MG: That’s an intuition of the way we conceive of the world as images. Think about how we live more and more in a visual world, how often people tell their lives through Facebook, through posting pictures, through You Tube. We see reality as if it were a photograph, a movie, a television show that we orchestrate ourselves. And the world of literature, this old mode of words, has the power to decompose or to deconstruct this way of looking and to look behind and beyond.
JM: What you’re showing us, in fact, is the inadequacy of this kind of framing to capture everything that’s real. And among what’s real, there’s eroticism, very present in your stories and never resulting in what we could call “a love story.” There’s a longing for coupling, a move toward a possible, licit couple—in the case of the characters Elijah and Hila in “Elijah’s Sabbath Days.” But there’s also violation through desire—in the child molestation of “From Two to Four.” In “Jet Lag” the main character sees the potential of desire but gets lost in a time warp.Yet having experienced desire his life will never be the same—or his wife’s either. Somehow she’s really lost out.These are anxious stories for me: Eros and violation exist side by side.
MG: Eros has a very central part in my writing. It’s clearly one of the mysteries of life that I explore, another form of revelation. I think that Eros reveals libido, the power of life. I know, for example, that I can attribute my mother’s survival to libido. Her desire to “be a woman,” to have children, to raise them, to live in her body was something transferred to me.
JM: In your stories Eros is not necessarily coded “good” or “evil,” which means Eros can also be distressing. In “From Two to Four” there’s no condemnation of the violator or the potential violator. In a certain form of feminist writing, and in a certain phase of feminist writing, these violators would have been set up to be crucified.
MG: Maybe my lack of overt condemnation shows us the complexities of things we must try to understand. Eros is a major factor of life and it has a very contradictory set of manifestations. We tend to be afraid of these contradictions and shun them because they’re not something you can enact.You sublimate them. But in literature you can express the urge that precedes the sublimation.
JM: Maybe it’s also about guilt feelings and the chance to express them as well.
MG: In “Between Two and Four” what interests me are the stages of desire’s awakening, when it emerges from the body at a very young age, before the mind is ready. The girl is aware of the gardener but she doesn’t know how to decipher his look. She has erotic urges that are totally innocent, that are part of childhood. To deny their existence would be mutilating. The abusing of this innocence, as the gardener does, is a betrayal of adult responsibility. But we cannot forget that to hurt, to do ill is also driven by an erotic urge. My obsession with trying to understand Eros is also an oblique way of getting to the riddle of sadism, of why people torture other people. Beyond all the historical, economic, ideological explanations, there’s that person to person relationship, something that happens in the psyche that connects body to body. And there are more and more torturers in this world.
JM: May I close by bringing up the question of allegory and the kind of allegorical tales included in this collection, especially “Rites of Spring” and “Hold On to the Sun.”
MG: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, who inspired the theater piece we did in Paris in 1974, used to say “Better teach through stories than through lectures,” because a story can capture secrets through the possibility of contradictions, through speaking about good and evil as they’re combined in the world. The legends in this collection (or allegorical tales as you call them) are not really lessons but rather ways of coming to terms with the world. The rage against God that I inherited from my mother infuses them, as do a longing and yearning for His eternal presence.Yet He hides.
JM: God is under the mist, in the dimness, or in the fog. And in the nightfall that also constitutes so much of this writing of yours.
MG: But in “Hold On to the Sun,” he’s also there in the fantastic hope that undergirds everyone’s quest—to stop time, to realize eternity.
JM: The photographer and the young woman in this story both die and don’t achieve their heart’s desire. And the scholar is so obsessive that he never really has a life.
MG: But he has his learning.
JM: Yes, but the scholar’s staying with the books, secluded, is not a hopeful option for me.
MG: I think we differ in the way we read this story and that has to do, I believe, with the different deep narratives we react to.
JM: Maybe that’s where it shows that your backgound is Jewish and that I was schooled by Unitarians!
MG: Probably. And so we attribute a different place to “learning,” especially as being part of Eros.
JM: Traditionally, of course, for men it was.
MG: The Eros of learning is part of a Jewish man’s life. So, in the story the scholar’s dedication to his research is a replacement for love. His outrageous hope of eternal light is the most daringly erotic experience of his whole life.
JM: But the story also treats the scholar in quite an ironic way.
