orthodox neighborhood of Mea Shearim, carried
by his mystical messianic longing. My grandfather, Mordechai Glob–
man, was an enlightened orthodox jew, who founded a modern Hebrew
school in the shtetl, and was affiliated with the political movement of
"Hovevei Zion" (the lovers of Zion). He settled in the center of
