Chasing the Dream

It’s been an up-and-down sort of week, and that’s not even starting in with the Supreme Court ruling about the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act. (I’ll write about that on another occasion when I’ve had more of a chance to digest the implications of the court’s ruling.)

On the down side, a German court in Cologne ruled that the circumcision of boys brings them “grievous bodily harm” and that, therefore, anyone who circumcises an infant risks arrest for assault. (More on this in weeks to come. The Jewish and Muslim communities did not take the news kindly) The Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, apparently acting with the approval of his Ashkenazi counterpart, publicly referred to me and my colleagues as “destroyers and saboteurs of Judaism” whose sole wish in life—or at least whose sole professional wish—is to “uproot the fundamental principles of the Torah” and thus actively to be working to “destroy the vineyards of the Lord of Hosts.” (He was responding to the decision by the Israeli government actually to pay the salaries of some few non-Orthodox rabbis who serve in remote, rabbinically underserved regions of the country, just as it pays the salaries of countless Orthodox rabbis who serve in every imaginable capacity throughout Israel. The Rabbinical Assembly of Israel, led by my colleague Rabbi Mauricio Balter, responded by filing a police complaint against Rabbi Amar accusing him—not at all unreasonably, in my opinion, given the shrill, angry tenor of the rabbi’s call for activism in the face of incipient pluralism—of inciting others to violence against him, and his and my colleagues in Israel.) The first vice-president of Iran, Mohammed Reza Rahimi, formally blamed the entire international drug trade on Jews and Zionists, whom he also noted, just a bit disconnectedly, were also responsible for the Russian Revolution of 1917. A man wearing a giant Elmo suit spent a few days in Times Square and Central Park delivering rabidly anti-Semitic speeches to the passers-by in which, among other things, he suggested they immerse themselves in the four volumes of Henry Ford’s viciously anti-Jewish pamphlets published together as “The International Jew.” (The police finally stepped in not to arrest faux Elmo, but merely to prevent him from polluting public space with his hate-filled venom. Elmo, for those of you too old to have watched Sesame Street as children and who haven’t watched with your own children or grandchildren, is the monster with red fur known for his famous disinclination ever to refer to himself in the first person. The actual Elmo is cranky, but not at all bigoted.) It’s been that kind of week!

On the up side of things, Joan and I bought a refrigerator. We also bought a washing machine and a dryer. Under normal circumstances, this would hardly be newsworthy. (The purchase was made without reference to circumcision, the Russian Revolution, the international drug trade, Henry Ford, the president’s health care initiative, or the Israeli chief rabbinate. Nor was I wearing an Elmo suit at the time of the purchase.) Nonetheless, it was a big moment for Joan and for me. And I thought I would wrap up this year of letter-writing to you all by telling you why.

One of the secrets of happy marriages that I always try to remember to share with my brides and grooms when we meet before their weddings is the concept of the shared dream. All sorts of compatibility issues sink marriages all the time, but the one area that seems to me the most essential to future happiness is the ability of a couple to project their commonly held hopes into the future, then to agree to travel together to the emerald city…and to subjugate less important projects to the sense of productive movement towards a great common goal. That lends marriage a sense of purpose, as well as a dynamic sense of motion forward…and that, in my opinion, is what differentiates marriage from even the finest and most satisfying friendships.

Somewhere along the way, Joan and I began to wonder what, if anything, we were going someday to leave to our children. Clearly, it is not going to be a fortune of money. And, yes, we talked and still do talk about one day composing a kind of ethical will stating clearly what we’ve learned of life and what we’ve come to value above all else, and what lessons we therefore wish to bequeath to our descendants as our moral legacy to them. But we also developed the idea of wanting to tie our family to Israel in a way that would transcend mere allegiance to the Zionist ideal, and which would constitute a kind of physically real link between our family and the Land of Israel (and the people of Israel and the State of Israel) that would say by its very existence how we view the world and our place in it. For a long time, this idea percolated around, taking on different guises and permutations as we moved forward through the years of our married life together. And then, about a decade ago, we finally concluded that what we want to leave our children—aside from a huge amount of what I heard someone refer to the other day as “non-electronic books” and some more and less valuable tchotchkes we’ve acquired or inherited along the way—was a home in Israel, and specifically one in Jerusalem.

We talked about it forever, unable to decide if we should wait until everybody’s out of college before attempting this or whether it made more sense to dive in right then and there before we lost our nerve all together. We stumbled down different paths as we tested our resolve to see if we really meant it and then, in 2005, as Israel was withdrawing from Gaza while we were actually present in Israel, it struck us that the moment had come. How did we know? I have no idea. Prices were low. We didn’t have anything else to do that week. We found ourselves standing next to the local RE/MAX office on Herzl Street in downtown Jerusalem. We went in. Tentatively, we started talking. We got cold feet repeatedly as we shlepped along after our agent, a nice woman originally from Holland, from apartment to apartment. And then, once all the flats we were seeing started looking alike, we just chose the one that appealed to us the most and made an offer. To our shock, it was accepted. (Who would have made that offer if we really thought it was going to be accepted? It was really just to keep the agent from thinking we were wasting her time! Or was it?) And so, reluctantly but also very proudly, we became property owners in Israel.

In Israel, apartments are sold without appliances. That didn’t matter, because the tenants who have lived there ever since we bought have all had their own appliances. But now the time has come for us to set foot into our own apartment a mere eight years after last being there. And that’s why, after diligently saving up for this move forward towards our shared dream, we bought a fridge the other day, and a washing machine and a dryer. We were shopping in Israel via internet and phone. Joan did an excellent job on the phone with the salesman when we finally made contact. I hovered in the background trying to think of a way to express the concept of a “self-defrosting freezer” in Hebrew. I came up with an idea, but it proved unnecessary: by the time I was ready to express myself, she was all done. This was all probably for the best. And the salesman’s English, it turned out, was fine. And he surely knew more about freezers, self-defrosting and otherwise, than I do!

And so that’s where we’re going this July: to our apartment in Jerusalem. So far, we own no furniture. The place has no bookcases. (This won’t be much of an issue—there are also no books.) But, at least so far, we do own a fridge, a washing machine, and a dryer. The rest will come too. (There’s an IKEA in Netanya we expect to get to know well.) And eventually we will have a flat to call our own that we can actually spend time in. And that will begin, we both hope, the beginning of a chapter in our family’s life that will eventually become permanent and provide a living, breathing link to Israel for us and for our descendants.

We endlessly reference the inviolate bond between the people of Israel, the God of Israel, and the land of Israel in our prayers. Some of the phrases that express that idea are so familiar that we almost have to force ourselves to consider them carefully and to ask ourselves what they imply regarding the future of the Jewish people. I’d like to explore some of these questions in more detail with you in the future, but this summer is turning out to be a season of practical things for Joan and me. We’re thinking of buying a television. We’re definitely going to buy a couch. (What good is a TV without a couch?) We’ve been saving up for a long time and now we’re going to take a leap forward in making real, even just a little bit, this dream that Joan and I have come to share. If you’re in Jerusalem in July, come by! We have a fridge. We’ll have a couch. We have a very nice balcony. We’ll make coffee!