MG: Yes, and on several levels. This man, whose hope is profoundly mystical, lives a secular life. It was characteristic of the Jerusalem I could still find on my return to Israel in the late 1970s. One could meet in the street great scholars, like Gershom Scholem or Haim Schirman, scholars who dedicated their lives to study, living secular, childless, or lonely lives. It was a generation of great European minds expelled from Europe, but also cut off from the old world of the shtetl where they didn’t belong anymore. The old orthodox neighborhoods of Jerusalem kept the secret of this vanished world yet they were zones of unreachable desire.
JM: Quite unreachable for the scholar in the story . . .
MG: Nevertheless, the traces of hope, the memory of redemption, lived on. . . . I think this is what I meant by calling the anthology Hold On to the Sun. I claimed the power to seek the traces of the dismissed voices of tradition, to create a fuller identity for Israelis, perhaps even to inscribe new marks.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The writing of a book encounters those readers who as sounding boards bring it into being—even more so in the burgeoning first years of literary writing.
My parents, Rina and Pinchas Govrin, profoundly conversant with world literature and the treasures of Hebrew, were my first addressees. Michaël and Emmanuel Levinas, Emmanuel and Stéphan Mosès, Uri and Shlomo Pinès, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, David Brezis, and Jacques Derrida later joined them. They read what was exposed and what was concealed between the lines, and they heard the continuing voice from the Jewish mystical tradition to modern avant-garde prose.
Parts of these stories were written all over the world during my travels with Haim Brezis, my companion and husband. Those were still the days of the typewriter, and in order to minimize its sound I used to leave our room to type on whatever shore was nearby. These landscapes, including the childhood northern seascape of Becki Brezis, my mother-in-law, reverberate in the writing.
My thanks to Menachem Peri and Moshe Ron, the editors of the original Hebrew text, Hold On to the Sun: Short Stories and Legends. Thanks also to David Rosenberg, whose enthusiasm as an ever close reader resulted in the commission of the first English translation. Thanks, too, to Nili Cohen and The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature for their support and to Dalya Bilu for the original careful translation into English. My friends Irène Shraer and Nessa Rapoport spontaneously translated their own readings into French and English which encouraged me to think internationally. The Jerusalem poets’ friendship with Peter Cole brought about the joint translation of the poem “Won’t You See” that opens the book.
Gila Ramras-Rauch included “La Promenade,” then published in a magazine, in her anthology, Facing the Holocaust, and Leo Edelstein, the editor of Pataphysics (whom I met in Melbourne thanks to David Shapiro and the international “poetry ne
twork”), first published the story “Hold On to the Sun.” In my last overseas telephone conversation with Shaindy Rudoff, before her premature death, she asked for “Between Two and Four” for Maggid’s issue on “Jewish Bodies,” edited by Michael Kramer.
The essays, written along the years, are part of my ongoing conversation with my mother—during her life and after her death. In publishing this book, I hope to honor all those people who generously transmitted to me bits and pieces of her story.
I am grateful to Rachel Feldhay Brenner and to Alan Berger, the editor of Second Generation Voices, thanks to whom I added the meditation “Journey to Poland” to the original “Letter from the Regions of Delusion,” addressed to my parents. The original letter was published by Yzhak Bezalel in Davar, and years later Yaakov Besser published the full two-part essay in Itton 77. Barbara Harshav hears deeply my voice in her translations both of my novels and of two of the essays included here.William Philips and Edith Kurzweil opened to me for years the Partisan Review as another “home for thinking.” I am grateful to all of them. “Facing Evil” was written at the request of Noah Flug, the president of the International Auschwitz Committee, and originally published in Ha’aretz. I’m grateful to Ilana Kurshan for reviewing its translation. Basmat Hazan encouraged me to write “Selichot in Krakow: Migrations of a Melody,” and Adam Rovner published it in the online journal Zeek—along with a fragment of my mother’s recorded voice.
As always, my gratitude goes to Deborah Harris, my agent and friend. But it is Judith Graves Miller who is responsible for the present iteration of Hold On to the Sun: True Stories and Tales, from its conception to her sensitive and uncompromising revision of the translations. I want to thank her for the immense pleasure of collaboration, but not less for our many years of literary, theatrical, and personal friendship that stand as proof of art’s power to cross languages and cultures.
Author and editor give their warmest thanks and affection to the exemplary staff at the Feminist Press, to executive director Gloria Jacobs, and to Elaine Reuben and Shulamit Reinharz of the Reuben/Rifkin Jewish Women Writers Series for encouraging and finally bringing to fruition this collection of texts.Working together has been joyful as well as professionally gratifying.
Judith G. Miller extends her thanks to New York University for its support of her research and to The Department of French, especially to Ellie Vance and to Elizabeth Applegate, for clerical and other help with this project. She would like most especially to thank Michal Govrin for the opportunity of making Hold On to the Sun appear with the Feminist Press, and for her steadfast love and the extraordinary stimulation of our conversations over thirty years of life.
