Lamed-E

A Quarterly Journal of Politics and Culture

Selected and Edited by Ivan L Ninic
________________________________________________________________________
Spring 2014

Number 22

either very or somewhat emotionally attached to

Israel. That means any discussion about observant
Jews who are anti-Zionists is, by definition, one about
a very tiny minority. But considering that three of the
five Jews whose views are featured in the piece seem
to fall into the category of Modern Orthodox, of
whom 99 percent told Pew they were very or
somewhat attached to Israel with one percent saying
not very attached and zero percent not at all
attached, the trio constitute a sample of a group that
is not merely a minority but one so small that it is
statistically insignificant.

NEGEV
Spring 2014
"The desert shall rejoice and blossom as
the rose"

(Isaiah 35, 1)

Once that is understood, it becomes clear that one

of the main failings of the article is not only the fact
that its author has no interest in challenging their
views but that it fails to put that fact in proper
perspective. The Orthodox trio and the one Conservative Jew and one Reconstructionist movement
rabbi (whose views may not be all that out of the
ordinary among that small left-leaning demographic)
highlighted are a peculiar minority. But the
willingness of the paper to give them such favorable
attention illustrates once again the falsity of the notion
that it takes courage for Jews to oppose Israel. To the
contrary, as was made clear last week by the
controversy over two Manhattan rabbis who defied
many of the congregants by signing a letter
denouncing the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC), those Jews who publicly
denounce Israel can always look forward to the
applause of the mainstream media.

Why Anti-Zionist Jews

Are a Minority
By Jonathan S. Tobin
It is a principle of journalism that news consists of
those events that are out of the ordinary. The old
clich is that when man bites dog, its news. A dog
biting a man is not. Thus, the conceit of the New York
Times Beliefs column feature on Friday met that basic
standard for newsworthiness. A story about religious
Jews who actively oppose the existence of the State of
Israel is one in which it must be conceded that the
subjects are unusual.

While this quintet are entitled to their views about

Israel and appear to be none the worse for wear for
being so determined to flout the views of their coreligionists, two aspects of the article are particularly
objectionable. One is the articles assumption that
there is something remarkable about the fact that they
are able to go about their business while living in a
Jewish community and attending synagogue without
much trouble. The second is the failure of the piece to
acknowledge that the views their subjects express are
inherently bigoted.

The Pew Research Center of U.S. Jews published in

October reported that 91 percent of Orthodox Jews, 88
percent of Conservative Jews, and even 70 percent of
those who identified themselves as Reform Jews are
1

universalism is the parochialism of the Jews. But it

takes a particularly perverse kind of universalism to
say that Jews should have fewer rights than other
peoples.

It should be acknowledged that the article is correct

when it states that prior to 1948, support for Zionism
was not universal among American Jews. Many Jews,
especially those affiliated with classic Reform
temples, viewed it as a threat to the rights of
American Jews to be treated as equal citizens in the
United States. The reason the adherents of that view
declined from minority status to statistical insignificance is that Israels creation did no such thing.
To the contrary, the creation of a Jewish state only a
few years after the Nazis and their collaborators had
killed nearly one third of the Jews on the planet
engendered the respect of other Americans as well as
enhancing the self-esteem of every Jew in the world
whether he or she was religious or a Zionist.

But what is particularly disingenuous about the

Times article is the unwillingness to hold its subjects
accountable for the thinly veiled anti-Semitism that
often masquerades as anti-Zionism in contemporary
debates. Groups like Jewish Voices for Peacewhich
is supported by one of the quintetarent content to
support liberal Israelis or to criticize Israels
government. Instead it seeks to wage economic
warfare on Israel in order to destroy it. If the only
imperfect state that is seen as worthy of such a fate is
the one Jewish onerather than the many others
founded on national or religious principlesthen it is
clear that the driving force behind anti-Zionism is
prejudice and not concern about human rights.
Websites like Mondoweiss, to which one of the five
contributes, similarly trades in anti-Jewish stereotypes
in its campaign against Zionism.

Israel gained its independence because the Jews had

a right to sovereignty in their ancient homeland and
not as compensation for the Holocaust. The sweat and
the blood of the Jews who built Israel and fought to
defend it earned that independence. But the Holocaust
made it abundantly clear, even to those who had never
previously given the idea their support, that without a
Jewish state to defend them, Diaspora Jews who had
not been lucky enough to make it the United States or
the other English-speaking countries that had not
succumbed to the Nazis would always be at the mercy
of violent anti-Semitism. That was just as true of Jews
who lived in Muslim and Arab countries (who were
forced to flee their homes after 1948) as it was of the
Jews of Europe. Theodor Herzls understanding of the
inevitable fate of a homeless Jewrya thesis that he
adopted after seeing Alfred Dreyfus being degraded in
Paris as a mob shouted, Death to the Jewswas
sadly vindicated by the events of the first half of the
20th century.

What the overwhelming majority of Jews know that

these five people and their adoring audience at the
Times dont is that opposition to Israels existence
as opposed to criticism of itis taking a stand against
the right of the Jewish people to life. While there is a
portion of the ultra-Orthodox community that also
holds to anti-Zionism because of their own bizarre
interpretation of Judaism (which strangely goes
unmentioned in the article), non-Haredim who do so
are fighting common sense, history, and the basic
principles of fairness. If those who adopt such
positions are a minority, it is not due to any resistance
on the part of the majority to ethics or concern for
others but because of the implausibility of their
beliefs.

Though their neighbors and fellow congregants

treat them with the toleration that Israels foes do not
extend to the Jewish state, the common failing of the
five anti-Zionist Jews in the Times story is their
failure to account for this basic historical lesson that
the rest of their community understands. One need not
support every action of the government of the State of
Israel or have no sympathy for the plight of the
Palestinians to understand that not only does Israel
have a right to exist but that its fall would endanger
the lives of its people and, by extension, Jews
everywhere. The notion put forward by one of the
subjects that non-statist Zionism would succeed was
exploded several decades ago by the refusal of Arab
opponents of the Jewish presence in Israel/Palestine to
accept Jews on any terms.

Topics: American Jewry,

Zionism, Israel, Pew Study

anti-Semitism,

Commentary

Nor does the article ask its subjects why the Jews,
of all peoples, should be asked to forgo the right to
their own country when no other nation is required to
do so. Cynthia Ozick famously wrote that

April 28, 2014

anti-

than the architect of the Final Solution. Rather than

being a garden-variety pro-Nazi, they say, the mufti
had so great an influence on the fuehrer that he might
as well have authored Nazi Germanys most demonic
project, the mass murder of European Jewry.

Did Zionism Cause the

Holocaust? A New
Biography Says Yes

The claim that al-Husaini was the hidden hand

behind Adolf Hitler is implausible, even silly. Rubin
and Schwanitz are historians with a political agenda:
They want to show that eliminationist anti-Semitism
animates the Islamic Middle East, and so they paint
al-Husaini as so devilishly anti-Semitic that he can
contend with Hitler himself.
Yet Rubin and Schwanitzs claim also has serious,
troubling implications. Where did al-Husainis
passionate hatred of Jews come from? Indisputably,
from the Jewish colonization of Palestine. So, if you
follow Rubin and Schwanitzs logicas they
themselves fail to doZionism is responsible for the
Holocaust. No Zionist colonization of Palestine would
mean no Arab anti-Semitism, which means no alHusaini, which means no Final Solution. The authors
use a historical life to advance their political reading
of the Arab-Israeli conflictwithout thinking through
the risks of loading their political agenda onto
historical analysis.

The Grand Mufti Amin Al-Husaini with the

Waffen SS in 1943.

The authors of a new history of the Grand

Mufti Amin Al-Husainis ties to Nazis fail
to carry their logic to its flawed conclusion

***
That al-Husaini was a radical anti-Semite is not the
real news in Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the
Modern Middle East. We knew that already. Though
al-Husaini was put in power by Britain, he eagerly
embraced Nazism and rivaled Hitler in his fanatical
anti-Semitismand frequently proclaimed that the
Middle East needed to rid itself of its Jews. AlHusaini spent the war years in Berlin enjoying the
high life: The Nazis put him up in luxurious fashion,
with the equivalent of a $12 million a year salary.
Hitler, who admired the mufti for his manly ardor and
his Aryan blue eyes, promised him that extermination would occur in Palestine as soon as
Rommels tanks broke through the British lines in
Egypt and rolled into Zionist territory.

By David Mikics
Back in graduate school we used to snort derisively at
the Great Man Theory of History, and not just
because of that unfashionably sexist Man. Only a
simpleton, we thought, would neglect world-historical
forces like the rising middle class or the struggling
proletariat in favor of the force of personality. But just
try imagining modern history without Mao, Lenin, or
Hitler. The really great and really terrible ones really
did change the world.
Now, in Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the
Modern Middle East, Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G.
Schwanitz advance a dark-horse candidate for the
Great Man theory: Amin al-Husaini, the Grand Mufti
of Palestine, close pal of Hitler and champion of
Islamist radicalism, and the unchallenged leader of the
Palestinians until he anointed Yasser Arafat as his
successor in 1968. If the Germans hadnt sent Lenin to
St. Petersburg in that sealed railway car, no Bolshevik
Revolution; if Hindenburg hadnt named Hitler
Chancellor, no Nazi regime. If the British hadnt made
al-Husaini Grand Mufti in 1921 in reward for his
espionage work for them, no Final Solution .

Al-Husaini met often with Eichmann and Himmler

during his tours of occupied Poland, and he helped
Eichmann escape to Argentina after the war. His most
important wartime mission was recruiting for the SS
in Bosnia. He almost certainly visited the gas
chambers in Auschwitz, a sight that seems likely to
have gladdened his heart. But for the most part, he
remained a man of vile words rather than vile deeds.
Where Rubin and Schwanitz depart from the known
historical record is in their dubious causal assertion
that Hitlers commitment to al-Husaini to keep Jews

Yes, you heard right. Rubin and Schwanitz make

the astonishing claim that al-Husaini is nothing less
3

East politics since the 1930s, right down to the present

day: The mufti made rejectionism look glorious,
paving the way for countless Arab demagogues who
trumpeted the notion that standing up to Israel and the
West is heroic, while compromise is treason. Scorning
the practical, clinging to noble but failed memories of
revolt: These became dominant ideas in Middle East
politics thanks to al-Husaini.

out of Palestine was in turn a major motivation for the

fuehrers decision, sometime in 1941, to exterminate
European Jewry. Its true, as Rubin and Schwanitz
make clear, that the mufti advocated genocide against
the Jews even before Hitler did. Like Hitler, he
thought of Jews as subhuman and evil parasites. But
the notion that al-Husaini played a key role in Hitlers
settling on the Final Solution is based on one piece of
thin hearsay evidence: comments that the controversial Hungarian Jewish leader Rudolf Kastner
attributed to Eichmanns subordinate Dieter
Wisliceny. (Rubin and Schwanitz oddly credit the
comments to Eichmann himself.)

There are a few obvious problems with Rubin and

Schwanitzs fingering of al-Husaini as the lynchpin of
Middle Eastern radicalism. Al-Husaini was never a
revered leader or teacher, much less a head of state
like Egypts Gamal Abdel Nasser. Rubin and
Schwanitz dont even try to make the case that alHusaini can compare as a source of anti-Western
doctrine to Sayyid Qutb, the intellectual spokesman
for the Muslim Brotherhood. If al-Husainis hard-line
stance really was and still is so appealing to the Arab
world, this must be due to a force more powerful than
the mufti himself. (The Arab street to this day
cherishes the idea that any concessions at all to Israel
or the West are acts of treachery.) Al-Husseinis
radicalism is significant only because it found an
answer, an echo, in Arab culture.