Rethinking Same-Sex Marriage

A few weeks ago I mentioned from the bimah that I wanted to re-open the discussion of same-sex marriage at Shelter Rock. Partially, I’m only being practical: now that same-sex marriage is legal in New York State, it is only a matter of time before we are approached by a gay couple interested in making their wedding in our sanctuary and it is only prudent for the community to develop its stance on the issue before we are confronted with specific people who ask a simple question and would like a simple answer in response. But I am also responding to recent developments within our Conservative Movement, and specifically to the approval on May 31 by the Committee on Jewish Laws and Standards of the Rabbinical Assembly of a responsum by Rabbis Elliot N. Dorff, Daniel Nevins, and Avram I. Reisner that suggests various ways in which same-sex unions could be solemnized in a way in keeping both with spirit and the letter of the halakhah.

It’s a complicated issue and I find myself impatient with people who insist otherwise: no matter where anyone stands on the issue, it seems—to say the very least—naïve to describe the Dorff-Nevins-Reisner responsum as anything but revolutionary. And, as should be the case with all dramatic steps forward any given society or group within society takes, the revolutionary nature of the proposal demands that we move forward warily and cautiously, carefully considering the implications and possible ramifications inherent in taking any of the paths that suddenly lie open before us.
Many Shelter Rockers have expressed themselves to me on the topic already, including people who feel very strongly on both sides of the issue. And, of course, they are not alone: the question of the reasonableness and legality of same-sex unions is already a major policy issue in the presidential campaign and will no doubt continue to engage all sorts of people, gay and straight, for the foreseeable future. It even seems likely that the Supreme Court will eventually become involved as well. So we’re not alone at Shelter Rock in feeling challenged to formulate an opinion on the matter in general, and a formal policy for our congregation in specific.

Before I express myself in more detail on the issues that I consider worthy of debate in this regard, I would like to suggest we abandon several lines of discussion that regularly, at least in my opinion, distract people from considering the actual issue that rests at the heart of the matter.

Of these, the least productive is basing the discussion on the question of whether there should be gay people in the world. To my way of thinking, one of the givens of the conversation has to be that there are gay people in the world and that the issue at hand is therefore whether they should or should not be entitled to marry, not whether the world would be a better or a less good place if people had less varied tastes in sexual matters. What kind of a discussion would that be to have anyway? More to the point, I think it is reasonable to suppose that there has always been a percentage of the population that, constrained from self-defining openly or not, has always been homosexual. And I think that even despite the confusing fact that the word “homosexuality” itself was only devised in the nineteenth century and that no classical language, including ancient Hebrew, has a word to denote the concept of what moderns call “homosexuality” or a name to label people moderns would reference as “homosexuals.” I’ve read a few books about the history of human sexuality that have attempted to explain why a feature of human society that strikes moderns as so self-evident and obvious somehow resisted categorization for centuries, but I haven’t found any of what I’ve read to be especially convincing. Still, the question before us cannot be whether it was wise or unwise for God to have made different varieties of human sexual orientation, but merely whether or not we wish to offer the possibility of long-term, faithful relationships respected in law and by society to people for whom heterosexual marriage is not an option.

The next red herring I think we should abandon is the ever-popular argument that we should endorse same-sex marriage because homosexuality is not a life-style choice that gay people make, but something hard-wired that can be resisted and repressed, but not materially altered through the sheer force of active decision-making. That surely is true, I’m sure, but it isn’t relevant because there are all sorts of behavioral patterns that people clearly do not choose, but that we as a society specifically do choose not to legitimize or endorse. So to say that gay people should be allowed to marry because they didn’t choose to be gay seems to be a pointless argument, something that would only make sense if it were part of a larger argument justifying all behavior to which those who engage in it are honestly drawn. The legitimacy of same-sex marriage cannot therefore be allowed to rise or fall on the question of whether people can choose their sexual orientation.

And, finally, I think we should agree not to allow the discussion to center on the famous verse from Leviticus that prohibits a man from lying with another man “in the manner of men lying with women.” Over the years, there have been many efforts to explicate those words along many different avenues of interpretation, but the simplest explanation is simply to take them to prohibit the kind of intercourse between men that is the most obviously analogous to the most common form of sexual intimacy between men and women. Discussing whether the Torah chose wisely in forbidding that single act also seems to me a pointless discussion: observant gay men will observe the law and others will not, just as observant heterosexual couples obey laws delimiting their own intimate lives even though other couples do not. But to take that thought and argue that that prohibition of Leviticus ipso facto makes ridiculous the question of same-sex marriage being legitimate seems a dramatic overstatement of the situation. One could, after all, argue just to the contrary: that by including in its list of sexual prohibitions one single one that affects male-male couples the Torah is in effect saying to gay couples, or at least to male ones, that they too are invited to find a path forward to spiritual communion with the God of Israel through fidelity to the laws of the Torah.

By omitting all the above-mentioned lines of argumentation from the discussion, we are, I think, left with two relatively simple questions before us.

The first—whether we do or do not wish to endorse the rights of Jewish gay people to enter into permanent, monogamous relationships in synagogue ceremonies that will bind them together as loyal partners and loving spouses—is the easier of the two to answer. Since I myself grew up wanting very much one day to marry, to have children, to live in a dignified, loving home, and to be a respected member of our Jewish community, it doesn’t seem at all odd to me that other people, and specifically other Jewish people, would want those same things in their lives. If anything, actually, it seems peculiar for me to imagine people wanting anything less from life. Nor does the fact that a specific individual might be gay seem relevant in any meaningful way in this context: what could sexual orientation have to do, really, with the desire to live in a dignified relationship characterized by loyalty and respected by the community as binding and real?

The second question—how exactly gay people can marry without the concept of marriage itself being altered in the process beyond recognition—is the more vexing. And it is this specific question that the Dorff-Nevins-Reisner responsum addressed. It is a complicated piece of writing. (If you are reading the electronic version of this letter, you can access the responsum in its entirety by clicking here.) But the broad strokes, at least to me, are as compelling as the details: the authors have come up with a way formally and respectfully to solemnize the commitment of same-sex couples to each other by sidestepping entirely the issue of whether the Torah’s concept of kiddushin between a man and a woman can be expanded to include same non-heterosexual couples. It sounds so simple when put in those terms. But, in my opinion, the responsum displays courage and originality most of all because of that specific aspect of its authors’ efforts.

In our American Jewish culture, we informally refer to kiddushin, the sanctification of a couple’s relationship through formal ritual, as marriage and the ceremony that establishes it as a wedding. For example, we call a couple’s rings “wedding bands,” or “wedding rings,” not kiddushin bands or rings. We refer to the k’tubbah as a marriage certificate, even though it has to do only with kiddushin and not with the “real” marriage that follows. We refer to the chuppah as a wedding canopy, although what takes place beneath it is kiddushin, not marriage per se. But it was the clever insight of Rabbis Dorff, Nevins, and Reisner to realize that kiddushin is merely the Torah’s way of preparing the path for couples on their way to nissu’in, to marriage, by requiring them to renounce other partners, to pledge their troth to each other absolutely and unconditionally, and by requiring them publicly to announce their intention to live together as married spouses. And, therefore, that—and here is the truly innovative part—it should be possible to consider other paths forward for other couples to follow on their way to marriage as loving, committed spouses. Wasting time worrying about whether the definition of kiddushin can reasonably be expanded to include same-sex couples is a debate from which no definitive answer seems likely ever to emerge. The authors of the responsum, therefore, had the idea of simply leaving the question unanswered, then of making the whole issue an irrelevancy by proposing alternate kinds of arrangements that can just as reasonably and reliably lead forward to marriage. The responsum then moves on specifically to suggest a number of such paths.

