Although Jewish kids may have predominated, if very slightly, in the two grammar schools I went to—Eugene Field on Lunt Avenue, later Daniel Boone on Washtenaw Avenue—the understanding was that the country was Christian and Christmas carols—“Silent Night,” “Oh, Tannenbaum,” “The Little Drummer Boy”—were sung without any Jewish kids asking to be excused. (Some did irreverent Jewish parodies of these songs outside school: “Deck the halls with schmaltz and cholla . . .”), but there wasn’t the least bad feeling that we had Christianity, by way of music, imposed on us.
I wonder if Christmas carols are sung in public schools today, the age of diversity, without giving equal time to Hanukkah, Kwanza, and other ethnic seasonal songs? I hope they are. I know as a boy I never felt in the least offended by singing Christmas carols. Music is after all the great Christian art, surpassing, in my view, painting and literature. One thinks of Mozart’s Requiem and the many Bach chorales and cantatas. Not carols but two of the most popular Christmas songs were of course written by Jews: “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” by Irving Berlin and “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” by Mel Torme. I only regret that Cole Porter didn’t write a song about Simchas Torah and Johnny Mercer one about Purim.
Jews, until the founding of Israel in 1947, have always been strangers in others’ lands, and hence assimilationist where possible, in some instances accommodationist. They have also been so within their own religion. I have heard it said that the Conservative wing of Judaism broke away from the Orthodox chiefly over the questions of prohibiting driving on the Sabbath and the elimination of separate seating for women in synagogues. As for Reform Judaism, the latest joke, among non-Reform Jews, is that it is the Democratic Party platform, with holidays added.
The holiday of Hanukkah is an example of Jewish accommodation within the religion itself. For it is fairly evident, and agreed upon by Jewish scholars, that Hanukkah is not in any possible reading a major Jewish holiday. The event it marks, the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire in the second century BCE, is post-Biblical, for one thing; and for another it is built on rather a slender and unimpressive miracle, ritual olive oil enough to last only one day lasted for eight, hence the lighting of eight menorah candles. The persuasive explanation about Hanukkah in America is that it was elevated only because it occurred in the winter and could be used by mid-nineteenth-century Jews in America who wished to have a holiday that could if not compete with at least stand alongside Christmas. In more recent years, Jews, or some among them, have added a strong consumer touch to the holiday by presenting children with a gift on each of the eight nights that commemorative Hanukkah candles are lit.
Much followed in the minor sociology of American Jewish life from the emphasis on Hanukah as a Christmas surrogate. Jews send out and receive from Christian friends cards carefully denoting “Season’s Greetings.” More assimilated Jewish families who still wished to think themselves Jewish bought and set up in their homes Christmas trees, designated Hanukkah bushes. Many Jewish firms and private persons give and attend Christmas parties. There are, of course, Christmas bonuses. All this, of course, is Christmas, with Jesus Christ, or its true cause, subtracted.
As a secular holiday, Christmas has long been under attack. The main line of attack is the accusation that it has come to stand for little more than empty consumerism. So-called “Black-Friday” shopping, whether it be at Target or Wal-Mart or anywhere else can turn ugly. Ravening crowds, screaming, pushing, in some instances punching one another to get a bargain on Play Stations or a toy drone at Best Buy is not, let us agree, America at its best. Yet for a great many people it is more and more what Christmas has become. Bah, one need scarcely bother to add, humbug!
The grand shopping spree that Christmas has increasingly become has lengthened the holiday itself out to roughly a month. Shopping begins in all-too-earnest right after Thanksgiving, if not dab on Thanksgiving day. Shops, supermarkets, elevators are suddenly filled with canned Christmas music. One of the nice things about shopping online is that at least, when doing so, one doesn’t have to listen to “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Round late November in recent years I note that I begin signing off e-mails and letters to friends with “Christmas will soon be at our throats.”
I have for the most part steered clear of Christmas giving. I pass out a fifty-dollar bill to our UPS man, buy a Christmas lunch for our barber, give the attractive couple who clean our apartment every two weeks two days extra pay, write out a check for $500 for a woman who can use help providing Christmas for her own father-deserted children. My wife and I have long ceased to give each other gifts. Samuel Johnson says that man, foolish fellow, goes in life not from enjoyment to enjoyment but from want to want. Truth is, I am just about out of wants of a palpable kind: I long for no Bentleys, capacious boats, wrist-watches that will tell me how many more days I have to live, exotic travel, exorbitant wines, cashmere underwear, leather goods, lotions, spices off the London East India boat. I am not wise, please understand, merely finished in the line of luxurious acquisition, content and grateful with what I have.