As Christopher Browning has argued, Hitlers

opting for genocide can much more plausibly be
traced to his exultation over what looked like a
blitzschnell conquest of Russia in midsummer 1941.
The fuehrer dropped his earlier vague notion of
getting rid of millions of Jews by shipping them
beyond the Urals; in the joy of what he thought was
victory, he set about to make his new Eastern empire
Judenfrei in the most direct and terrible way
imaginable.
Al-Husaini may not have given Hitler the idea for
the Holocaust, but his actions and words were vile
enough. In his memoirs he boasted that he had
prevented thousands of Jewish children from emigrating to Palestine in 1942 and 1943 and expressed
satisfaction that they instead headed to Poland and
death. The Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan alBanna lauded al-Husaini after the war: What a hero,
what a miracle of a man. Germany and Hitler are
gone, but Amin al-Husaini will continue the struggle.

Had the mufti embraced the White Paper, history

would have turned out just the same. The Jews would
never have accepted it, since it would have meant
being ruled by an Arab majority. Soon enough, the
Palestinians proved more amenable to Britains
sweetheart deal. Though the mufti rejected the White
Paper in 1939 in loyalty to the Arab High Committee
slogan, The Englishmen to the sea and the Jews to
the graves, the other Palestinian leaders, Amins
brother Jamal al-Husaini and Musa al-Alami,
reportedly accepted the White Paper in Baghdad the
following year (a fact oddly ignored by Rubin and
Schwanitz). And Britain appeased the Arabs even
more by slowing Jewish emigration to Palestine to a
trickle during the war, below the level allowed in the
White Paper.

Yet Rubin and Schwanitz make al-Husaini

responsible not only for the manifest evil of his own
words and deeds, but also for the Holocaustand for
the subsequent birth of Israel and the entirety of the
subsequent Arab-Israeli conflict. According to Rubin
and Schwanitz, Israel only became a reality through
the muftis rejection of the 1939 White Paper and,
later, his staunch opposition to the U.N. partition of
Palestine in 1947. If not for the muftis powerful
naysaying, they argue, Britains White Paper would
have been accepted by the Arabs, who would soon
have ruled Palestine. This was the clear promise of the
White Paper, which would have ended Jewish
emigration to Palestine after five years. After 10
years, with Arabs still in the majority, the White Paper
promised an binational state.

Continue reading: Arab sympathy with

the Nazis
Rubin and Schwanitz also bring up the Arab
rejection of the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan, which they
see as another missed Palestinian opportunity masterminded by the extremist al-Husaini, but here they are
on even shakier ground. The moment the U.N.
resolution passed, there were massive street
demonstrations in the Arab world protesting the
outrage. Arab governments went to war because the
resolution had ignited the passions of the people. The
U.N. partition plan was no bargain for the
Palestinians. Nearly half of the Palestinians would

So, without the grand mufti, no Israel. But alHusaini, Rubin and Schwanitz say, is also responsible
for the lack of peace between Israel and most of the
Arab world. According to Rubin and Schwanitz,
theres a single man behind the radicalism of Middle
4

mufti or Hitler is. The German connection does not

explain Islamic radicalism; it remains part of the
background.

have become a minority under Jewish rule; the

Zionists would have gotten over half the land,
including the best regions for agriculture, though they
were far less than half of the population. Of course,
the Arab countries might have rejected any partition
plan; but this one especially could not be defended in
the face of the intense uproar in the streets. Al-Husaini
had little to do with the Arabs decision to go to war.

Rubin and Schwanitz present their book as a

necessary look back at the past that helps us
understand the present, but the present needs a more
careful analysis, one that pays serious attention to
todays bewildering, strife-ridden Middle East. Yes,
the mufti remains a source of inspiration to those who
dream of annihilating Israel and establishing a purely
Muslim Middle East cleansed of Jews and Christians.
But that doesnt mean he changed history. There is
never a lack for prophets of violence in the Arab
world, or Islamists who look to the Nazis as models of
proper neighborly relations with Jews and with others.

***
Yet it is also a fact that sympathy with the Nazis
runs deep in the Arab world. Even now, the muftis
closeness to Hitler increases rather than diminishes his
reputation. No Arab country ever expelled a Nazi war
criminal; on the contrary, Arab regimes sheltered
thousands of ex-Nazis, many of whom were guilty of
war crimes. Nazi sympathizersNasser and his men,
Assads Baathistsruled Egypt and Syria for decades
after WWII. Nassers ex-Nazi adviser Johann von
Leers introduced him to the Protocols of the Elders of
Zion, which Nasser made a canonical text for the
Middle East. Even Anwar Sadat, who later became a
heroic maker of peace with Israel, began his career as
a Nazi collaborator, and when rumors surfaced in
1953 that Hitler was still alive, Sadat wrote a fervent
public letter declaring, I congratulate you with all my
heart, because though you appear to have been
defeated, you were the real victor. That you have
become immortal in Germany is reason enough for
pride.

The Nazi-Islamist connection doesnt explain the

staying power of Middle East extremism. What we
need to grasp instead is why, despite the hopes
aroused by the Arab Spring, the alternatives to
extremism in the Middle East remain so weak.
Muslim extremism has behind it a long tradition,
bolstered by Oppenheim and al-Husaini, among
others. But thats not what makes the pursuit of heroic
martyrdom pay off, or what renders the frightened
majority in the Arab world so incapable of taming the
terroristssecular and religiousamong them.
Irans quest for the bomb has made the question of
whether the Muslim rejection of Israel is at bottom
eliminationist properly seem urgent to many Jews and
to others who believe that genocide in the Middle East
would be a bad thing. The answer cant be found in
great men, nor was the eclipse of moderation in the
Muslim Middle East caused by personalities like alHusaini, Nasser, Arafat, Khomeini, and Assad pre
and fils. The bad guys are only the expression of
something more basic: a region splintered ethnically
and spiritually, marked by fervent religious yearning,
burning with rage against both Western meddling and
its own rulers, and in desperate need of a common
enemya role in which the Jews have always served
rather nicely.

Rubin and Schwanitz set the stage for the NaziIslamist connection with an account of Max von
Oppenheim, the subject last year of a fascinating
exchange between Walter Laqueur and Lionel
Gossman in Tablet. Oppenheim spearheaded the
German effort to spur an Islam-wide jihad during
WWI, and he continued to work for Germany in
WWII as well. (Rubin and Schwanitz claim that
Oppenheim had Jewish parents who converted to
Catholicism when he was a child; in fact, his mother
was Catholic, and his father was a Jew who had
converted to Catholicism before Oppenheim was
born. Such errors aside, the story of Germanys effort
to spark a Muslim uprising against British rule during
WWI, as well as the alliance between Germany and
the genocidal Turkish government, is grippingly told
here.)

David Mikics is the author, most recently, of Slow

Reading in a Hurried Age. He lives in Brooklyn and
Houston, where he is John and Rebecca Moores
Professor of English at the University of Houston.

Despite the overblown claims for the muftis

central role, Rubin and Schwanitz do an illuminating
job showing the extent of the partnership between
Germans and Islamists; this is by far the best part of
their book. Germany had a long history of
encouraging Jihadism even before Hitlers rise to
power. But Max von Oppenheim is not any more
responsible for 21st-century suicide bombers than the
5

The true value of this essay lies in Fincis ability to

display his own human and intellectual understanding
of a compelling rationale for killing and for not killing
the future Emperor something from which less
confident writers might shy away.
Perhaps it is all because I searched inside myself
for what kind of personality could belong to the
assassin. Or maybe because all of us, especially in
Bosnia, have felt (although in different ways) the
consequences of that event for a long time. We felt
them despite what we thought about the event and its
protagonists.
In the postscript Predrag Finci has written:
As a little boy I fell in love with a young girl,
although to me she was just an 'auntie' at the time. In
fact, she was an actress and she taught me how to
swim. She had a boyfriend, an actor called Bert Sotlar.
I felt a strong aversion to him. One day, he played
Franz Ferdinand, and when he turned the corner of a
street, I got him as Gavrilo Princip.
Aside from this entertaining admission, many key
questions are asked and answered in this essay. For
example, Finci addresses the increasingly pertinent
issue of whether the use of violence is justified when
fighting oppressive regimes, and he is prone to claim
'that every anarchist movement that uses violence
actually maltreats its own people'.
When I say this, Im not thinking so much about
what the movement actually did, but am rather
pointing to the repercussions of the ruling authorities'
behaviour towards those involved in the movement,
and the people from which the movement grew.

Thinking and Drinking

on a Gruesome Centenary
Why I Killed Franz Ferdinand and
other essays by Predrag Finci
Published by Style Writes Now

By Marija F. Sullivan
First, he considered killing the Austrian archduke,
Franz Ferdinand. Then he considered taking up
drinking.
These could be the titles of chapters from the
biography of actor-turned philosopher Predrag Finci,
who is very well known throughout former
Yugoslavia. The first essay, on thinking about killing
the Austrian archduke, is interesting from the point of
view of historical distance: what did the popular
young actor feel when he killed the archduke, 'not
once, but twice', first in a film and then in a 1968
theatre performance? And what does the mature
philosopher in exile feel about this almost half a
century later?

Finci's other essays also stand out, through the

distinctive style of the writing and through their
playful inquiry into the nature of motivation in a
hyper-consumer society and their exploration of
questions such as why do we really go to theatre and
who are the people who control things behind the
scenes. These are essays that every young actor and
theatre director should read, because they constitute
an invaluable introduction to what lies ahead in the
complex world of the arts: they challenge as well as
validate a love of the theatre.
Predrag Finci who really was born under a red, red
star, belonged in his youth to a generation of
Yugoslavs who had to inhale clouds of cigarette
smoke and drink gallons of alcohol as part of their
initiation in the world of artists and intellectuals.
And by his own admission Finci embraced this
challenge with enthusiasm. So much so that he is now
able to provide a remarkably intimate, yet
philosophically and psychologically relevant, account
of what goes on in the head of a person who is
properly drunk and he offers a compelling portrait
of the positive side of unsavoury behaviour.

Of course, with the passage of time more than one

historical truth has emerged. In communist
Yugoslavia, Gavrilo Princip was seen as a great
martyr, a sensitive young man who wrote poetry, who
cared about social justice and who simply wanted to
see all south Slavs united; and then, years later,
independent historical research found a variety of
evidence to suggest that Princips ideals were not
perhaps quite so obvious and that the organisation
behind him was rather orientated towards the interests
of Serbia.
6

I claimed that Aristotelian moderation was

physical, and that immoderateness was spiritual
yearning, yearning for the ultimate. Persuaded myself
excess should be pursued, that human conditionality
can be outgrown in ecstasy, that the sublime can be
reached. In excessiveness I want to cross over and
thus negate myself. Why am I as I am, and not
different?
In the end, it can justifiably be asked how it is
possible to bring such thematically distinct essays
together in one book: the death of an archduke
whether on stage, in film, or on the historic streets of
Sarajevo and the enjoyment of drunkenness.
By his own account, Finci not only finished off
Franz Ferdinand but killed the assassin Gavrilo
Princip too, with his bad acting. Was this an
additional motive for the artists enthusiastic research
into the benefits of drinking? Readers will draw their
own conclusions. Part of the answer might be gleaned
from the authors admission ... I felt early in the day
that I couldnt stay in the acting profession for long. I
cared much more about the world of thought, and
would not, at any point, prefer to be someone else.
In conclusion, I would like to raise a glass to the
unique philosophy of Finci as the London writer
Cathi Unsworth has characterised the essays in this
book. I have been privileged to act as midwife at the
birth of the title essay, as I was curious to see how this
gifted writer would interpret the assassination of the
archduke in the year when the centenary of this event
is being marked.