In another posting, I hope to describe those paths to you in detail. None is perfect. All have things to recommend them and not to recommend them. Basically, though, they are all variations on the same theme and what they all do have in common is the desire to create an unassailably legal context in which same-sex couples may formalize their commitment to each other against a background of fidelity, dignity, mutuality, and reciprocity—the same foundation stones upon which any successful heterosexual marriage will also be based. None requires the officiant or the participant to violate any principle of halakhah or to ignore any of the foundational principles of our Jewish faith. None requires any halakhic doubletalk or any complicated rationalization to sound cogent. And, more to the point, none has at its core anything other than the simple desire to deliver to same-sex couples a simple series of messages. We accept you as you are. We respect you for your commitment to each other. We find nothing peculiar in your desire to live out your lives in dignified, loving relationships. And we welcome you unambiguously and warmly as members of our community. When it comes down to it, which of us would not want all of our children, gay and straight, to hear that message reverberating in their ears loud and clear as the chart their course forward through life?

Fathers and Sons

I’ve never been a huge fan of Father’s Day, a sentiment I believe I inherited (not inappropriately) from my own father. Maybe it feels like a wan add-on to our extensive American list of sort-of-holidays because its history is so brief: Father’s Day only received its “official” status in 1972 when President Nixon granted it federal recognition more than sixty years after it was first proposed to the world by (of all people in all places) the leadership of the YMCA in Spokane, Washington. So I myself am older than Father’s Day! (Mother’s Day is a whole different thing, by the way, and a lot older: it was proclaimed as a holiday by President Wilson in 1914 after first having been conceived of as a “Mothers’ Day for Peace” by Julia Ward Howe, the activist author of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” in 1872 and then unofficially promoted by, of all ancient institutions, Wannamaker’s Department Store in Philadelphia.) But when I think more carefully about the whole thing, I realize that my disinclination to embrace Father’s Day too vigorously or enthusiastically (or, to continue the thought, to impose any specific obligations on my children to embrace it with vigor or enthusiasm) has to do not with the history of the day or with its relationship to Mother’s Day (or to Richard Nixon), but with the complexity of the father/child relationship and the inherent peculiarity of using pre-written greeting cards to suggest sentiments that are hard even to formulate at all, let alone to sum up in a few italicized lines of third-rate doggerel. Also, I have more than enough neckties as it is.

Or maybe I’m being unduly harsh here. I had a father. I am a father. Why shouldn’t I get a card once a year from my various offspring acknowledging my shared, yet indispensable, responsibility for their existence? So what if it’s a bit perfunctory? Better perfunct than defunct! And yet…I still find the whole father/child thing mysterious and complicated, something that resists summing up with a phone call and, although this part has blissfully fallen away, a bottle of Old Spice.

Just lately, although not specifically in preparation to write to you this week, I’ve been reading a surprising number of books about fathers and sons. The mother (so to speak) of such books, Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, I read in college and recall as being essentially about the way fathers and sons are both incapable of stepping far enough away from their biological relationship to accept each other “just” as men. (The book, if I recall correctly, opens with a young man returning home to discover that his father has undertaken a tawdry affair with one of his housekeepers, a young woman with whom he has already produced a child, a “new” baby brother for his already-grown-up son, Arkady.) I don’t recall liking the book that much, although I liked other books by Turgenev, especially Asya and The Nest of the Gentry, and even went so far during one of my trips to the former Soviet Union to make a kind of literary pilgrimage to Spasskoye Lutavinovo, Turgenev’s great estate in southern Russia. (I also made a similar trip to Tolstoy’s estate at Yasnaya Polyana, very faithfully reproduced in the 2009 movie The Last Station starring Helen Mirren and Christopher Plummer, which I found far more stirring and interesting than Spasskoye. But, then again, I find Tolstoy’s books themselves far more stirring and interesting than Turgenev’s!)

Far more to the point, however, are the three books I’ve just completed reading. About Bernd Wollschläger’s book, A German Life, I wrote last week. Detailing his own complicated journey to Judaism against the background of his even more complicated relationship to his father, a decorated Wehrmacht officer, the book is really as much about fathers and sons as it is about Germans and Jews. As I wrote then, I liked the book very much and recommend it to people interested in both topics. (What’s the word for the convergence of several totally distinct events in a context related in some specific yet peripheral way to each of them? For what it’s worth, Bernd Wollschläger’s father received his Iron Cross—which medal Hitler himself pinned on his chest—for his personal bravery on the Eastern Front in the 1943 Battle for Oryol, which Russian city was both the city of Turgenev’s birth in 1818 and the city in which I personally spent a long month in 1990 enrolled in the Intourist Russian Language Institute there.)

But I wish to write today more about the other two books I’ve just recently completed: Noah Hawley’s The Good Father and William Landay’s Defending Jacob. I found both books engaging to the point of being engrossing. They’re similar in some ways, but distinct in others. But they will both appeal both to readers who have or had parents, or who are parents…but men will read this book differently, I think, than will women.

Hawley’s book is essentially about a man who loves his son intensely without knowing much about him. Is that the story of all fathers, the authors appears to be asking subtly: are all men who father sons doomed to loving them without really understanding them once they grow past childhood or even being able to fathom who they are or what they have become? Are we all that blind when it comes to those we love? Or is there something specific in the relationship of fathers and sons that makes it impossible for either to see the other party clearly? (Is it the same for mother and daughters? Hawley doesn’t go there and neither will I. But the question of whether the issue here is the same-genderedness of fathers and son or whether it is their specific maleness that is in play is key.) The book, at any rate, begins with a scene that we all know from our worst nightmares: we are having the most normal of days when suddenly a policeman comes to the door with the information that a child of ours has been arrested and charged with a horrific crime. I won’t say more because the book is too good for me to risk ruining it for you by giving too much away. But I will say that the book operates on two levels: the narrative one following the storyline along to its shocking conclusion (and inviting you time and time again to think you see what’s coming next only to be completely wrong), and the psychological level on which the book is not about the tale being told but about the author’s understanding of what it means to be a father, what it means to be a son. The father in question has an ex-wife, the mother of the son in question, and a second wife, the mother of that older son’s two much younger twin brothers. And within the warp and woof of that slightly complicated, but ultimately ordinary, family structure lies the lion’s share of what the book has ultimately to offer its readers, particularly regarding the nature of the relationship between fathers and sons. I was very taken by the book. Despite one single plot twist that I found irritatingly improbable, the book was satisfying and sobering: the former because it’s a very good story about the intertwined impossibilities of holding on and letting go, and the latter because it left me uncomfortably focused on the part of the emotional iceberg of family life that no one ever sees and most prefer simply to ignore. The short version is that I liked the book and I think my readers will too.

