HOW TRUE TO LIFE IS BIOGRAPHY?
4 9
The point is that we had Seders at home every year, and by the time
I had my last Seder, when I was fourteen, I knew instantly that this was
a hoax. 1 usually like to refer to Marx quoting this magical moment in
Hegel, "The first time things happen as tragedy, the second time as par–
ody." I was fully conscious that this was ridiculous. There we were,
about to leave Egypt, and we didn't even want to leave Egypt, we were
happy in Egypt, so what were we doing celebrating Passover?
There are two things you can do. You can neutralize this series of
paradoxes and say, "Well, that's part of the Jewish tradition. To be a
Jew also means having to wonder why you're Jewish in the first place."
The more I resist Judaism, the more I'm told "That's fine, we all do
that." It's like telling a psychoanalyst that Freud was totally mistaken,
that the subconscious does not exist. "But that's why you need therapy."
So there are certain things you cannot get out of, and I do resent, in a
sort of joking paradoxical fashion, the fact that the more I resist Jewish
tropes or Jewish biograph isms, the more they are thrust on me, and the
more the resistance is construed as just a manifestation and a confirma–
tion of the very thing I don't want. I have always stepped outside of the
Jewish tradition, knowing all along that stepping outside of it in that
fashion ultimately makes me very Jewish. I toy with this paradox. But I
don't practice my religion. It has very little meaning for me.
When I went to Jerusalem and I stood on the Mount of Olives, just
to be perverse, I was thinking of, and I made myself go to, Gethsemane
in order to think of Christ there-when he is sweating drops of blood,
anticipating the worst. I just wanted it this way because that is the way
it would make sense to me, rejecting one thing, embracing another I
don't particularly like either, just to confuse myself.
But by and large I stay away from it, and if there 's anything that
makes any sense to me, it's that I have a spiritual biography.
It
is very
Western in its tradition, the Western poets always come back, and 1
think at the end of
Out of
Egypt
there is a moment that almost quotes
verbatim Matthew Arnold and Wordsworth-the idea that "I will think
of this moment in years to come." Of course, as soon as I said this, I
said, "Oh God, I can just see everyone telling me that I'm being so Jew–
ish," because what does one do at Passover? What is the most impor–
tant night? This one. And so on Passover I was doing a very Jewish
thing inscribed in Gentile books, and I can't get out of one and [ don't
want to repudiate the other, so I'm caught.
Justine de Lacy:
This is a question for Mr. Aciman. I'm currently writ–
ing and transforming into memoir a book I started a long time ago on