The Strange Powers of

Norman Mailer
By Edward Mendelson
Norman Mailer: A Double Life by J. Michael
Lennon
Simon and Schuster
Mind of an Outlaw: Selected Essays by Norman
Mailer, edited with a preface by Phillip Sipiora,
and an introduction by Jonathan Lethem
Random House
1
Norman Mailer was sixteen when he discovered
John Steinbeck, John Dos Passos, and James T.
Farrell and, he said later, formed the desire to be a
major writer. He was twenty-five when his first
novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948), made him
famous for its narrative force and notorious for its
army barracks vocabulary. He became the most
celebrated and most reviled American writer of his
time, a one-man industry producing stories, novels,
poems, sportswriting, essays, histories, and biographies in expansive and exhilarated prose, directing
films and plays, making headlines with his eloquent
protests against the Vietnam War, his quixotic
campaign to be mayor of New York, his outrageous
theories of race and sex, his skill as an amateur boxer,
his six marriages and uncountable affairs, and the
drunken fights, in one of which, on a bourbon-andpot-addled night, he stabbed his second wife almost to
death.
He hoped to write a novel great enough to cause a
revolution in the consciousness of our time. But his
best work was his political and cultural reportage: The
Armies of the Night (1968), Miami and the Siege of
Chicago (1968), Of a Fire on the Moon (1971), and
The Executioners Song (1979). He insisted on
marketing the last of these as fiction, although he said
it was a factual accountas accurate as one can
make it. He spent much of his life reporting facts as
if he were writing fiction, and performingfor an
audience of gossip columnists and shockable
reviewersa fictional version of his life as though it
were fact.
J. Michael Lennons biography is the first that
interprets Mailer from within, not as a public spectacle. Unlike his predecessorsMary V. Dearborn,
Peter Manso, Carl Rollyson, and othersLennon was
Mailers friend and collaborator; he has read 45,000
of his letters, and talked to an enormous population of
friends and enemies, from gangsters to editors. He
shepherds a prodigious variety of events into well-

A good friend of mine and an accomplished

writer, Cathi Unsworth, wrote the foreword, and
an Austrian born photographer Ruth Bayer took
the photo which is on the back cover of the book
Predrag Finci

with women and men. A narrator-prince, waking into

death, says, Crude thoughts and fierce forces are my
state, summarizing Mailers idea of ultimate human
reality, although Mailers own state tended to be
theoretical imaginings and bourgeois work habits that
generated his enormous output.
Mailer, Lennon reports, resolved never to write
about his childhood. As a result, he wrote only about
experiences that had been mediated through
adolescent theorizing or adult intelligence, never the
unfiltered feelings of a child. The narrator of his
second novel, Barbary Shore (1951), is an amnesiac
who seems to have been a college student and soldier
but otherwise suffers what Mailer described in his
own life as a lobotomy to my past. Mailers hero
D.H. Lawrence wrote of James Joyces later work that
it was too terribly would-be and done-on-purpose,
utterly without spontaneity or real life. Mailers later
novels tend to be done-on-purpose products of will,
unsoftened by the gifts of memory and written in
defiance of his deepest sense of himself: I, who am
timid, cowardly, and wish only friendship and
security, he wrote in a journal, am the one who must
take on the whole world.
The same archetypal impulse that blurred and
abstracted his fictional characters made his political
reportage vivid, focused, and convincing. Unlike
every other political writer of his time, Mailer
understood instinctively, without intellectual effort,
that political trends were driven by irrational
collective myths, that the public saw political leaders
as embodiments of mythical heroes. In his essay on
John Kennedys presidential campaign, Superman
Comes to the Supermarket, he wrote: There is a
subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and
romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and
violence which is the dream life of the nation.
Everyone read this as a vivid metaphor; Mailer, like a
nineteenth-century romantic nationalist, meant it
literally. He always believed that a nation such as the
United States or a people such as the Negro had a
psyche of its own, with unconscious undercurrents
that shaped its destiny. Minority groups, he wrote,
again literally, are the artistic nerves of a republic.
He believed in myths that, like all great myths from
Zeus to the modern myth of a society that has
Zeuss omnipotence, seemed to make literal sense of
reality. A myth, for someone who believes in it, is not
myth but truth.
Mailers accounts of political conventions,
campaign tours, protest marches, and swarming
journalists are his most memorable works. He
typically presents himself as an archetypal figure, the
reporter, the novelist, the observer, Aquarius,
or some other avatar of the writer-hero with a
thousand faces. He also perceived, sometimes
belatedly, that a mythical political hero could also be a

organized chapters, sometimes cluttered with

irrelevant details like the names and addresses of
movie houses where Mailer watched gangster films as
a teenager.
Lennon is the also first biographer to see that
Mailers prolific thoughts about gods, devils, and
divine forces were at the heart of his workfrom the
intimations of obscure powers in The Naked and the
Dead to the devil who narrates The Castle in the
Forest (2007). His whole career was a search for
transcendence. The sixteen-year-old Harvard freshman who hoped to be an aeronautical engineer
became the mystical prophet thundering against
technologyplastics, synthetics, birth control,
computersas a form and cause of cancer in
individuals and nations. His last book was a transcript
of his talks with Lennon, On God: An Uncommon
Conversation (2007), and Lennons biography makes
clear that the same habits of mind that kept Mailer
from writing a great novel were the ones that made
him a great journalist. Mailer was less interested in
human beings than in the quasi-divine forces they
embodied, and in the vast unconscious currents that
shaped political and cultural history.
Mailer sounded like the village gnostic when he
talked about religion, but he meant what he said. God
wasat war with the Devil, he wrote in Of a Fire on
the Moon and elsewhere. He told Lennon: It makes
sense to me that this strife between God and the Devil
has been a factor in evolution. When we act with
great energy, he said, it is because God and the
Devil have the same interest in the outcome. He was
not being metaphorical. He imagined the devils in The
Castle in the Forest as fictional characters like Anna
Karenina, semidivine persons who dont exist but
resemble those who do.
The best of Mailers novels after his firstThe
Deer Park (1955), Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967),
Harlots Ghost (1991)display more variety of style
and incident than generations of novelists normally
manage. But even these novels go more or less wrong
because he imagined his characters more as embodiments of impersonal forces than as persons. He
planned novels in which characters from The Deer
Park would become different persons in each book,
sometimes a reincarnation of an earlier self, sometimes an epiphany while encountering some lost
way-station of the divine.
Mailer said that his novel about reincarnating
pharaohs, Ancient Evenings (1983), was set in a world
before anything we know, without Moses or
Jesus, though not, apparently, without C.G. Jung or
Joseph Campbell. All the major characters are
mythical archetypesor twentieth-century notions of
archetypestemporarily occupying one or another
human body, reincarnating themselves through
vaginal sex, probing mystic depths through anal sex
8

Mailer acknowledged that she was right, although

he had mistakenly thought the first half was about
cowboys acting in manly ways, the second half about
media types acting in womanly ways. He had been
misled by archetypal fantasies about inherently manly
and unmanly actions, the same fantasies that impelled
him to fistfights and head-butting. Didion perceived
that the book was shaped by his craftsmans sense of
the ways in which womens and mens styles of
speech were shaped by social norms and conventions,
not by eternal archetypes.

calculating operator. Marilyn Monroe said of his

Hollywood novel The Deer Park that he was too
impressed by power, and he portrayed Kennedy the
candidate as the World Spirit in an open-backed
convertible. But when Kennedy was elected a few
weeks later, Mailer, fearing he had apotheosized an
opportunist, felt a sense of woe.
Mailer was unique in combining mythological
imaginings with left-wing politics. Writers like W.B.
Yeats and Ezra Pound who saw the world through
archetypal myths tended to favor reactionary fantasies
about natural hierarchies and golden-souled leaders.
Writers tempted by archetypes but who refused the
temptation, like Virginia Woolf and W.H. Auden,
aligned themselves with the rational, egalitarian left.
Mailer was a mythologizer who was passionate
against injustice, and his double perspective opened
his way to become the first American able, on
occasion, to write about his country with the prophetic
depth and precise observation of Tocqueville.
Mailer did his best reporting in the 1960s, when
American politics resembled a Wagnerian apocalypse.
He had less to say, and felt much out of step, from
the 1970s to the 1990s, when cynical technocrats took
charge and politics seemed opaque to the mythical
imagination. Then, on September 11, 2001, as he
wrote in these pages, gods and demons were
invading the US, coming right in off the TV screen.
It was as if untold divine forces were erupting in
fury. As the Bush administration began shining its
costume armor for a new crusade, Mailer, now in his
seventies, wrote again with all his old energy and
insight.
Much of the left explained the Iraq war as
Kissingeresque realpolitik; Mailer, while acknowledging that a grab for oil was part of the story, recognized
the theological impulses that drove Bush, Rumsfeld,
and Wolfowitzthe undisclosed logic at the root
of flag conservatismbecause those impulses were
distorted versions of his own. Myths are tonic to a
nations heart, he wrote, but once abusedthey are
poisonous. Sometimes he was the abuser. He wrote
an essay that made all the rational and moral
arguments against capital punishment with force and
clarity, but concluded that state-sponsored killing
may be one of our last defenses against the oncoming
wave of the computer universe.
The Executioners Song is the best of his books
partly because he forced himself to hold back from
mythologizing and write about murder and misery in a
stark, almost unornamented style. Joan Didion
observed that the first half of the book was spoken
mostly by women constrained to a local domestic
world, the second half by men who move in the
larger world and believe that they can influence
events.

2
Norman Mailers mother was born in Lithuania
shortly before her family emigrated to New Jersey and
went into business running hotels for Jewish
vacationers. Mailers father, whose parents had
emigrated from Lithuania to South Africa, was born in
Johannesburg, moved to Brooklyn as a young man,
and met Mailers mother at her familys hotel. Their
son was born in 1923 and grew up first in New Jersey,
then in Brooklyn, always in a climate of lies.

Frank Fournier/Contact Press Images

Norman Mailer and Norris Church Mailer,
New York City, May 1983
His father was a womanizer and a secret
compulsive gambler. His mother subtracted ten years
from her age and said she was born in America. She is
the most consistently baleful figure in Lennons
biography, refusing help for a faked heart attack until
her daughter renounced a gentile boyfriend, telling
reporters after Mailer stabbed his wife, My boys a
genius, explaining to another wife that he needed
more love than other men, telling him that she prayed
while nursing him, Please God, make him a great
man some day, and descending periodically with new
supplies of narcissism for him to mainline. Mailer said
she never left his father because doing so would
interfere with the largestwork of her life, which
happened to be me.
Encouraged by her, he wrote a 35,000-word novel
when he was eleven, then abandoned writing until he
found his vocation when a Harvard English professor
assigned Farrells Studs Lonigan, Dos Passoss
9

doors of perception at the same time he was seeking

the mythical depths beneath the daily headlines.
In 1955, higher than usual on pot, Mailer had
nothing less than a vision of the universe. Lennon
writes: His atheism withered and belief took hold,
belief in a God who was not all-powerful, an
existential God, who, as Mailer wrote, is in danger
of dyingwho can suffer from a moral corruption.
I believe in it, he insisted. Its the only thing that
makes any sense to me. He cared nothing about
modern Judaism, which seemed a shell emptied of its
ancient visionary energiesand he wrote a curious
sport of a novel narrated by Jesus, The Gospel
According to the Son (1997)but he was excited by
medieval Jewish mysticism and wrote essays about
the Hasidic tales.
The first fruit of his belief was his theory of the
hipster, expounded in his 1957 essay The White
Negro (published in the otherwise unimaginative
pages of Dissent, the left-wing anti-Stalinist quarterly
edited by Irving Howe), and later in interviews,
reviews, and fictions. Today, when hipster means a
submissive herd-follower attuned to the latest gadgets,
it is hard to remember that Mailer, only slightly
exaggerating its contemporary meaning, popularized
an image of the hipster as a lonely knight of the spirit
attuned to archetypal currents undetectable by the
square, like an exiled Obi-Wan Kenobi sensing a deep
disturbance in the Force. The hipster is both a
theologian who conceives of Mans fate being tied
up with Gods fate and a philosophical psychopath
whose drama is that he seeks love through an
apocalyptic orgasm that has much in common with
the thrill of mere psychopathic violence.
The sentence in The White Negro that caused the
most outrage was one in which Mailer attributed
courage of a sort to two hoodlums who risked their
future by killing a storekeeper. (Readers inferred that
the killers were black and the victim Jewish, though
Mailer identified neither.) The hoodlum is therefore
daring the unknown, and so no matter how brutal the
act it is not altogether cowardly. Mailer, here and
elsewhere, made the aesthetes perennial error of
confusing the bravery or intensity of an action with its
merit. His argument has been defended by citing T.S.
Eliot on Baudelaireit is better, in a paradoxical
way, to do evil than to do nothingbut an argument
is no less muddled because Eliot happened to make it.
For the next few decades, against all the evidence of
his experience, Mailer still imagined that some
extreme drglement de tous les sens, brought about
by drugs, drink, or violence, would reveal the deep
instinctive truths promised by his religious ideas.
Reality kept knocking him to the mat, but he always
sprang up again, punching his way to transcendence.
The nadir of Mailers quest for intensity occurred in
1960 during a party at which he had planned to