The second book, William Landay’s Defending Jacob, is also about a father and his son. To be fair, the son has a mother who plays a key role in much of the book. So this is not a book almost solely about fathers and sons in the same way Noah Hawley’s book is. But at the heart of Landay’s book too is the perplexing image of a father who loves his son, yet who turns out to know almost nothing about him. The books have their nightmarish premise in common as well: life is normal until it’s not, until the cop comes to the door with the news that the boy you thought you knew has been accused of doing something unimaginably bad. You leap to the boy’s defense, obviously. Both dads do, in fact, in both books. And the back story behind the narrative line in both books is about the degree to which fathers know their sons well and also don’t know them at all. The twist in Defending Jacob is that the father himself works as a public prosecutor, therefore as a legal professional who is supposed to be good at seeing things as they are, who is paid by the state (or rather the commonwealth, the story being set in Massachusetts) to know guilty parties when he sees them and adequately to demonstrate their guilt to juries beyond a reasonable doubt. And so, slowly, as the policemen and the lawyers do their jobs, the truth does emerge, or some version of it does. (This is true in both books.) I won’t give the plot away here either so as not to ruin the story for you, but the experience of watching these two fathers, the doctor in The Good Father and the lawyer in Defending Jacob, slowly realize how impossible it is to know another person truly well and eventually come to understand that that thought applies, if anything, even more meaningfully when the other person in the equation is someone you love wholly and absolutely in the manner of parents loving their children—that experience is what makes both these books worth your time to read and to savor. The final plot twist is unexpected to the point, I thought, of being unbelievable. But the book itself is great and I recommend it without reservation.

I have no specific plans for Father’s Day. I suppose I’ll hear from my kids. I might even get a meal out of it, or a necktie. Or just the meal. Maybe some cards. I’ll let you know. What I’d really like, though, is a few quiet hours to read…and then a nice meal with my descendants. Maybe I’ll give Turgenev another chance!

A German Life

In the unlikely event that Shelter Rock ever runs a contest to see which of us has made the acquaintance of the most German converts to Judaism, I think I’ll probably win. In fact, I’m sure I will. For one thing, most of us find the idea itself that a citizen of the nation Daniel Jonah Goldhagen famously damned as “Hitler’s willing executioners” could willingly embrace Judaism as a ger tzedek—that is, as a righteous proselyte eager to seek his or her spiritual destiny as a lately-arrived but nonetheless bona fide member of the House of Israel—that idea will strike most as beyond peculiar. For another, one doesn’t find these people just anywhere. You have to know where to look!

A good place to look, actually, is Heidelberg, where I spent two years teaching in the Institute of Jewish Studies in the mid-1980s. Most of my students were “regular” Gentiles—mostly Lutheran types either headed into the ministry and interested in Judaism as part of their spiritual education as faithful Christians or else more secular souls drawn to Jewish study as a way of coming to terms with the legacy of the Shoah, a legacy that weighs (at least for some) no less heavily on the children and grandchildren of the perpetrators than it does on the descendants of the victims. And some were “regular” Jewish people: the children of Jewish parents, raised in Jewish homes, studying something else in Heidelberg (usually medicine or law) and interested in taking advantage of the existence of the Hochschule (and the presence in town of people such as myself) to take some courses in Jewish history or Jewish literature. But there were also present a small number of people enrolled at the Institute as part of their studies towards conversion to Judaism as well as some who had already completed their conversions and were simply eager to learn more. We had students from all over Europe in the school, but the converts, future and present, were all Germans who had gone far beyond being “interested” in Judaism and who either had chosen or were hoping to choose Judaism as their spiritual path in life. It seems unlikely in the extreme that any of them will ever read this, but I won’t identify them by name anyway lest I contravene our custom of never singling out converts in public.

They were, to say the least, an odd lot. P., for example, was not only a German, but (this was before the reunification of Germany in 1990) an East German of what he himself labelled as “ancient peasant stock” who had fled across the border and sought asylum in West Germany, then found his way into a synagogue and had eventually adopted a religious lifestyle, willingly undergoing b’rit milah and adopting a strict regimen of religious observance. L. was the daughter of not one but two Lutheran pastors, both of them prominent in the church hierarchy and neither even slightly connected to Jews or to Judaism. Certainly neither was descended from Jews. But L. found her way to Israel as a teenager, spoke openly (at least to me, but I think also to others) about the way she could feel destiny drawing her forward for the first time when she made her first visit to Jerusalem and particularly to the Western Wall, and easily about the way adopting Judaism made it tolerable for her to think of herself as a German. M. was the grandson of a guard who served at Maidanek, the death camp near Lublin. He knew his grandfather well, I recall him saying—of the 1,037 SS officers who perpetrated their unspeakable crimes there, a grand total of 170 were prosecuted after the war—but only learned what Maidanek was when he was a teenager, which experience led him too to Israel, where he volunteered on a kibbutz for six months. As a result of that experience, he came home intent on embracing Judaism…and certain, so he said, that he was not merely doing so as a way vicariously of atoning for his grandfather’s sins but, in a more positive vein, as a way of responding constructively to the horrors of the past by doing his part to preserve the religion of the murdered. (I remembering not feeling at all sure that that was a very good reason actually to convert to Judaism. But he seemed intent and clear-minded regarding the reasonableness of what had become his life mission. I lost track of him after we left Germany, so cannot say whether he reached his goal. A little bit, I hope he did.)

All of this sounds odder in the telling than it was in the hearing. I’ve lost touch with all of these people, actually, although I find myself from time to time wondering what happened to them. Perhaps they’re on Facebook! But I write about them today not to announce my intention to hunt for them, but as a way of introducing to you all a book I’ve just read, something that I think you would all find interesting and inspiring.

The book is called A German Life: Against All Odds, Change Is Possible, and it was written by Dr. Bernd Wollschläger, today a family physician in Miami, but formerly a medic in the IDF, and before that the troubled German son of a Wehrmacht general on whose chest Hitler himself pinned the Knight’s Cross on January 12, 1942 for bravery in battle on the Eastern Front. (Since the public display of Nazi symbols is forbidden by Germany law, the author’s father could only wear his medal at home once the war ended. What it meant for the young Bernd to have to spend every Christmas Eve at home with his father wearing a medal awarded to him personally by Hitler with a tiny swastika where the arms of the cross meet is one of the most personal, deeply introspective passages in the book, one you will not quickly forget.) It is an odd book in many ways, and in some ways a flawed one. (It seems odd, for instance, for a man as involved in contemporary Germany history as the author to confuse Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Niemöller. Nor does it behoove a married man, and a religious Jew at that, to describe his pre-marital affairs in quite as much detail as he does.) Still, the book is moving and very interesting. I recommend it to you all wholeheartedly.

I read the book almost accidentally: Si Seidel, a long-time Shelter Rocker, shared with me an on-line clip he came across featuring the author speaking in a Boca Raton synagogue on Yom Hashoah. (If you are reading this electronically, you can access the clip by clicking here.) Just sitting and listening to the man speak was a riveting experience that led me to do just a bit more research. When I found his book for sale—the book is available on amazon.com and all the other on-line sites—I resolved to read it and, if it was as powerful as his remarks were, to recommend it to you.