For what percentage of the 300-million or so Americans does Christmas retain its true religious meaning and, with that meaning, its power? A subtler statistician than any I have ever encountered may know. For those of us whom find no religious significance in the holiday, it can carry complicated meanings. Everyone, surely, has heard that suicide rates go up around Christmas, occasioned by those for whom the holiday reminds them of family lost, other unwanted detachments, dead-ended relationships, their own crucial missteps in life.
In recent years, my wife and I have by design eaten our Christmas dinner at home alone. We don’t have a good Chinese restaurant in the neighborhood, or should, in traditional Jewish fashion, repair to it. Four or five years ago we used to dine with my wife’s dear cousin Patsy and her family—a husband and three daughters and their husbands and daughters’ children—in the western Chicago suburb of Oak Brook. On the Eisenhower Expressway, on the way out of the city, as we pass the Mannheim Road exit, now well into the nearly Judenrein Chicago western suburbs, my long-suffering wife has had to put up with my annual yuletide joke: “Did you note that sign, dear? Next Jew eighty miles.”
The dinner at cousin Patsy’s is always excellent and the bonhomie, or in this case holiday cheer, at a perhaps too uniformly high level. Sixteen or seventeen people from the same family, three generations at table, and they all seem genuinely to like one another. No bad feeling, old grudges, resentments, envy, jealousy, hidden malice is ever allowed to leach into the Turkey dressing. Over the years I’ve studied this extended family carefully, but can find no chink in the façade of their good feeling for one another. Turns out the façade wasn’t really a facade; there has never been anything there but a solid structure of family love.
But let us play the old game of what’s wrong with this picture: Sixteen or seventeen people, three generations, around a table piled with holiday food. Mistletoe hang from a nearby window. A Christmas tree, gifts beneath it, in the next room. Nordic, also Irish, good looks abound; no paucity of blond hair. Everybody seems to be enjoying him- or herself. Everyone is laughing. Except a man seated there, down table a good bit, toward one of its corners. He is merely smiling, and it is a strange smile, less than wholehearted, with a certain tinge of irony to it. Not a very Christmassy smile, most would agree. He is, of course, me, the odd man out, put out there by himself.
As I was to discover some years ago, I rather like being odd man out. I noticed this, not for the first time, in 1993, in Jerusalem, listening to Shlomo Mintz conduct the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. Gazing around the hall, I had the following thought: everyone in this room may well be Jewish, and it makes me ever so slightly uncomfortable. I do not wish, apparently ever, to be among the majority; and I enjoy a permanent minority status, and I feel it with greatest intensity as a Jew at Christmas.
But my title promises a Jewish Chri
stmas Dream. Here it is: The night of December 24—I need scarcely add that not a creature was stirring and so forth—I go off to bed. Deep and dreamless sleep comes instantly. The alarm goes off at its usual time of 6:00 a.m. I turn it off, then turn on the radio to discover that it is December 26. I have, lo and behold, slept right through Christmas.
Season’s Greetings!
Part Four
Masterpieces
The Brothers Ashkenzai
(2009)
Robert Lowell called Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier the best French novel in the English language. So, similarly, might one call I. J. Singer’s The Brothers Ashkenazi the best Russian novel ever written in Yiddish. The book has the grand sweep of Tolstoy, with a vast and wide-ranging cast of characters, a strong feeling for the movement of history, and, playing throughout, the drama of men and women trapped in the machinery of forces much greater than themselves.
I(srael). J(oshua). Singer, born in Bilgorai, Poland, in 1893, was the older brother by nine years of I(saac). B(ashevis). Singer. The Singers’ father was a Hasidic rabbi, their mother the daughter of a long line of famous misnagid (or non-Hasidic) rabbis. I. J. Singer spent his early years in the shtetl of Leoncin and his adolescent years in Warsaw, where he became caught up in the Haskalah, or Jewish enlightenment, movement. As a young man he worked as a journalist in Kiev, where his early attraction to socialism was punctured by the brute realities of the Russian Revolution. In 1934 he too moved to the US, where he worked for the Jewish Daily Forward. He published seven books in all, of which The Brothers Ashkenazi (1936) is the best known.
The tension between religious and secular life among Jews born into orthodoxy gave both Singer brothers an inexhaustible literary subject. In much of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s fiction, his characters stray from religion and then, after leading lives of dissipation, degradation, and disappointment, return to it, where they find a measure of contentment.
For I. J. Singer, things are more complicated. He did not think much of either traditional religion or the secular life of his time, which didn’t leave him, as a novelist, a great deal of room to negotiate. Politics taught I. J. the bitter lesson that, however much the extreme left and the extreme right might disagree, the one common ground upon which they met comfortably was anti-Semitism. The Jew as scapegoat in the dark world of Eastern Europe is more than a leitmotif in The Brothers Ashkenazi; it is the underlying moral of the novel. “Don’t you know,” the wives of the striking Jewish workers cry out to their husbands during a bitter strike in Lodz, “it always ends up with Jewish heads bleeding.”