U.S.A., and Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath. Shortly

after graduating in 1943 he published a story in a
commercial anthology, married for the first time, was
drafted into the army, and endured the Pacific island
battles that he fictionalized in The Naked and the
Dead.
Everyone read the book as if it belonged to the
realistic tradition of Farrell and Dos Passos, but
Mailer said he had been on a mystic kick when he
wrote it. He told his editor, There are going to be
troubling terrifying glimpses of order in disorder, of a
horror which may or may not lurk beneath the surface
of things. The characters include the first of many in
his work whose evil impulses open them to primitive
glimpses of a structure behind things, who live on
the edge of a deeper knowledge. The book also
includes the first of many ordeals in his fiction and his
life in which men test themselves by walking along a
dangerous, narrow ridge. The one who fails the test in
The Naked and the Dead is the college-educated,
recently married Jewish boy.
Mailer had thought of himself as an atheist, neither
proud nor ashamed to be Jewish, but nauseated by
the Jewish marriage ceremony that his mother
demanded after he married his first wife secretly. The
glimpses of deep knowledge in The Naked and the
Dead were reflections of Oswald Spenglers
determinist history in The Decline of the West, which
had the same overpowering effect on Mailer that it has
had on many bright, susceptible teenagers.
The Naked and the Dead glanced toward an
American future in which centralized control would
masquerade under a conservative liberalism, but the
book had little else to say about partisan politics.
Mailer, meanwhile, had thrown himself into left-wing
politics, speechmaking for Henry Wallaces
presidential campaign in 1948, then losing faith in
Wallaces Soviet-leaning fellow-traveling. In 1949
Mailer was cheered when he stood up to speak at the
Stalinoid (Dwight Macdonalds word) Waldorf
Conference in New York, and booed when he sat
down, having said that the Soviet and American sides
were both moving toward state capitalism and that
there was no future in fighting for either. But he
remained committed to the anti-Stalinist left.
Barbary Shore was Mailers first attempt to write
about politics as myth. Vast ideological forces are
embodied in individual persons in a shabby rooming
house, authority and nihilism stalking one another in
the orgiastic hollow of this century, as he described
them later. The Soviet Union, never named, is the
mythical-sounding land across the sea. Lennon
implies that Mailer took up drink and marijuana,
joined by his second wife Adele Morales, to find
comfort after the critical failure of this book, but it
seems likely that he was using them to push open the

10

authority that Mailer despised. At the same time that

Mailer was praising Abbots search for inviolability, Abbot, in circumstances that are still
unclear, was colluding with the warden and the United
States attorney. Mailer brought Abbott to New York,
and when he murdered in New York, Lennon reports,
it was no consolation to Mailer that he would likely
have murdered somewhere else if Mailer had never
heard of him. Mailer never wrote again about
psychotic hipsters.

announce his mayoral campaign. Drunk and stoned,

he spent the evening hitting friends with his fists and
other convenient objects. Around four in the morning
he got into a shouting match with Adele and stabbed
her twice with a penknife, once in the back, once in
the chest.
Lennon quotes Mailers late, sanitized recollection
of the stabbing as an edgy performance that
unpredictably went wrong. He only intended, he says,
to nick Adele lightly, but accidentally came within a
fraction of an inch of her heart. Lennon then lists
sensationalized thirdhand reports from Gore Vidal,
Evelyn Waugh, and George Plimpton, his point being
that Mailer should not be judged according to fictions.
But he ignores the only other firsthand report, by the
victim herself, although it seems consistent with
everything else known about that night. Adele (in The
Last Party, 1997) remembers a stranger and her
husband standing over her:
My God, man, he said to Norman, what have
you done? Weve got to get her to a hospital.
I felt Norman kick me. Get away from her, let
the bitch die.
Norman grabbed the guy, punching him, as they
wrestled all over the room.
Lennon tends to portray Mailers life as a sequence
of disconnected events, and his account of the months
after the stabbing describes Mailer as quietly picking
himself up and resuming work: He was mending.
Mailers last wife, Norris Church Mailer, suggests a
more plausible and sympathetic version. Mailer, she
writes in her memoir A Ticket to the Circus (2010),
could pull himself out of the grasp of mental illness
by an act of willpower and come back to win Pulitzer
Prizes and lead a good life.
Norris Church Mailer is a better guide than Lennon
to another much-reported episode, when Mailer
championed the prison writings of Jack Henry Abbott,
a murderer who was paroled in 1981 and enjoyed six
weeks of celebrity in New York before stabbing to
death a waiter who told him that his restaurant had no
public restroom. Lennon and Norris both report that
Abbott had not been released on Mailers recommendation, but because he was a stool pigeon who
fingered prisoners and lawyers who organized a work
stoppage and allegedly dealt drugs. Norris adds the
crucial detail that Mailer knew nothing of Abbotts
continuing record of violence or the warnings by
prison psychiatrists that he was paranoid and capable
of sudden violence.
Lennon blurs the extent to which Mailer was
manipulated by Abbotts rhetorical skill. Abbott
portrayed himself in his letterspublished with
Mailers help as In the Belly of the Beast (1981)as,
in effect, the true hipster whom Mailer had only
imagined, a victim driven to fierce, hardly contained,
almost visionary anger by the impersonal state

3
J. Michael Lennon is Mailers literary executor, and
admirably fulfills his obligations to his memory.
Sometimes he overstates Mailers achievements.
Among the intoxicating ideas he serves up as twohundred-proof Mailer, many are in fact bourbon-andLawrence. Mailer on the psychic tendrils of the
womb and its waves of communication to some
conceivable source of life is an echo of Lawrences
vision of the solar plexus in Fantasia of the
Unconscious. Mailers excremental romanticism (the
anus as a center of power, feces as the riches of
Satan) copies the Excurse chapter in Women in
Love. Mailers fantasies about the psychosomatic
etiology of cancer derive from Georg Groddeck via
Wilhelm Reich. In each instance, Mailer used more
words than his sources and said less.
Lennons account of Mailers sex life as a greathearted Don Juan with women waiting in every city
has a whiff of leering admiration that inspires
skepticism. Norris Church Mailer tells a more
plausible story. Both she and Lennon describe the
awkward moment when she met Mailers Chicago
girlfriend, but only Norris adds the detail that the
woman was his age if not older; she wore a gray wig,
was about five feet tall, and must have weighed two
hundred and fifty pounds or more. When Norris
asked what had attracted him, Mailer said that
sometimes he needed to be the good-looking one.
Forty years earlier, the narrator of Barbary Shore
lusted after an undeniably short and stout older
woman; in bed with a young slender one, he
performed without tenderness or desire.
Norris later learned that Mailers other secret lovers
resembled the one in Chicago and although Norris
doesnt mention it, the photos she prints of Mailers
mother fit the same description. In public, meanwhile,
Mailer provoked masculine envy by squiring beauties
and presented himself as a prophet of sexual energy
that broke social constraints. His real sexuality seems
to have been the opposite, a lifelong performance by
an actor hungry for applause from two audiencesa
public one impressed by his books and wives, and the
audience in his mind that wanted to see himself as the
adored good-looking one. At thirty he wrote in his
journal that his desires were the polymorphous wishes
of infancy: I, whose sexual nature is to cling to one
11

bullfighters. She came on for her moment of truth

by saying, He told me your whole life is a lie, and
you do nothing but run away from the homosexual
that is you.
And like a real killer, she did not look back, and
was out the door before I could rise to tell her that she
was a hero fit for me.
Mailer, as Lennon observes, wrote relatively little
criticism, but he wrote about books and films with an
unforced enthusiasm unlike anything else in his work.
The selected essays in Mind of an Outlaw include
splendid examples such as his joyful bumper-car
collisions with rival novelists in Quick Evaluations
on the Talent in the Room and Some Children of the
Goddess, and his scene-by-scene dissection of Last
Tango in Paris, written (for these pages) somewhat in
the mood of Shakespeares Theseus delighting in the
earnest awfulness of Pyramus and Thisby. He slipped
critical judgments into almost everything he wrote.
Denouncing modern synthetics, he listed fiberglas,
polyethylene, bakelite, styrene, styronware. The last
of these was his trade name for William Styrons
novels.
In 2007, a few months before he died at eightyfour, Mailer visited his San Francisco lover during a
publicity tour. They met in the hotel restaurant and
talked about his surgeries. Then he asked, Would you
like to come up to the room? She declined: If I
come up, Ill fall asleep. He replied that he would
too, perhaps still hoping to cling drowsily to a woman
like a child embracing the universe.

woman like a child embracing the universe, am driven

by my destiny to be the orgiast, or at least the
intellectual mentor of orgiasm.
Part of his performance as mentor of orgiasm was
his theorizing about the hipsters search for an
orgasm more apocalyptic than the one which preceded
it. The hipster pursued that orgasm through acts of
dominance, but the extreme contradictions of the
society which formed his character made it as
remote as the Holy Grail. Could the hipster attain
apocalyptic orgasm, he would experience a visionary
ecstasy of power. Mailers theories about hipsters
ignored all the testimony of literature and life that
describes sexually induced visionary experiences,
whatever play of dominance leads up to them, as
visions of gratitude, equality, and awe.
Mailer knew all this when he wrote about real
personsincluding himself when he was writing
privately in his journalinstead of mythical hipsters.
For D.H. Lawrence, sexual transcendence was
some ecstasy where he could losehis sense of self
and his will. Lawrence achieved ecstasy through
dominance over women, but because he was
physically weak, psychological dominance was not
tyranny to him but equality. Mailers sense of
himself as the good-looking one was for him the
form of dominance that, by balancing his inner
weakness, made equality possible.
Mailers friends wondered why he encouraged
attacks on himself from women outraged by his
theories, as he did at Town Hall in 1971 when he
moderated a Dialogue on Womens Liberation that
he knew would be a well-publicized assault. He was
performing a role that required a large supporting cast
of antagonists; the more women felt provoked by him,
the more masculine he seemed to himself. His
provocations had some unwanted effects. Germaine
Greer was on the panel with him at Town Hall;
afterward, he had to flee from a taxi to escape being
dragged into bed by her, according to Lennon, but not
Greer.
Mailer always acknowledged in indirect ways that
he was the loser in the sexual wars he provoked. The
Time of Her Time (1959) is the notorious story in
which Sergius OShaugnessya character from The
Deer Park, now a hipster somehow earning his living
as a bullfighting instructor in Greenwich Village
brings a repressed college student to her first orgasm
through anal and vaginal sex with the organ that
Sergius calls my avenger. As attentive readers
noticed, Sergius finally provokes the girl to orgasm by
whispering in her ear, You dirty little Jew
psychologically effective but scarcely a triumph of the
avenger. At the end the girl proves to be the matador,
Sergius the fallen bull:
I could see the look in her eyes, that unmistakable
point for the kill that you find in the eyes of very few

NYTBR

Norman Kingsley Mailer

January 31, 1923 November 10, 2007

12

languages at which hes adeptand he writes

about books that he may not have read but that he
has collected. In 2008, his 30,000-volume library,
adjacent to his home in southwest France,
received its own loving profile in the New York
Times Home section; the occasion for the story
was the publication of The Library at Night,
Manguels book about libraries, including his
own.