In the past, it’s been the rare book by a post-war German grappling with his or her nation’s past that I’ve found totally successful. (I’ve generally found such books to teeter back and forth between self-serving and self-righteous, neither of which attitudes I find especially appealing.) But Bernd Wollschläger’s book is different. (If you look for it on-line, spell his last name Wollschlaeger and it will pop right up on your screen.) For one thing, the author writes totally guilelessly and openly, describing his relationship with his parents, but particularly with his father, painfully and very movingly. That the author himself clearly seems to understand his relationship with his father to constitute the background for his decision to embrace Judaism as a ger tzedek is itself unusually insightful, but that he trusts his readers to understand nuances that are generally glossed over in this kind of book—and particularly books written in English for non-Germans—is even more impressive. Wollschläger’s father, for example, was not a member of the Nazi party. Nor does the author hold back from describing the contempt in which his father held the S.S.—whom he looked down on as less than “real” soldiers assigned to foul clean-up work that no true German soldier would undertake after the Wehrmacht, the “real” army, had successfully secured some new territory for the ever-expanding Reich. Nor does he hold back from describing his father as a principled man brought low in life not by his regrets regarding his wartime record but by something as prosaic as alcoholism. What emerges is a complicated portrait of a complicated man and his long-suffering wife. You won’t like his father. But, even despite yourself, you will feel for him…and for his predicament in life and for his inability successfully to break with his own past and for his ultimately failed relationship with his only son.

Throughout the book, the author drops hints regarding the possibility of his mother being of Jewish ancestry. He himself clearly does not know if her dark, guarded comments in that direction were true. Nor does he even know if he understood her properly when she made occasional vague comments that could have meant what he himself obviously hopes they did mean. Yet the author appears specifically to have chosen not to pursue that line of ancestral research, although it seems odd—at least a little—that he hasn’t. But, as noted above, it is precisely in the author’s guilelessness that the books’ power, and also its charm, lie. Wollschläger seems unwilling to dissemble, clearly aware that the book’s power has to rest in his willingness to write openly even about things that most people in his situation would hide or at least prefer to omit. The chapters covering his initial trip to Israel, in the course of which he was shown around not only by an appealing Jewish girl doing her army service on Kibbutz Yahel, about sixty miles north of Eilat, but also by an angry Palestinian young man from Abu Ghosh, an Arab town just west of Jerusalem on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway, are very successful. Most moving of all is his description—also unguarded and very openly written—of his encounter with an old man at the Wall who seems just for a fleeting moment to be able to peer into the author’s soul and who tells him something that, for once to mean the words literally, changes his life.

Jews born into the faith tend to find the whole concept of conversion slightly mysterious, as though embracing Judaism were the equivalent of signing up for a lifetime of obsessive insecurity about the present and worry about the future. That being the case, it would do readers so-mystified to read this book, which is as stirring and encouraging as it is frankly written. The traditional High Holiday liturgy never seems to tire of reiterating that the gates of repentance are never closed, that t’shuvah, return, is always possible. We say it. And mostly, even, we mean it. But to read Bernd Wollschläger’s story is to be reminded that that truth is not only applicable to specific instances of wrongdoing or moral miscalculation, but to life itself: the ability to chart one’s destiny in life specifically along the lines of one’s own moral consciousness and to pursue a path forward in life that, for all it may constitute a total break with one’s own past, is solely and absolutely a path of one’s own making, and to do with specifically without reference to one’s own past or one’s family’s history—that is the deepest of all lessons readers will take from this book. I enjoyed it immensely and I think my readers will too!

Justice for Africa

It is possible that some of us passed just a bit too quickly by the news regarding the fifty-year sentence handed down in the Hague on Wednesday to Charles McArthur Taylor, the former president of Liberia who earlier this spring was convicted of an extensive laundry-list of horror-crimes committed between 1996 and 2002 during the civil war in Sierra Leone, the country on the Atlantic coast of Africa to the northeast of Liberia. In that Taylor was the first former head of state to be convicted of war crimes by an international tribunal since the Nuremberg trials that followed the Second World War, it behooves us to take a careful look.

The list of crimes of which Taylor was found guilty—including murder, rape, punitive mutilation, enslavement (and particularly forcing women into sexual slavery), and conscripting children to serve in the military—only tells part of the story, however, because the tribunal was only considering crimes committed in neighboring Sierra Leone, where 50,000 citizens died in the fighting, not crimes committed by Taylor and by men under Taylor’s command in his own country during the so-called Second Liberian Civil War, a conflict that eventually cost at least a quarter of a million Liberian citizens their lives.

It’s easy to wave it all away. Who even knows where these places are? If you had the good fortune to see the 2006 movie Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Connolly, and set against the background of the civil war in Sierra Leone, then you know something about the events under discussion. If you had the infinitely greater good fortune, however, to read Ishmael Beah’s book, A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, published by Sarah Crichton Books in 2008 (and of which used hardbound copies are currently available from amazon.com for the price of exactly one penny), you will know a lot more. (In this regard, I should also mention the remarkable 2008 book, The Bite of the Mango, by Mariatu Kamara, in which the author, who miraculously survived the massacre of her village, describes the experience of being raped as a twelve-year-old only then to have her hands cut off by her attackers for the sole purpose of terrorizing the survivors, and particularly the women, into submission.) But for most of us—including most of everybody who didn’t read Beah’s book or Kamara’s, or who missed Blood Diamond, this will all seem impossibly distant both from our normal frames of reference and the regular scope of our interests. That, however, is not at all how I believe ordinary Americans such as ourselves should relate to these events and particularly to Taylor’s conviction and sentencing.

Liberia, most of us will recall having learned somewhere along the way, is the state in West Africa founded in 1847 by freed black American slaves supported by such American political luminaries as Henry Clay and President James Monroe who believed that the ultimate solution regarding slavery in America was not to emancipate the slaves and make of them American citizens but to repatriate the slaves back to Africa and support their efforts at self-government on their ancestral continent. (The 1816 founding of the American Colonization Society, devoted to fostering support for the repatriation movement and also known as The Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, was one of the truly pivotal moments in the history of antebellum slavery. It’s a fascinating story too, one with profound implications for the subsequent history of race relations in America told in detail and with great authority by Eric Burin in his book, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society, published by the University of Florida Press in 2008.) Sierra Leone, most readers will know even less about. It’s right there between Liberia and Guinea, about as far south on its side of the Atlantic as Puerto Rico on the other, but it hardly looms large in the political awareness of most Americans. Home to about six million citizens and one of the world’s major sources of diamonds and gold, the country is nevertheless not at all a prosperous place in which a full 70% of the population lives in poverty. Together, Sierra Leone and Liberia occupy a corner of the world most Americans rarely think about and almost never visit. For most of us, West Africa and its exotically named countries are just…there.