CREDITS
The short stories in this collection were originally published in Hebrew in Le’echoz Ba’shemesh, Sipurim Ve’agadot (Hold On to the Sun: Short Stories and Legends) by Michal Govrin, Siman Kria/HaKibbutz HaMeuchad, 1984. The original English translation was provided by The Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature. The original translation was revised by Judith G. Miller and Michal Govrin.
Aharon Appelfeld’s quote was translated from the Hebrew by Gabriel Levin.
The poem “Won’t You See” was originally published in Hebrew in Ota Sha’a (That Very Hour) by Michal Govrin, Sifirat Poalim, 1981. It was translated from the Hebrew by the author, with Peter Cole.
The essay “Journey to Poland” was translated from the Hebrew by Barbara Harshav.
The short story “La Promenade:Triptych,” parts I, II, and III were originally translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu.
The short story “Between Two and Four” was originally translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu and revised by Michael P. Kramer.
The short story, “Elijah’s Sabbath Days” was originally translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu.
The short story “Evening Ride” was originally translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu.
The short story “Jet Lag” was originally translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu.
The short story “The End of Pythia” was originally translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu.
The short story “The Dance of the Thinker” was originally translated from the Hebrew by Dalya Bilu.
The short story “Rites of Spring” was originally translated from the Hebrew by Dayla Bilu.
The short story “Hold On to the Sun” was originally translated from the Hebrew by Dayla Bilu.
The essay “Facing Evil: Thoughts on a Visit to Auschwitz” was translated from the Hebew by Barbara Harshav.
The essay “Selichot in Krakow: Migrations of a Melody” was translated from the Hebrew by Anat Schultz, edited by Adam Rovner, with Yiddish transliteration by Adam Rubin.
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1 (1700-60) Charismatic founder and first leader of Hasidism in Eastern Europe.
2 A lively Polish dance from the Krakow region.
3 A drink of raw egg mixed into milk, in this case probably a stolen egg mixed with some sugar.
4 (German) A kapo was a privileged prisoner of the Nazi concentration camps who served as a supervisor of the barracks.
5 Code name for Gusta Dawidson Draenger, resistance fighter and author of diaries written while imprisoned by the Gestapo in Krakow.
6 (1970) Documentary film exploring average French citizens’ memories of Nazi occupation.
7 Arabic term for the Palestinian Liberation Organization, founded in 1964.
8 Code name given to the illegal immigration of Jews to Palestine in violation of British restriction (1934-48), distinguished from Aliyah A, the limited Jewish immigration permitted by British authorities in the same period.
9 (Hebrew) Organized attempt to collect Holocaust survivors in Europe and bring them to pre-state Israel, resulting in three hundred thousand survivors reaching Israel (1944-48).
10 A religious concept by which man finds virtue resembling God.
11 (German) Common nickname for the deportation and murder of Jews.
12 (1908-46) Austrian war criminal found guilty of murdering tens of thousands of people. He was executed by hanging.
13 (German) A unit of ten, used ironically.
14 (Hebrew) A left-wing political party, the dominant force in Israeli politics until it merged with the Israeli Labor Party in 1968.
15 (1877-1942) An influential Yiddish poet and songwriter, best known internationally for his song “S’brent” (It is Burning). He was killed by a Nazi bullet in the Krakow
ghetto on Bloody Thursday (June 4, 1942).
16 (1869-1907) A Polish playwright, painter, and poet who linked modernism with the Polish folk tradition.
17 (Aramaic) The prayer recited at funerals and by mourners.
18 (German) “Work brings freedom,” the sign over the gates of Auschwitz.
19 USSR chain of stores.
20 (Yiddish) Multipurpose interjection, often analogous to “well?” or “so?”
21 (Distorted French and German) “We soldiers here, understand? Soldiers? War.”
22 (Distorted French and German) “Now here. Visit. Visit. With wife. Understand?”
23 (German) Work unit consisting of Nazi death camp prisoners forced to assist the mass killing process during the Holocaust.
24 (Hebrew) Jewish penitential poems and prayers leading up to Rosh Hashanah andYom Kippur
25 (Yiddish) assistant synagogue manager
26 (Hebrew) A prayer book.
27 (Hebrew) Often called a “Rabbinical Bible” in English, an edition that generally includes three distinct elements: the biblical text, the Aramaic translation, and biblical commentaries.
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