Alberto Manguel and

the Library of Babel
The Argentinian-born man of letters,
cosmopolitan defender of books and
reading, is exiled to a world of his
own making

I was, of course, fully prepared to loathe

Manguel, to resent his good fortune. But about
halfway through our conversation, which took
place in a fifth-floor room at a Holiday Inn in
Kingston, Ontario, where he was attending a
literary festival, we had an exchange that made
me sadsad for him. It began when he was
telling me about his beloved German-speaking
Czech nanny, who took care of him in infancy
and his young boyhood in Israel, where his father
was the Argentinian ambassador.

By Mark Oppenheimer

I lived with this nanny for seven years of my

life, Manguel said, and it was wonderful. It was
like having two parents in one just for me. I then
asked Manguel if he had siblings. I have two
brothers, he said. They were born in Israel, but
they were looked after by another nanny. This
was some kind of bizarre arrangement my parents
had thought of, and we didnt even speak the
same languagehim and his parents, that is.
My parents spoke Spanish, a bit of French. I was
taught English and German. My brothers were
taught English, so I could speak to brothers but
not to my parents.

Argentine-born writer Alberto Manguel pictured

Sept. 11, 2007, in his house of Mondion near the
city of Chtellerault, France.
(Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty Images)
Alberto Manguel really should be an heir to some
sort of fortune, for how could someone like him
not be in possession of great sums of cash? He
has no full-time job. He is elegantly dressed.
Sixty-five years old, blue-eyed, bearishly bearded, and so obviously, in photographs and in
person, at ease. So well-traveled, so well-read.
Gay, Jewish, Argentinian-born, Canadian by
citizenship, a resident of Tahiti, London, and now
France, a worldly man in the old sense, not in any
debased, current, broadband sensean essayist
and anthologist and occasional fiction writer.
Those occupations do not pay much.

Your Spanish wasnt good enough to speak to

your parents? I asked.
I spent no time with my parents, Manguel
said. I said good morning to them some
mornings. Thats all I can remember. And then
we returned to Argentina after the fall of Peron in
55. Then we learned Spanish, and then I was
able to speak to my parents.

But it turns out that Manguel needs income, as

he told me when I asked. What I thought he did
for fun, he in fact does for profit: read, write
about reading, and lecture about writing about
reading. He has over 50 books to his credit,
mostly collections that he has assembled and for
which he writes the introductions, but many
original works, too. He writes about books that he
has read, read in any one of the multiple

Was that I hesitated. That sounds like a

rather sad childhood.
It was very happy, Manguel said. Imagine a
childhood where you have someone to yourself
24 hours a day, who understands that you love
books and therefore allows you to buy any books
that you want, travels with you, treats you as an
13

in life to take his leave of countriesfirst Israel,

then Argentinaand to put more stock in books
than in parents. He was abandoned by his mother,
and had to abandon his motherland, where he
now returns if asked to give a talk or something.

adult? So, we had all sorts of interesting conversations, and that was that.
It is entirely possible that Manguel is that rare
man who was not scathed by having distant, even
completely absent, parents (when many of us are
scathed even by close, loving parents). Still, his
odd childhood seems to have gifted to Manguel
an affinity for books so powerful, so endlessly
generative, that it has compensated for every
normal affinity that he lacks. Instead of parents,
he had books. Instead of a country, he had books.
Instead of a people or a race or a religion, he had
books.

What I thought he did for fun, he in fact does

for profit: read, write about reading, and lecture
about writing about reading.
It is undeniable that books gave Manguel a
childhood, a life, and a living. But I think that the
small shortcomings that Manguel does have, as
an essayist and a critic, might also be traced to
that original, sacrificial swap, which he denies
was any sacrifice at all. I think that many would
agree with the New York Times critic Dwight
Garner, who wrote last year, in a review of a
novel by Manguel, that Mr. Manguel is among
the most self-consciously literary people alive,
and that while he is ardent and adept on this
topic, he is vaguely tiresome too. I believe,
however, that Garner has somewhat misdiagnosed the problem. It is true that Manguel
has only one dominant topic, reading, or perhaps
two, if we are to separate reading and the physical
artifact of the book. In art, consistency can be a
virtue. Roy Lichtensteins famous paintings all
look alike. And Bach used a lot of harpsichord.

***
Manguel is a Canadian citizen. He raised his
three children in Canada, and he principally
identifies as Canadian. On the last night of the
literary festival in Kingston where I met him, I
heard him say that of all his countries it is Canada
that his heart calls home. But in 2000 Manguel
and his partner, Craig Stevenson, whom he began
seeing after he and his wife divorced in 1987,
moved to the southwest of France. Given his ties
to Canada, I asked him, why did they move?
What happened waslook, this is really silly,
but I dont drive, Manguel said. So, that meant
that in Canada, because, thanks to [former prime
minister Brian] Mulroney, who ripped up the
railways, you can only get to places if you drive.
Therefore, he had to live in a city. And to get a
place in a city thats big enough to lodge my
library was impossible. You know that. Thats
every book collectors nightmare. So, Ive always
lived in small places and sent my books into
storage

What I find a little shifty about reading

Manguel, what keeps me from settling into his
work like a comfy corduroy chair, is the way that
he returns so often to a few favorite examples:
The big three seem to be Alices Adventures in
Wonderland (along with other Lewis Carroll); the
works of Robert Louis Stevenson; and having
worked as a reader to a blind Jorge Luis Borges,
when Manguel was a teenager in Buenos Aires.

Butas the story goesManguel was in

France, and he met a bookseller, one thing led to
another, and he found, for a steal, a property
where he could have a house and library, in a
town where there are 10 other houses, and he
doesnt have any friends. So, that is the only
reason were there, Manguel said. I mean, I
would come back to Canada if I could.

The idea of the editor

Stevenson and Borges are both all over
Manguels most famous book, A History of
Reading, from 1996. In the 2010 collection A
Reader on Reading, which includes work from
1993 to 2009, every essay is prefaced by a
quotation from Lewis Carrolls writing. The Red
Queen pops up in an essay called Saint
Augustines Computer, the Caterpillar in the
essay Homage to Proteus, Lewis Carroll
himself in two more essays. Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde appears in three essays, in one case as a

Its an extraordinary thing, really: to leave a

country that one professes to love, where one has
raised children, in order to have a better space to
store books. Of course, I am not a bibliomaniac.
But nor am I Alberto Manguel, who has learned
14

book that he really seemed to detest: Bret Easton

Elliss American Psycho. When I asked, he
confirmed that the book was uniquely loathsome.
American Psycho is simply two things, he said.
Its a list of brand names that we have already
forgotten, and the very loving and accurate
description of inflicting terrible pain on another
human being, mainly women. And I find that, as
a reader, unforgivable.

mere fillip, mentioned when, one imagines, other

books might do. Borges is mentioned in, by my
count, about a quarter of the essays in this
collection and is also the subject of a short book,
With Borges. Its a totally delightful book, by the
wayand if I had spent my late teen years
reading to John Updike or Raymond Carver or
Grace Paley or, heck, Robert Ludlum, youd
better believe Id work it into as many essays as I
could.

***

What I cannot quite forgive is how uncritically

Manguel approaches his favorite authors, how he
suspends judgment and shrewdness. When he is
writing about an author who is not on this short
list, he can be very smart, especially in praising a
writer. To read, say, his 2012 Guardian review of
the Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, one of his
current favorites, is to be tutored in what
specifically is great about a writer. But his alltime favorites Manguel deploys for personal
comfort rather than for his readers instruction.
You get the sense that he returns to Alice because
she was a childhood friend of his, and he wants to
keep her close by. When I asked him what it was
about Alice that endeared her to him so, he
replied, I dont know. To me, its mysterious,
this falling in love with one person.

Bret Easton Ellis aside, Manguel is a radical

partisan for the author, the book, the character:
They keep us from loneliness. This favoritism
leads to his rather curious diagnosis of what ails
publishing today. Worse than the usual suspects
like e-books, the Internet, or the vanishing reader,
topics on which he must pontificate everywhere
he is paid to go, Manguel wanted me to know that
there is an even more worrisome culprit, bringing
writing, and writers, down: the editor.
If I would have to find fault somewhere, he
said, I would say that it is largely the fault of the
mechanics of publishing that have imposed the
idea of the editor. He then added something
about creative-writing classes, which also seem to
be part of the problem, but mainly as adjuncts to
the editor-driven industry. Implied in these
systems is the idea that a piece of writing is an
object of consumption that can be perfected,
aspiring to a certain model, in the same way that
you can tell that a shoe is well made or a house
well built. And literature simply doesnt function
that way. If the model that exists today of
perfecting the work through an editor and a
course and even a formula were to impose
itself today, the oeuvre of writers like, to use a
classic example, Milton, Shakespeare, etc., etc.,
could never exist! Could never exist, because
youd have an editor working on Macbeth and
saying to Shakespeare, Do we really need Lady
Macbeth? Is it not better if we just have this one
character struggling? And why are there three
witches? Why are there not five?

In the beginning, Alice was me, and the world

of crazy adults she was in was the world that I
was confronting, with their absurd rumors and
their nonsense logic. But then afterwards, before
almost any situation, when we go through politics
in high school and afterwardsthis was
Argentina in the years of coups dtatwhen I
was looking at languages and how to read and
write and all that is in Alice, I play a game with
myself of coming up with a subject and saying to
myself, Well, where is there a quote in Alice that
corresponds to that? And there always is.
So, Alice is a very intimate book, which I
constantly translate into my own experience.
It is not exceptional that Manguel relates to a
book this way; most avid readers probably do.
But Manguel has generalized a principle of
affection into a principle of criticism. It is one
thing to have books for friends, but the most
enlightening readers also have some books for
enemies. Manguel does not. He elevates
enthusiasm to a first principle. I found only one

This fundamentalist antieditor stance privileges

the author above everyone else, including those
who might have something useful to tell her, like
when shes not doing her best work. Its a kind of
exaltation of the individuals spirit over the
expectations of society, which the editor, after all,
15

represents. Editors are paid to bring authors in

line, to help them produce stuff more fit for
public consumption. But Manguel is completely
uninterested in society, in man-in-general. He is
not just a man without parents, but a man without
a country, and without a people. He is the
Luftmensch par excellence (to go polyglot, like
Manguel).

Books to record and to remember

In primary school, back in Argentina, Manguel
would occasionally be taunted by anti-Semitic
classmates. And in high school, in this colegio,
you sometimes felt this anti-Semitism which is
endemic in the Argentinian aristocracy, he said.
You wouldnt be insulted, but you knew there
was some kind of stigma attached to this. But in
dictatorship-era Argentina, religion was not the
most important category for organizing peoples
enmity. The political divisions were so strong,
and the political questions were so loud, that that
overrode everything else. And then there was the
fact that Manguel was an egghead: If anything, I
felt somewhat segregated because of my bookish
interests, you know? Now, when people say,
Young people dont readwell, in my generation, we had maybe three, in a class of 30, who
were interested in books.

Manguel reveres the writer as a citizen only of

the Land of Artas a man, or woman, beyond
national borders or any conventional loyalties.
Manguel has almost no use for blood or soil.
Most of us, even writers and other artists, feel
some affective ties to our familys ethnicity or
religion, as well as to our country of origin. But
Manguel evinces almost no loyalty to either. I
dont make this point to insult or denigrate
Manguel, but rather as a blunt statement of fact.
He is a Jew without Judaism, and an Argentinian
without Argentinian-ness. Or at least thats what
he aspires to be.