Was Taylor truly evil or just crazy? The dignified man in a blue suit and a yellow necktie in the defendant’s box at the Hague on Wednesday certainly didn’t seem like an insane war criminal. Rather like Eichmann in Jerusalem, Taylor seemed like a mid-level bureaucrat, not at all like the kind of person who—according to testimony during the trial—once forced an aide to demonstrate his loyalty to his leader by eating a human heart, or who would order or authorize the intentional mutilation of children. But that, of course, is just the point: when divested of the political and military platforms that grant them their power over others, all of these types seem harmless because, finally impotent, they truly are powerless. Indeed, just as was the case in Jerusalem in 1962, the testimony itself—in Eichmann’s case specifically regarding the annihilation of Hungarian Jewry—seems beyond belief, and almost impossible to connect with the actual man on trial for crimes that for the vast majority of normal men and women would be unimaginable even to dream up, let alone to carry out. But that, I believe, is part of the lesson to be learned from contemplating Charles Taylor’s fall: that there is no bottom line to the evil regular men and women can devise and carry out when, loosed from their ethical moorings, they abandon all pretense at virtue or at moral decency. That was certainly true of Eichmann and, on a scale only smaller in terms of the final numbers of victims but not in terms of the savagery and depravity involved, it is also true of Charles Taylor. That, I believe, is the lesson to be learned from this week’s events in the Hague.

Taylor himself will soon enough be yesterday’s news. By prior agreement, he will be detained in Holland for as long as the appeals process drags on. (This, it was reported earlier in the week, could easily take a full year.) And then, assuming his conviction and his sentence are upheld, he will spend the rest of his life—he would have to live to be 114 years old to be set free in fifty years—in a British prison. So his story is as over, practically speaking and assuming the appeals process does not result in his conviction being overturned, as Eichmann’s was after his execution. From neither will the world hear again. But it is crucial, I believe, not only to recall their stories, but to insist that their legacy of crime and punishment be remembered not only by ourselves, but by our children and grandchildren as well.

It is encouraging that Taylor was tried by an international tribunal—the judges themselves came from Uganda, Ireland, and Samoa—because it only seems right that crimes committed on this scale, even though the victims in this specific case were citizens of one single country, should be considered crimes against humanity as a whole. The case currently being prepared at the International Criminal Court against Laurent Gbagbo, the former president of Côte d’Ivoire now accused of a long list of inhuman acts including the rape and murder of civilians, is scheduled to move forward later this month. And the court has issued an arrest warrant for Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the sitting president of Sudan, for crimes committed against the civilian population in Darfur, where approximately 300,000 citizens have died and another two and a half million citizens have been dislocated in the fighting over these last years. All these are good things.

The International Criminal Court came into existence in 2002 as a permanent tribunal to prosecute individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Although it is true that the United States voted against the Rome Statute of 1998 that established the court out of a sense that it would permit the prosecution of American citizens for alleged crimes committed on the territory of their own country and would thus constitute an infringement of those citizens’ civil right to be tried in an American court, then signed it anyway, then “unsigned” it, we should not dismiss the good the court has done to date. (Israel also “unsigned” the Rome Statute after signing it, as has Sudan.) Nor should we condemn the court’s work merely because it was created at an international conference proposed and sponsored by the United Nations, an organization with which it has, as far as I understand, only historical ties. In the case of Charles Taylor, a criminal with the blood of hundreds of thousands on his hands was brought to justice, and that surely has to count for something! Perhaps, it strikes me, we have reached a reasonable compromise: the rights of American citizens to be free from the threat of prosecution by foreign bodies is safeguarded by our refusal to remain signatories to the Rome Accord and countries like Sierra Leone that acting on their own would never be able to bring a man like Taylor to justice have a court to which they can turn for justice. That doesn’t sound to me like such a bad outcome at all!

Shavuot 2012

Shavuot begins Saturday evening. Our least famous “big” holiday, Shavuot lacks even a reasonable English name: Passover is pretty much exactly Pesach and Tabernacles is at least a bad translation of Sukkot (although, not knowing any nineteenth century preachers, I have never actually heard anyone call it that), but Shavuot doesn’t even have a bizarre English name for people not to call it by. The word shavuot means “weeks,” in biblical context a reference to the fact that the festival falls exactly seven weeks after Passover-Pesach, but who ever called the holiday Weeks? It was once customary in Christian circles to refer to Shavuot in English as Pentecost because that name, derived from the Greek word for “fifty,” seemed reasonably to refer to the fact that, there being forty-nine days in seven weeks, Shavuot indeed does fall on the fiftieth day after the first day of Passover. But the name Pentecost not only never caught on in this context but actually did catch on in an entirely different context to denote a Christian festival totally unrelated to Shavuot, one which falls on the day that a text in the New Testament Book of Acts marks as the day, exactly fifty days after the crucifixion, on which the spirit of prophecy descended on the disciples of Jesus. (To be more precise, “totally unrelated” is not entirely correct since, at least according to the simplest reading of the synoptic Gospels, the crucifixion took place on Passover. So the first Pentecost did indeed coincide with Shavuot. And the whole concept is clearly a reflex of an early impulse within the primitive church to make parallel the stories of the ancient Israelites and the new Christians, thus subtly to discover in Christendom the “true” Israel. Later, this denigratory impulse, existing on the boundary line between insulting and pernicious, became distinctly less subtle. But the festivals are otherwise totally unrelated. And since the church formally denounced and renounced the custom of fixing the date of Easter with reference to Passover at the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE, Shavuot and Pentecost never coincide other than by rare coincidence.)

It’s a shame that we don’t focus more intently on Shavuot, because embedded in its story are worthy principles for Jewish people even today to embrace. The story, of course, is the Torah’s account of Israel at Sinai and the festival is traditionally understood to celebrate the day on which God spoke the words of the Ten Commandments aloud from atop the mountain. It’s a hard story to embrace unequivocally. Moderns tend to respond to it by asking if it is true. It’s a good question, but, regretfully, one that cannot be answered with anything like the kind of certainty modern historians attempt to bring to bear in their discussions of other legendary events and their evaluation of those events’ actual historicity. Of course, being unable scientifically to demonstrate that something happened does not necessarily imply that it didn’t happen, merely that it cannot be proven. And to suppose that events rooted in national memory are by definition exercises in wishful national thinking is not that defensible a line of thinking with respect to events so far back in time that their historicity is as really far more unprovable than merely unproven.

So we are left wondering…but perhaps that is the point: that the holiday is meant to engender wonder rather than frustration, engagement with the tale itself absent the natural skepticism moderns tend to bring to unverifiable stories. (Just to remain with this point for a moment, we grant events in our personal histories the weight of historicity without provability all the time almost without thinking about it at all. I have no way, nor is there any way nor could there be this far after the fact, to prove that my parents bought me a red Schwinn bicycle for my ninth birthday. No receipts were preserved. I have no idea where exactly my dad went to buy it. I have no parents to present as witnesses to the event. There is, I feel certain, no possibility of any of my friends who were present possibly remembering all these years later what my parents bought me for my birthday, nor could any of them prove it even if they did recall me getting that specific bicycle on that specific day. My parents, always for some reason averse to recording things for posterity, took no home movies. There are no still photographs either. But I feel absolutely certain the event occurred. I just can’t prove it. I remember the day clearly, possibly because it was also the day Adolf Eichmann was hanged. But for the nine-year-old me the bicycle was the thing, not the day’s news from Israel. I suppose historians could prove what happened in the Ramla prison that day. But my party exists, to the extent that it exists at all, within the confines of my own recollective consciousness and nowhere else.)

And so we are left not with home movies of the Israelites at Sinai, but with a single national memory preserved in Scripture and venerated for generations as something that truly happened. The details we all know. The Israelites, safe on the far side of the Sea of Reeds, travelled further into the desert until arrived at the mysterious mountain alternately referenced in Scripture as the Mountain of God, Mount Choreiv, and Mount Sinai. Here, they set up camp, then—after being instructed by Moses how exactly to prepare themselves—washed their clothes, kept apart from their spouses, and waited for God. And then, on the third day, God finally spoke. What he said we also all know. To believe in God. Not to worship idols. Not to take false oaths in God’s name. To keep shabbos. To be respectful towards our parents. Not to murder. Not to betray our spouses’ trust. Not to steal. Not to lie in court. Not to give ourselves over to obsessive acquisitiveness. Judging from the larger narrative, God intended to keep going through the rest of the commandments, but the people, overwhelmed and not sure how much more they could take, begged Moses to intercede, to receive the rest of the revelation personally and then to reveal it to them in a less emotionally super-charged moment. Moses agreed. God stopped talking. The Torah moves on to some other material, then opens its account of the Book of the Covenant that God then proceeded to reveal to Moses atop the mountain. And so we moderns are left with the story as told…and challenged to do with it what we will.

Forty years later, Moses was still talking about it. Speaking from the edge of his own life and looking back to Sinai, he is recorded as speaking directly to the Israelites of the new generation as though they themselves had been at the foot of the mountain on “the great day on which you…approached the foot of the mountain and stood there as the mountain was ablaze with fire that rose to the heart of heaven…but also with darkness, cloud, and fog. And then did the Eternal, your God, speak to you from the midst of the fire—permitting that you hear a voice speaking words but not that you see any image at all, only that you experience the Voice—telling you of [first] ten codicils of the divine covenant that God was present to bequeath directly to you, deigning even to write them down on two stone tablets. And it was at that time as well that the Eternal commanded me to teach you the statutes and laws and to inveigh upon you actually to obey them all in the land into which you are now crossing so as soon to acquire it as your own.”

There’s something hiding behind those words, something that can provide a gateway into our own observance of Shavuot. Moses was speaking to the new generation of Israelites gathered on the plains of Moab as they prepared to enter the Promised Land. Indeed, the whole point of the decades of wandering in the desert was precisely so that the original generation of Israelites, the ones who crossed the sea and actually stood at Sinai, would die out and be replaced by their own children. So the people to whom Moses was speaking as he prepared to die were specifically not the people who approached the foot of the mountain and stood there as the mountain was ablaze with fire rising to the heart of heaven. Yet Moses speaks to them as though they had been standing there all along. Later, even further along in his final remarks, Moses will make the idea explicit by noting that there stood at Sinai both those physically present and those physically absent. Who he meant to include in the latter group is a bit obscure in that passage, but the larger context makes the meaning clear: there were those who were physically present, but the subsequent generations of as-yet-unborn Israelites were present as well…not as actual men and women, but as the disembodied souls of a nation bundled up in the bond of life everlasting outside of time past, present, and future. And it was thus to those psychically present Israel as well that Moses addressed himself, including those who would only be born in the distant future. Perhaps that was just Moses’s ancient way of nodding to the reasonableness of events existing in the recollective consciousness of a nation long millennia after they retain any trace of historical verifiability: the events in his nation’s past, he seems to be saying, will also ever exist outside of the flow of moments, similar in that to the people whose history they will eventually constitute.

So the bottom line is to stop worrying and embrace the festival as it is. Our Torah exists. Our people exists. Our recollective consciousness certainly exists. (Along with arguing, the Jewish people has elevated the maintenance of ongoing national memory to an art form.) And Shavuot also exists, returning each year in the late spring to remind us to remember that if we were not among those physically standing at the foot of Sinai, then we were surely among those psychically present…at the mountain, in the moment, embedded in the events that more than slightly paradoxically would soon become the defining experience within history of an eternal people that exists outside of time.

Bravo Appelfeld!

The other day, Aharon Appelfeld, the 80-year-old Israeli author about whom I’ve written in this space several times now, became the oldest author ever to win the prestigious Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. (The prize has that name because it was originally administered by The Independent, a British newspaper, and still called by that name even though it is now run by Booktrust, an independent British charity dedicated to promoting great books and encouraging reading in general.) He’s in very good company—a list of past nominees for the prize reads like a roster of some of my all-time favorite non-English-writing authors: Haruki Murakami, Alaa Al-Aswany, David Grossman, Amos Oz, Orhan Pamuk, even the late José Saramago (whose books I really did enjoy thoroughly until his extreme, one-sided anti-Israelism made it impossible for me to read his books neutrally or calmly).

The specific book for which Appelfeld won the prize was Blooms of Darkness, a novel I wrote to you at length about in October, 2010, comparing it there to Ken Follett’s Fall of Giants. (If you are reading this electronically, you can find my comments here.) But today I’d like to write about the man’s larger body of work, and recommend his books to all of you more generally. Any who have yet to read one of his books are in for a rare treat. But those of you who have only read a few of his books should consider undertaking a read-through of the whole corpus (or rather, please God, the whole corpus to date). Appelfeld’s books are all short. His prose is spare, even in places austere. He has the uncanny ability, so rare in novelists (and yes, yes, even rarer in rabbis), to say more by saying less, always to remember that the deepest emotions can be stirred far more effectively with a feather than with a literary sledgehammer.

Appelfeld’s entire body of work is about the Shoah in one way or the other. He himself was a child survivor, having been born in Czernowitz, today part of Ukraine. When the Romanian army invaded in 1941, his mother was murdered. He and his father were deported to a concentration camp, but he somehow managed to escape almost immediately after arriving and, despite the fact that he was all of eight years old in 1941, managed somehow to survive in hiding for three years. Then, at age eleven, he somehow ended up working for the Red Army as a child cook. When the war finally ended, he was still not bar-mitzvah age. But he was old enough to be interned in a displaced persons camp in Italy, where he had a series of formative experiences about which he has written repeatedly and rivetingly. In 1946, he immigrated to Palestine, only then to learn that his father too had somehow survived. One of the holes in the story as related through his thirty-seven novels—as justifiable as it is lamentable—has to do with their eventual reunion in British Palestine: even after all these years, Appelfeld—whose 2003 autobiography, The Story of a Life, detailed his experiences during and after the war—has never written about their reunion. Nor, I suspect, will he ever. Some things, apparently, are beyond the written word. Perhaps it takes a writer of Aharon Appelfeld’s enormous talent to know where the edge of literary expressibility truly lies.

One of the features of Appelfeld’s writing that has spoken the most deeply to me personally over the years has been his repeated efforts to describe the Shoah through the eyes of children. As noted above, he himself was a child when he lived through his own wartime experiences. In a sense, his body of literary work could be characterized as an extended midrash on that detail, on what it could possibly mean for a child to witness what adults themselves found and find unfathomable. It is that specific aspect of his writing that I’d like to write about today.