***
Manguel dropped out of college and left
Argentina in 1969, at the age of 21. He found
jobs in publishing houses in both Paris and
London; in London, he also wove belts that he
sold to British and expat hippies. He began to
write essays and short stories. But almost
immediately after Manguel had left Argentina,
the countrys politics fell into a chaos that only
ended with a military coup in 1976bringing to
power the most brutal government of all, which
would famously disappear thousands suspected
of leftist sympathies. During this time, Manguel
stayed out of Argentina, spending time in Tahiti,
England, and Tahiti again, before settling in
Canada, where he lived from 1982 to 2000.

Manguels fathers family were German Jews

who settled in Buenos Aires. His mothers family
were Russian Jews who moved to one of the
agricultural colonies, established for Jews by the
philanthropist Maurice de Hirsch, in the
Argentine interior; from there, they later moved
to Buenos Aires. I asked Manguel what Judaism
had meant to his parents.
Nothing, he said.
Nothing? I asked again.
Absolutely nothing. In fact, I did not
discoverafter having lived in Israel for seven
yearsI did not discover that I was Jewish until I
was about 10. We kept none of the Jewish
holidays. Despite his fathers having been
ambassador to Israel, the family celebrated
Christian holidays, as befitted their residence in a
Catholic country. His nanny, a Jewish refugee,
did not want him to talk about Judaism. She had
a friend who had a number tattooed on her arm,
and I remember every time we met her, she
would say, Above all, you dont ask questions
about the tattoo. When we returned to Argentina, my grandmother, my mothers mother, she
went to synagogue and so on, and I remember
blessing the candles and all that sort of stuff, but I
didnt know what it was, and I just thought it was
something that she did. That was it.

Of course, in the United States or England,

being a writer of ones land is a great calling:
There is hardly higher blurbalistic praise than
the great American novel. But in South
America and in the Caribbean islands, national
borders are constricting. For someone like
Gabriel Garca Mrquez, to be a great writer
means being great beyond Colombia. And its not
just a Hispanophone trait. Its a small-country
trait, and an island trait. Nobody is less interested
in being seen as Trinidadian than V.S. Naipaul.
When Manguel speaks of having to attend literary
festivals in order to see his friends, friends from
16

Turkey and Colombia, etc., he is not lamenting

this state of affairs but, I think, bragging.

Black Water: The Book of Fantastic Literature

(not to mention Black Water 2: More Tales of the
Fantastic). Manguel has a strong claim to being
the leading anthologist of our age, and while his
list also includes titles like Gods Spies: Stories in
Defiance of Oppression, a collection of short
fiction about political oppression, I suspect that
Manguel edits his more serious collections for the
money, his more whimsical collections for the
joy.

Manguel also dismisses his Jewishness in a

particularly Argentine way. Most of the great
Jewish writers have had distant or estranged
relationships with Jewish religious practicewith
Judaismbut they typically enjoy their ethnicity;
they emphasize it and exploit it. I am thinking
here of Sholem Aleichem, Bernard Malamud,
Howard Jacobson, plenty of others. Many
younger Jewish writers are interested in Jewish
practice, too: Dara Horn, Tova Mirvis, Michael
Chabon. I can think of Jewish writers who at
times seem quite angry with the Jews, in an
obsessive way, like Philip Roth and Shalom
Auslander. Manguels smooth indifference to his
Jewishness is something else. It is the work of an
Argentinian man of letters, for whom being unArgentinian, like being un-Jewish, is a lifelong
practice.

Manguels smooth indifference to his Jewishness is the work of an Argentinian man of letters,
for whom being un-Argentinian, like being unJewish, is a lifelong practice.
We could say that a fantasist is made, not born,
that Manguels life, from his unsettled childhood
to the dark affairs in his homeland, made him
crave books that veered away from life outside
the covers, that did not replicate it. But many
children of distant parents, or of authoritarian
states, have the opposite reaction: to use books to
record and to remember. And Manguel has been
so omnivorous a writer and reader that books
surely do anything and everything for him: The
brilliance of Alice as a favorite character, for
Manguel, is that her absurd journey is both
childs play and eerily reminiscent of police-state
hell. It depends on how you read it.

***
Manguel does not like talking about the
troubles in Argentina, but if his literary
ambitions had not recommended that he move
beyond his native land, the murder of many close
friends might have done the trick. He feels
vaguely guilty, he told me, for having not been
there during the years that his friends were
getting disappeared. But its not as if he fled:
He was already gone, to Europe, and just
refrained from coming back to the place that an
American might casually call his home. He had
a lot of the wrong friends, and his name could
have been in the wrong address book, or inscribed in the front of the wrong book lent to
somebodyand that would have been that. His
guilt is a survivors guilt, the guilt of one inexplicably favored by fate.

Manguel is aging, and his children are

interested in their familys past. They are more
interested in Judaism than he or his parents were,
he told me, and one daughter has just moved to
Argentina. Perhaps they will pull their father in
front of mirrors that he had long avoided. His
next collection, to be published in Canada next
year, includes A Return, a novella about a
resident of Rome who returns after decades to his
native land, which in the interim was ravaged by
troubles that sound distinctly Argentinian. Thirty
years had passed since Nestor Esteban Samuel
Fabris had left the city to which he was now
returning, it begins, and to do so now, simply
because he had promised to attend the wedding of
his only godchild (whom, it must be said, hed
never seen), seemed to him an act of remarkable
idiocy. When he arrives, the hotel where he had
a reservation seems not to exist; old friends are
recognizable but slightly, uncannily off; he
cannot navigate the streets. Its not third-rate
KafkaIll grant it second-ratebut its pathos
inheres in what we know, or imagine we know,

It is understandable that Manguel generally

avoids politics. His choice of subject tends in the
opposite direction, away from reality. He enjoys
nonfiction G. Steiner, Schopenhauer, Gramsci
and of course much realism, but, even beyond his
trinity of Lewis Carroll, , Robert Louis Stevenson
and Borges, his passions run mainly from the
fantastical to the ridiculous. He has edited anthologies titled, to pick a few, The Oxford Book of
Canadian Ghost Stories, The Ecco Book of
Christmas Stories, Canadian Mystery Stories, and
17

promise, and in spite of Audens dictum, it allows

no forgetting. Not only is Vargas Llosa, who
was to win the 2010 Nobel Prize in literature,
demoted to p.r. flack, but then, the close reader
will notice, he is identified not with the gifted
writer but merely the politician. For the writer,
Manguel is telling us, must in the end side with
justice. Just as the sadist, like Bret Easton Ellis,
forfeits the title writer, so too does the
politician who betrays truth for votes.

about Manguel. At the end, the narrator is trapped

in his childhood city, which he had sworn to
himself would from now on belong to the past
swallowed by the sea.

Vargas Llosa and the great cosmopolitan

writers
I have a theory that if Manguel is a little more
interested in the political world today than he was
yesterday, its not just age and fatherhood that we
have to thank. Its also Mario Vargas Llosa, the
Peruvian novelist, journalist, and, in 1990,
presidential candidate. Manguels best essay, his
angriest, most political, and most memorable
piece of writing, an essay in which his passion
vigorously goads his talent, is called Gods
Spies. Along with his short book on reading to
Borges, with its intrinsic historical interest,
Gods Spies, which was first published as the
introduction to the 1999 collection of the same
title, is the work of Manguels that should last
longest. It is about many thingsmemory,
violence, poetrybut it lands on Vargas Llosas
1995 newspaper article Playing With Fire,
published in the Spanish newspaper El Pas. In
his article, Vargas Llosa argued, more or less,
that Argentina would do well not to bring the old
government torturers and murderers to justice,
that it is better to forget, and that, after all, wasnt
everyone at least a little bit at fault?

Manguel held this conclusion about Vargas

Llosa with the newfound force of the reluctant
convert, of one who had resisted for a long time.
I had, for a time, a theory that literature, good
writing, or good art in general, disallowed certain
attitudes and ways of thinking simply because
they were dogmatic and literature is contrary to
dogma, Manguel told me. Although, he added,
Vargas Llosas political memoirs are very badly
writtenso maybe the theory holds? I tried to
contain the anger in that essay, he said, but of
course it seeps through. Hypocrisy angers me. I
think its a cardinal sin. If you dont know better,
if youre stupid, it is up to a point a valid excuse.
As it happened, Vargas Llosa never got far in
politics at all, and he moved to Spain. But
Manguel has not forgiven him. One can imagine
all sorts of good reasons to carry this grudge:
Vargas Llosas apologies for crimes against
humanity; for crimes against humanity in a
country not his own; for crimes against humanity
in a country not his own where, during the
troubles, as other writers died, he was able to
publish freely. The whole thing stinks, and
Manguel was right to hold up the rotting fish for
all to see. Manguel, of course, has yet another
reason, not unique to him but of unusual
importance: Vargas Llosa is an excellent writer.
That good books were written by unkind
peopleManguel would never have denied that.
But how many of those unkind people had run for
president in another, nearby country, also with a
history of mans great cruelty to man, and then,
five years after losing, written a blithe and obtuse
defense of dictatorship in the land where Alberto
was born?

Manguel was not the only writer horrified by

what he felt amounted to a defense of brutal
dictatorship, and in fact the end of Gods Spies
is given over to a lengthy summary of
Argentinian writer Juan Jos Saers published
rejoinder. But if Manguels was not a surprising
reaction, reading it surprised me. To read the
compulsively amiable Manguel launch from
AudenPoetry makes nothing happen, he
famously wroteinto an evisceration of a
colleague in the world of letters is like watching a
bookish nerd finally snap, punch the bully, and
knock him out cold.
Burston-Marstellerthe public relations
firm hired by the Argentinian militarycould
not have come up with a more efficient publicist
for its cause, Manguel writes. The maze of a
politicians mind has seldom held the promise of
redemption, Manguel icily adds, but that of a
gifted writer is almost exclusively built on such a

For the most part, Manguel lacks the ambition

of the great cosmopolitan writers. If Naipaul left
his small island to be a writer of the world,
Manguel left his country to read books in other
18

countries. Want someone to edit a collection of

Tanzanian haiku? He is surely your man. His
facility with many kinds of literature, originally
in many languages, makes him a fine party
magician, turning tricks for a bit of money. But it
is hard to be unmoved by the force and clarity
that enliven his writing when he is truly agitated,
when he is after something more than diversion
or profitwhen he is summoned, as by the
impertinence of Vargas Llosa, to answer a great
writer by being a great man.

Ivo Andri
and the Jews
By Duan Puvai
In the last chapter of Bosnian Story (Travnicka
hronika) Salomon Atijas, 'the most prominent of the
Atijas brothers and the head of the whole prolific tribe
of the Travnik Atijases'1, comes to pay his farewell
visit to the departing French Consul, Monsieur
Daville. He comes unexpectedly to offer 'what little he
possessed or could do'2 to help the Frenchman - who
had treated them, the Travnik Jews, as men, without
any discrimination - out of his financial difficulties.
While the Sarajevo Jews, who used to make loans
to the Consulate in better days, now, at a moment of
great changes in the world and in France, become
distrustful and unwilling to offer a helping hand,
Master Salomon brings tears of emotion to Daville's
eyes by his embarrassed gesture of compassion and
friendship, in the form of the offer of a loan of twentyfive Imperial ducats.
'Daville, who had thought at first that Atijas had
come to request or ask something from him, was
surprised and touched'.3 However, in his words of
thanks Daville confines himself to 'general and
indefinite phrases', speaking of his 'sympathy and his
understanding towards the Jews, of humanity and the
need for people to comprehend and help each other,
without distinction'4.
Encouraged by Daville's kindness and the
admiration he expressed for the resilience of the
Travnik Jews who had managed to defend and
preserve themselves against all the ills brought upon
them by the whims of history and the persecution of
greedy Pashas, Salomon discards his protective shield
of caution and starts to speak, 'to utter his complaint,
to commend and explain himself, like a man who is
given a unique opportunity, a few precious minutes
only, for an important and urgent message'5. But
Daville's benevolent laughter, provoked by the words
of a Jewish saying, makes Atijas stop short in his
confession, while a 'worried and fearful expression'6
returned to his face. 'He was frightened that he might
have gone too far and said what he should not', and

Mark Oppenheimer, a contributing editor for

Tablet Magazine, writes the Beliefs column for
The New York Times and is the author of
Wisenheimer, a memoir of high school debate
geekdom. He has just published an ebook about
sex abuse in the Buddhist world titled The Zen
Predator of the Upper East Side.
Tablet

Alberto Manguel

Bosnian Story, p. 446.

Ibid., p. 447.
3
Ibid., p. 447.
4
Ibid., p. 447.
5
Ibid., p. 449.
6
Ibid., p. 449.
2

19

that 'what he had said was not what he had meant to

say'7.
But this Jew who brings with himself, besides his
offer of money, 'a scent of garlic and untanned skins'8
and a 'worried expression of animal melancholy'9 in
his eyes, has an important message to deliver to the
departing stranger. He feels uncomfortable in
Daville's clean and comely world. But in spite of his
shyness and his fear he cannot resist the desire 'to say
something further, about himself and his people,
something urgent and secret, from his great hole of
Travnik, from the damp storehouse where one lived
hard, without honour or justice, without beauty or
order, without judge or witness'10. He wants his
message to be addressed 'to some better, more orderly,
more enlightened world beyond'11.
But instead of a message with a 'great and general'12
meaning about his own existence and the suffering of
the Travnik Jews, he is able to utter only 'confused
and disjointed words'13. Unable to express 'briefly and
worthily'14 what he wanted to say about his people because he 'does not know a single one of this world's
languages properly'15 - he departs with 'broken words
which came to his tongue'16.
'It will never be told', comments the author, 'what
was choking Salomon Atijas at that moment, what
was bringing tears to his eyes and excited trembling to
his whole body'17. But in a moving gesture of
identification with his character, Andric continues:
'Had he known how, had he, in general, been able to
speak, he would have said something like this...'18 And
there follows a long passage of Salomon Atijas's
unspoken message which has been rightly described
as one of the best and emotionally most powerful
passages in the whole of Andric's writing and in
Yugoslav literature in general. The tone, the content,
and the whole character of the passage do not differ in
any significant way from some of Andric's more direct
and more personal utterances on the 'Jewish theme' in
his essays. But Salomon Atijas's unspoken 'heartfelt
plea'19 is not only of contextual but also of great
symbolic importance.
What the author says on behalf of his character is
not actually what Salomon would have said himself,

because what lay within him as a living burden had

not been 'quite clear or definite in his own mind, still
less was it ripe for utterance'20. And so the author
'mediates' between Salomon's 'best feelings and best
longings'21 and their unspoken expression. But it is not
only the linguistic inadequacy of a Spanish Jew living
in Bosnia which prevents Salomon from turning his
feelings into a coherent statement of great emotional
importance. It is a long inheritance of fear and
insecurity haunting the man who, even in his cradle,
was never permitted to 'weep aloud, let alone talk
freely and clearly during his lifetime'22.
Although, as Andric says, 'no one, almost no one'
manages to express 'his best feelings and his best
longings' in his lifetime, Salomon succeeds where so
many have failed, in spite of all his inadequacies,
because the author has identified with him, giving him
his voice and his moral concern.
So Ivo Andric has shown himself to be a writer who
was willing both to write about Jews and to speak for
them at a time when such support was their 'real
need'23. Bosnian Story was finished in April 1942.
And there is no doubt that in the mind of this 'master
of the unspoken', as Andric has been called by the
American critic John Simon,24 the 'terrible, senseless,
fratricidal hurricane which even today we cannot
comprehend and which to this day has never
understood itself'25 - about which Salomon Atijas
would have spoken if he had dared and known how the hurricane which had torn the Spanish Jews from
Andalusia and brought them to the Balkans, making
them 'beggars whom not even gold can help'26, was a
part of the same historical process which was killing
Jews while the novel was being written.
It was that 'tragic and inexorable'27 historical
process Andric refers to in his essay on Kalmi Baruh
(1896-1945), his Jewish friend who perished 'with
thousands and millions of others like a predestined
victim of brutal racism'28. However, Andric reminds
us that the Jews were not the only ones who fell
victim in the same historical drama which, as he has
put it, 'it seems, has no end'29. Those 'others', nonJews, were also 'without guilt or defence'30.

20

Ibid., p. 449.
Ibid., p. 446.
9
Ibid., p. 448.
10
Ibid., p. 450.
11
Ibid., p. 450.
12
Ibid., p. 450.
13
Ibid., p. 451.
14
Ibid., p. 450.
15
Ibid., p. 453.
16
Ibid., p. 450.
17
Ibid., p. 451.
18
Ibid., p. 451.
19
Ibid., p. 453.

Ibid., p. 453.
Ibid., p. 453.
22
Ibid., p. 453.
23
Ibid., p. 453.
24
John Simon, 'Bosnia through the Ages'. The New York
Times Book Review, 28 July 1968, p. 4.
25
Bosnian Story, p. 451.
26
Ibid., p. 451.
27
'Pomen Kalmiju Baruhu'. In Umetnik i njegovo delo.
Sabrana dela, Belgrade 1977,Vol. XIII, p. 217.
28
Ibid., p. 217.
29
Ibid., p. 217.
30
Ibid., p. 217.

21

20

By identifying Jews and non-Jews in their historical

destiny it would seem that Ivo Andric has tried to
reiterate, in a manner appropriate for a creative artist,
Leo Straus' conviction that 'the Jewish people were
the chosen people in the sense, at least, that the Jewish
problem is the most manifest symbol of the human
problem as a social or political problem'31. The same
feeling, common to many enlightened European
writers, has found its expression in the words of the
exiled Czech author Milan Kundera (b. 1929), who
said that in the destiny of the Jewish people 'the fate
of Central Europe seems to be concentrated, reflected
and to have found its symbolic image'32.
Do we need a more telling example of this allusive
identification of the destiny of Jews and non-Jews in
Andric's work than the one we are offered in the story
The "Titanic" Bar (Bife "Titanik"), one of Andric's
very few stories which deal with World War Two. It
is enough that it is Mento Papo, 'a Jew without any
ties with the Jewish community, alone, without
money, without respect, without property, naked,
mute and helpless'33, who has been chosen as a
symbolic representative of those thousands and
millions who have suffered and perished 'without guilt
and without defence'. Mento Papo, faced with his
Croatian ustasha murderer, becomes in his danse
macabre no less symbolic than Aska, the little lamb
followed by the bloodthirsty wolf, in her dance of life
and survival. Just as Aska knew that 'in order to live,
she had to dance'34, so did Mento know that 'talking
meant... living'35. However, his 'pitiful, ridiculous, and
improbable leaps'36 did not have any chance of
succeeding in the world of irrational hatred and selfgenerating evil.
Prior to Andric's both extensive and sympathetic
treatment of the Jews, they had received but scant
attention in the literature of the peoples of former
Yugoslavia. As in all European literatures, biblical
inspiration has been prominent in the writing of
numerous Yugoslav writers ever since the first books
were written in the Middle Ages, and this interest has
been maintained, though on a much smaller scale,
ever since. But the writers who have used biblical and
apocryphal subjects have not generally associated the
people of the Book with the Jews of their times. They
either tended to use them to express some general
philosophical ideas, or as symbols of their own fate
and aspirations. On the other hand, the Jews who

occasionally appear in folk literature are usually

presented, under the influence of religious prejudice
and intolerance, as objects of ridicule, contempt and
derision. One folk song, exceptionally, contains
qualified praise for the young Jewish girl who wishes
to marry Kraljevic Marko, the Balkan folk hero.
Similarly sympathetic treatment of the Jews appears
in the Slovene France Presern's (1800-1849) poem
Jewish Girl (Judovsko dekle), where a Jewish girl
abandons her Christian sweetheart because of the
religious barrier.
However, anti-Semitism never struck deep roots in
Yugoslavia, and when it did exist it was usually in the
form of what David Goldstein in his book on
Dostoyevsky and the Jews37 calls conventional antiSemitism - the widespread belief that the Jews are
cursed and cruel masters of craft and deceit and
unscrupulous exploiters of others. It has been
established that 'such anti-Semitism as did exist was
more apparent in the ex-Habsburg territories than in
the Serbian or former Ottoman areas. Hence, it was
more directed against Ashkenazim than Sephardim,
the former being considered foreign and the latter
native'.38
Understandably, some of those anti-Semitic
sentiments have found their expression in the form of
anti-Jewish slurs and slanders scattered in the works
of some 19th and 20th century Yugoslav writers, in
which the Jews played only minor or episodic roles.
They were generally presented as stereotypes shopkeepers, moneylenders or publicans - and were
referred to disparagingly and depicted as representatives of the forces instrumental in precipitating the disintegration of native rural society and
its values. Some anti-Semitic remarks are placed in
the mouths of negative, deranged or degenerate
characters, and cannot be attributed to the writers
themselves.39 It is not uncommon to find them even in
some of Andric's works, because he realized that
without them his whole picture of the complex ethnic
scene of Bosnia would have been less convincing.
The fact that among Yugoslav writers there were
only a few non-representative figures who were
openly and strongly anti-Semitic can be explained by
the circumstances of the Jews being few in numbers,
inconspicuous, living largely their own separate
existence cut off from gentile society. For the
indigenous Slav population they never represented a

31

37

Leo Straus, Spinoza's Critique of Religion. Preface to the

English Edition, New York, 1965, p. 6.
32
Milan Kundera, 'A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows
Out'. Granta, 11, 1984, p. 108, p. 6.
33
'Bife 'Titanik'. In Nemirna godina. Sabrana dela. Vol. V,
p. 197.
34
'Aska i vuk'. In Deca. Sabrana dela. Vol. IX, p. 191.
35
'Bife 'Titanik', In Nemirna godina, p. 220.
36
Ibid., p. 221.