Blooms of Darkness is about a child, probably not unlike the author, whose middle class existence within the Jewish community of a large European city abruptly ends with the onset of the war. His father disappears, but just as any eleven-year-old would, Hugo lacks the insight into the larger picture to understand the true scope of the disaster that has befallen his people and his city and his family. His mother, frantic with worry, embarks on a complicated crusade to find a Gentile—any Gentile at all—who will risk his or her life to hide her little boy from his would-be murderers. One plan after another falls through, but then she somehow comes into contact with a childhood friend, a Ukrainian woman named Mariana, who agrees to harbor the boy. What Hugo’s mother appears not fully to understand—although we never find out if that really is the case or if she just wills herself not to know, or perhaps not to care—is that Mariana is not only a prostitute, but one who lives (and not merely works) in a brothel, the exclusive clients of which are now German soldiers. Hugo can pass, however. He speaks Ukrainian. He looks enough like he could possibly be Mariana’s nephew for the subterfuge plausibly to work. In any event, he never leaves her bedroom, never steps outside, remains as still as possible for most of the day. He doesn’t move around. He barely breathes. As the months pass, and then the years, Mariana becomes all of Hugo’s world. But his presence becomes an important factor in her life as well, and she too grows dramatically because of their relationship. As Hugo approaches puberty, his feelings undergo just the kind of complicated metamorphosis that you would expect would characterize a boy growing to maturity with no friends around with whom to compare notes (and, indeed, with no male companions of any sort), no parents, and only a single woman as his friend and mentor. And then the war ends, the Germans flee, the Red Army occupies the town…and begins its concerted effort to root out collaborators, specifically including all women who granted comfort to the enemy during the occupation.

At the end of the book, Hugo is all alone in the world. His friends are all gone. His parents are gone. Marina herself too is gone, never to return. Somehow, Hugo comes to realize that the prison by the front gate of which he has been waiting for Marina to emerge is not actually that far from his parents’ old apartment. And so he embarks on a walk to his old home, the description of which has to be one of the finest, most moving pieces of writing about the Shoah I’ve ever read, one as overwhelming as it is understated.

Appelfeld could not have deserved his prize more. But there are others of his books to recommend to you as well. All Whom I Have Loved, published in 1999 in Hebrew and then in 2007 in English translation, is the story of a nine-year-old boy, Paul Rosenfeld. The book is set in 1938. Little Paul’s parents are divorced and, soon enough, they are both dead: his mother of typhus (after being abandoned by her second husband, a Gentile who seems to represent the false promise of security vaguely offered to the Jews of Europe by modernity itself) and his father shot down while trying to prevent the robbery of a Jewish shop. And then, like Hugo, little Paul is alone in the world, facing unimaginable events without anything even remotely like the perspective necessary to interpret them.

Appelfeld’s description, then, of an orphaned child facing a cataclysm the dimensions of which he cannot even begin to fathom becomes the author’s model for conceptualizing the situation of European Jewry in 1938. These books are painful to read, obviously. But they are also endlessly illuminating, thus also deeply satisfying. In an interview in the Israeli newspaper Globus in 2007, Appelfeld said “I have written forty books and every single one is part of the story of my own life. All my books are linked to each other and differ only in that they explore different corners of my own history.” The little boys in all these books, then, are the author. And, of course, they are also all of us….grown-up children, trying to fathom the unfathomable and nevertheless to find a place in the world in which to flourish.

Not all of Appelfeld’s “children” are boys. A third book worth mentioning is Tzili, the story of a young girl in war-torn Europe. When the front approaches her home, her parents run off and leave her to guard the house. When she herself flees, there begins a serious of adventures that form the core of the narrative: her stay with an aging prostitute named Katerina who is capable of kindness but also of great cruelty to her basically unwanted visitor, her subsequent stay with a family of peasants who see nothing wrong with beating her for the slightly infraction of their family’s rule, her encounter with a Jewish man named Mark who has escaped from one of the camps and with whom Tzili finally finds love (and pregnancy, which ends in miscarriage) but who eventually leaves her, and finally her aliyah to British Palestine on a ship packed full of rootless, identiless people like herself who can only hope that they will find in each other’s company the companionship, understanding, and security the world has never really offered any of them. It’s the rare male author who can write of a woman’s journey to adulthood like this. Men and women are similar, obviously, in many ways. But it is precisely the ways in which they differ that constitute the greatest challenge for any author attempting to write someone else’s story when that someone is of the opposite gender. Appelfeld, I think, gets Tzili Kraus down perfectly, though, writing about her coming of age—and specifically the onset of menstruation and her first attempts to understand physical love—in a way that stays with me still, even though I read the book fifteen years ago. The sign of a truly great author, after all, lies precisely in the ability to make of every character in every book some sort of literary midrash of his or her own psyche and nevertheless for the description of them as men and women in their own right to ring perfectly true. And it is that specific talent that, in my opinion, constitutes Appelfeld’s greatest gift.

One final book I’d like to write about, also about a young person, is Laish. Set outside of time, this peculiar—but ultimately very satisfying—novel reads like an extended fable. Laish is a boy of fifteen, an orphan who has somehow ended up as part of a caravan of Jews shlepping through Eastern Europe on their way to Jerusalem, where they are convinced they will find the solutions to all of their problems and the cures of all of their physical and psychological illnesses. On the way, they are beset by endless woes. Some are pious students of Torah whose lives, even under the worst circumstances, are bounded by prayer and ritual. Some of them are scurrilous criminals whose daily lives are given over to violence, extortion, and theft. Some are their resigned victims. And still others are idiots who cannot really fathom the point of the journey, yet who seem unable simply to give up and settle where they are. No towns are given names; we never really know where these people are or what year this is. All we learn is that they are following a river, the Prut, because they believe it will take them to Palestine, to Jerusalem. (The Prut is a real river that, beginning in the Carpathian Mountains, traveling along the border between Romania and Moldova, and eventually emptying into the Danube, most certainly does not lead to the Middle East.) Laish speaks for himself, but he also narrates for the others; this is a first-person narrative about a young man telling his own story by telling other people’s stories. Alternately violent and soothing, the point of the book is to describe the journey of the Jewish people itself towards salvation, towards Israel. At first feeling at sea, readers—or at least Jewish readers—will eventually find themselves in the book as they realize that one of the traveler’s portraits mirrors his or her own life story more than slightly. But, like all great novels, this is as much a book about the human condition as it is specifically about the people whose story it reveals. I recommend it highly: for a novel that overtly has nothing to do at all with the Holocaust, Laish is nevertheless an exceptionally powerful contribution to Shoah literature because within its pages lies a portrait of European Jewry on the eve of destruction that both could not be less flattering and yet somehow which also draws readers in and invites them to travel along with this motley crew of thieves, rabbis, and children on their way to the future of the Jewish people on the other side of an abyss none of them can see and which surely none of them could ever begin even remotely to imagine.

There are a lot of other books by Aharon Appelfeld I could recommend. The Healer, The Iron Tracks, Badenheim 1939, and Age of Wonders come to mind. (Age of Wonders I would like especially to recommend as one of Appelfeld’s true tours de force, a comment on Jewish reality that no one who reads will ever forget). Appelfeld has won all his awards—the Israel Prize, the Bialik Prize, the Prix Médicis in France, the National Jewish Book Award here in the U.S., the Nelly Sachs Prize in Germany—so, at least in a sense, this last one is just a bit more icing on the man’s cake. But it is also satisfying to see one of our greatest authors, now a full half-century into his career, still being recognized for his work both inside and outside Israel. We should all be proud! If any of you has yet to start reading through the oeuvre, this is surely the right moment to begin.