David I. Goldstein, Dostoyevsky and the Jews, University

of Texas Press, 1981.
38
Harriet Pass Freidenreich, The Jews of Yugoslavia. The
Jewish Publication Society of America. Philadelphia, 1979,
p. 189.
39
'Yugoslav Literature', Encyclopaedia Judaica. Jerusalem,
1971, Vol. 16, pp. 885-892. Miroslav Pantic, 'Jevreji u
dubrovackoj knjizevnosti'. Zbornik Jevrejskog istorijskog
muzeja. Belgrade, 1971, pp. 211-238.
21

dark and sinister force detrimental to its own interests,

as was the case in some other European countries. So
the Jews rarely inspired strong feelings and their
individual and communal lives were neglected as a
literary theme.
Consequently, before the Second World War, Jews
were central characters only in the works of Jewish
writers, such as Haim S. Davico (1854-1918), Isak
Samokovlija (1889-1955), Hinko Gottlieb (18861948) and Zak Konfino (1892-1975). Ivo Andric was
the only exception, and the first Yugoslav non-Jewish
writer to treat the Jews with a real creative interest.
Ever since Andric introduced 'the passionate and
devious Jewess'40 in his story of Ali Djerzelez, a
steady stream of Jewish characters has continued to
populate his prose: Josif Baruh, Mordo and Salomon
Atijas in Bosnian Story; Mordo and Santo Papo, Elias
and David Levi and Lotika in The Bridge on the Drina
(Na Drini cuprija); Rafo Konforti in The Woman from
Sarajevo (Gospodjica); Haim in Devil's Yard
(Prokleta avlija); Rifka Papo in Love in a Country
Town (Ljubav u kasabi); Salomon Kamhi in Under
the Hornbeam Tree (San i java pod grabicem); Mento
Papo in The "Titanic" Bar (Bife "Titanik"); and Maks
Levenfeld in Letter from the Year 1920 (Pismo iz
1920) are the most prominent ones. Both in his fiction
and in his essays Andric has sustained his continuous
interest in, as he used to call them affectionately, 'our
Jews'.
It has been claimed that Jews are so manifestly
absent from Dostoyevsky's novels, in spite of his deep
involvement with the 'Jewish question' in his nonfictional prose, because he did not have - nor could he
have had - any direct experience of Jews, as St.
Petersburg counted very few Jews among its
residents.41 Jews play such an important part in
Andric's work because he did have first-hand
knowledge of their way of life from his frequent
contacts with them, first in his early days in Visegrad
and later in Sarajevo, Zagreb and Split. These contacts
established a very deep personal bond between him
and both those Jews who had settled in Bosnia after
their expulsion from Spain in the 16th century, and
those who came later from Central and Eastern
Europe. The roots of that bond could be traced to his
early childhood, as his story Children (Deca)
suggests. The narrator, a 'greyish engineer',42 revives
an episode from his youth, when he refused to take
part in the battering of Jewish children, a cruel game
in which some of his friends participated with great
relish, at the price of being ridiculed and ostracised by
his comrades in play. He could not, and did not know

how, to beat the Jews. A Jewish boy kept appearing in

his dreams being chased by his friends, while he
would let him pass unchallenged. With his 'tormented
face' the Jewish boy seemed to him 'light and
unrestrainable as an angel'.43
Andric, who was so reluctant to comment on the
works of his colleagues and contemporaries, did not
decline to write about his two Jewish friends, Isak
Samokovlija and Kalmi Baruh. And what is even
more symptomatic, he published two texts about each
of them respectively. But the dominant theme of these
essays concerns not so much - if at all, particularly in
Samokovlija's case, - their individual talents and
achievements, as the tragic predicament of the people
they belonged to, and its characteristic ambiguous
position in the wider Bosnian context.
The most eloquent statement of Andric's proSemitic sentiments can be found in his piece on the
Sarajevo Jewish cemetery, which, he pointed out, he
had visited several times on several consecutive days.
In this affectionate and evocative text, Andric surveys
the four centuries of the history of the Sephardic Jews
on Bosnian soil and emphasizes the identity of their
historical situation with that of all rayah in the
Ottoman Empire. But at the same time he points out
their more precarious and exposed position brought
about by their ethnic and linguistic isolation and the
religious prejudice and superstitions of their Christian
fellow-sufferers. Forced to hide behind their own
traditions, beliefs and prejudices out of need and
through the instinct of self-defence, the Jews did
represent a world in itself, but they were at the same
time, as Andric puts it, a living part of 'our wider
community'.44
In his book Defenses of the Imagination, the
American critic Robert Alter says that if the Jews
have a historical destiny, it is to be at 'the crossroads
of trouble', and that 'that destiny has been fulfilled
time after time not only in the realm of geo-politics
but also in the Christian imagination'.45 Is not this
metaphor - 'at the crossroads of trouble' - exactly
applicable to what Andric has considered to be a
major feature of his native Bosnia; and, having that in
mind, might it not be said that the Jews in Andric's
work are shown to fulfil their historical destiny not
only by sharing the fate of the oppressed people of
Bosnia, but by being presented as symbolic of that
fate?
Throughout his work Andric attributes to the Jews
many of the features of the Levantines, as defined by
Cologna in his conversation with Des Fosss in
43

Ibid., p. 54.
'Na Jevrejskom groblju u Sarajevu'. In Znakovi. Sabrana
dela. Vol. VIII, p. 216.
45
Robert Alter, Defenses of the Imagination. The Jewish
Publication Society of America. Philadelphia, 1977, p. 151.

40

44

'Put Alije Djerzeleza'. In Znakovi. Sabrana dela, Vol.

VIII, p. 31.
41
David I. Goldstein, Dostoyevsky and the Jews, p. 4.
42
'Deca'. In Deca. Sabrana dela. Vol. IX, p. 47.
22

Bosnian Story. They have two homes and yet none,

'being at home everywhere, yet always remaining a
stranger';46 they are 'men who know many languages
but have no language of their own'47; they are 'equally
despised and mistrusted'48 on both the East and the
West; 'they are a little humanity on its own, staggering
under a double original sin';49 they are often given the
role of 'interpreters and go-betweens'50 mediating
between peoples of opposed civilizations and cultures.
In Bosnian Story there are several Jews who have that
role: a Jew from Split by the name of Pardo, Juso
Atijas, Josif Baruh and Rafo Atijas.
But, in a few instances, the function of intermediary
they are given goes beyond the simple task of
interpreting, as they are put in charge of some rather
special assignments. Maks Levenfeld, born into a
family of Jews converted to Catholicism, conveys in
Letter from the Year 1920 (Pismo iz 1920) Andric's
most succinct archetypal image of Bosnia, and it is
implied in the text that Levenfeld's congenital
restlessness and his cravings for a better world, a
world without hatred (the same world about which
Salomon Atijas dreams in Travnik), have their roots in
his discarded Jewishness.
In Devil's Yard (Prokleta avlija) it is Haim, a Jew
from Smyrna, a compulsive talker, who mediates
between the world of reality and the world of fiction;
and, moreover, by his ability to know everything and
foresee everything ('although not always accurately'),51 between the present and the future. Even his
'gloomy tales and imaginary fears'52 are a typical
expression of his Jewish inheritance.
Sometimes, that role is more specifically personal
and limited, but equally tragic, as it can be seen in the
history of Rifka Papo who, in Love in a Country Town
(Ljubav u kasabi), attempted to cross the barrier of
religion and prejudice. In the mind of Ledenik, her
flippant Christian lover, she is closely related, and
almost identified, with the image of the Visegrad
bridge. For him they are the only two things capable
of comforting him and cheering him in his Bosnian
desolation. This identification is suggestive of the
similarities in the symbolic roles ascribed by Andric
to bridges and the Jews in a wider context. Elsewhere
Andric even points out that the Jews had first settled
in Visegrad about the time the bridge had been built.53
Even a superficial insight into Andric's works
would suggest that his presentation of the complete
ethnic spectrum of Bosnia offers a thematic and moral

balance, and that his compassionate treatment of the

Jews is symptomatic of the general humanistic values
operating in his work. It would seem, however, that, at
least in some of the episodes where the Jews appear as
protagonists and where they are compared with and
contrasted to his gentile characters, Andric weighted
the emotional scale in favour of the Jews.
Throughout Bosnian Story, for instance, the Jews
are shown to possess more moral courage and humane
responsiveness in their relations with the French than
is the case with members of other ethnic groups. They
are the only ones who are willing to offer Daville their
hospitality upon his arrival in Travnik, and their help
before his departure. This tendency of Andric's to
recognize in his Jewish characters some of the
positive features his other protagonists are denied is
best exemplified in those parts of his work in which
he deals with the personalities who have identified
their lives with money.
In the vision of Vitomir Tasovac, Salomon Kamhi
from Under the Hornbeam Tree (San i java pod
grabicem) may seem the epitome of a Jewish
shopkeeper disposed to cunning and trickery, but it is
gazda Jevrem from An Uneasy Year (Nemirna godina) who is described as an archetypal usurer. The
comparative presentation of Rajka Radakovic and
Rafo Konforti, in The Woman from Sarajevo, is
particularly illuminating in the section of the novel
covering 1917, when the war brings hunger and
misery upon thousands of people. Rafo's compassion
and Rajka's insensitivity are directly juxtaposed. For
Rafo, 'a hungry people, that's the worst thing there
is'.54 Rajka is unable to find understanding for Rafo's
'unexpected explosion of indignation, or see what
possible connection she, Rajka, and her business had
with the question of whether the people were hungry
or full'.55 While Rafo, who was falling apart, 'had a
compulsive need to talk of the hunger and poverty of
the great mass of people and of the grave consequences this would be bound to have for the state,
the economy, and the individual',56 Rajka only noticed
that the signs of destitution were 'more numerous than
she would have wanted'.57 While Rafo donates food to
the neediest and buys various provisions in order to
'sell them to the people at the unusually low price',58
or hands out the food without charge, Rajka continues
to count her money, 'insensible to most of the rules of
the community and to the moral feelings and
responses of an individual'.59 Rafo suffers his final
downfall in the form of a complete breakdown and is

46

Bosnian Story, p. 285.

Ibid., p. 286.
48
Ibid., p. 286.
49
Ibid., p. 286.
50
Ibid., p. 286.
51
Devil's Yard, p. 72.
52
Ibid., p. 120.
53
The Bridge on the Drina, p. 176.
47

54

The Woman from Sarajevo, p. 119.

Ibid., p. 119.
56
Ibid., p. 125.
57
Ibid., p. 120.
58
Ibid., p. 126.
59
Ibid., p. 141.
55

23

taken to a mental institution; Rajka justifies her earlier

reputation of being 'Shylock in petticoats'.60 Throughout this comparative analysis Andric has reserved for
Rajka a tone of chilly detachment, while Rafo has
been observed with humorous compassion and, even,
affection.
However, the character for whom Andric shows the
greatest amount of sympathy is the 'beautiful Jewess
from Tarnovo' in The Bridge on the Drina, Lotika,
'that untiring and adroit woman of chilled senses,
quick intelligence and masculine heart'.61 Although
she 'earned very much'62 practising a trade which was
'neither pleasant nor particularly chaste',63 and took
good care of her money, she is presented as a woman
of an exceptionally 'compassionate heart and kind
nature',64 ready to help complete strangers as much as
her own kith and kin. She does believe in 'the law of
profit and loss'65 ('that divine law which had always
controlled human activities'),66 but it is not money for
money's sake which controls her life. 'She directed the
destinies'67 of the Jewish poor scattered throughout
Galicia, Austria and Hungary, but her counsels were
always accompanied by 'a money order for a sum
sufficient to ensure that her advice was listened to'.68
When, finally, she makes her last exit in Chapter
Twenty-three of The Bridge on the Drina, her
'despairing scream'69 is mingled with the 'muffled
thunder of the guns... which showed... that universal
and individual misfortune was nearer and greater that
it seemed'.70 While elaborating this idea, with a
varying degree of emphasis, in his novels, short
stories and essays, Ivo Andric has shown that, in the
words of Robert Alter, 'what a writer has to say about
Jews, carefully considered, can sometimes provide a
key to the underlying aims and even methods in his
work, and an insight into his relation to the larger
culture around him'.71

Content
Jonathan S. Tobin:
Why Anti-Zionist Jews Are a Minority
David Mikics:
Did Zionism Cause the Holocaust?
Marija F.Sullivan:
Thinking and Drinking on a Gruesome
Centenary
Edward Mendelson:
The Strange Powers of Norman Mailer
Mark Oppenheimer:
Alberto Manguel and the Library of
Babel
Duan Puvai:
Ivo Andric and the Jews

From: Duan Puvai, BALKAN THEMES,

Tradition and change in Serbian and Croatian
literature, Editions Esopie, 41, rue Olivier Metra,
75020, Paris

Selected and Edited by

Ivan L Ninic
Shlomo Hamelech 6/21
42268 Netanya, Israel
Phone: +972 9 882 6114
e-mail: ninic@netvision.net.il

60

Ibid., p. 78.
The Bridge on the Drina, p. 178.
62
Ibid., p. 179.
63
Ibid., p. 179.
64
Ibid., p. 179.
65
Ibid., p. 258.
66
Ibid., p. 258.
67
Ibid., p. 180.
68
Ibid., p. 180.
69
Ibid., p. 302.
70
Ibid., p. 302.
71
Defenses of the Imagination, p. 137.
61

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