The Brothers Ashkenazi begins not long after the Napoleonic wars, with the arrival of German and Moravian weavers in the Polish town of Lodz. At first excluded, the Jews gradually insinuate themselves into the town. They began as small-time entrepreneurs, setting up minor factories or sometimes working in their homes with handlooms, putting in long hours and grinding out a living. A handful of Jews worked for large-scale German factory owners, as agents, buyers, managers.
One such is Abraham Hersh Ashkenazi, who, soon after the novel begins, is presented by his wife with twin sons, Simha Meir and Jacob Bunem. Abraham Hersh hears the prophecy from his rabbi that his sons will both know great wealth. This prophecy, which will come true, is a disappointment to their father, who would have preferred they be pious and learned.
The brothers turn out very differently, in talent and in temperament. Simha Meir, the first born by a few minutes, is from an early age clever, conniving, a boy and then man concentrated on the main chance. His brother is physically more gifted—strong, handsome, charming—a cynosure. Simha Meir is aflame with ambition; Jacob Bunem, less concentrated, is dedicated to easy living.
At the center of The Brothers Ashkenazi is the climb of Simha Meir—who later abandons his religion and becomes Max Ashkenazi—to dominance over the weaving industry of Lodz. The machinations behind his climb are set out in impressive detail. In the background plays the subsidiary story of the rivalry and estrangement between the two brothers: Simha Meir, in an arranged marriage, is betrothed and marries the love of his brother’s life. Later Jacob Bunem marries into a family of vast wealth, a cause of consternation to Simha Meir.
Conflict is the order of the day in Lodz: between brothers, between owners and workers, between rabbis and miscreants, between Russians and Poles, between Gentiles and Jews, between Polish and Lithuanian Jews. Under capitalism man exploits man, an old saying had it, while under communism just the reverse obtains. So it is in Lodz; no matter who is in command, the city is breeding ground for exploitation, with every kind of hatred polluting the air.
“Simha Meir had the guts of a pickpocket,” Singer writes. “In Lodz this was the highest compliment.” We learn that “justice isn’t a commodity in Lodz,” and that “Lodz admired nothing more than wealth.” With hundreds of dab touches Singer personifies the city as the sinkhole of men set loose without any guiding principles or goals apart from that of gain: “Lodz knew that with money you could buy anything.” When credit dries up and inflation hits Lodz, Singer notes that “even the whores in brothels and the doctors who later treated their venereal diseases were paid off with IOUs.”
Such idealism as Singer allows in the novel is given to the few revolutionaries who appear in its pages, but theirs turns out to be a naive revolutionism. Nissan, the son of a poor rabbi, exchanges his father’s devotion to Torah for his own to Marxism, into which he invests the same unshakeable faith. He lives to see the revolution he fought for turn into a pogrom, with the corpses of Jews hanging from trees. At one point, Nissan thinks: “Maybe man was essentially evil. Maybe it wasn’t the fault of economic circumstances, as he had been taught, but the deficiencies of human character.”
Strikes, World War I, the Russian Revolution, the invasion of Lodz first by the Germans, then by the Russians—all are described by Singer, with pitch perfect artistry and pace. Lenin makes a cameo appearance in the novel, as Napoleon does in War and Peace, and so do the hapless Czar Nicholas and his Czarina Alexandra. The world turns topsy-turvy, with only Max Ashkenazi’s dream of industrial and financial dominance remaining constant, until it, too, is blasted, when, having earlier moved his factory to Russia, he is imprisoned in the new Soviet Union, from which he is saved by his long-despised brother. On the brothers’ return to Poland, reconciled at last, Jacob Bunem is killed, in an act of anti-Semitic bullying, by an ignorant Polish officer.
The Brothers Ashkenazi ends on a pogrom, which sends all the city’s Jews fleeing: to America, to the new Zion recently created in Palestine, to less cruel countries than Poland. “Lodz,” Singer writes, “was like a limb torn from a body that no longer sustained it. It quivered momentarily in its death throes as maggots crawled over it, draining its remaining juices.” Max Ashkenazi, intent on personal reform, which he is unable to attain, dies soon afterward.
Masterly, pitiless, this great novel forgoes a happy ending to render instead a just one: The city of Lodz and the characters it spawned get all they deserve.
Civilization of the Renaissance
(2013)
The most instructive of all the books on the Renaissance,” Lord Acton called Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. The book was one of the few modern works that Friedrich Nietzsche admired. Burckhardt (1818–1897) and Nietzsche (1844–1900) were colleagues at the University of Basel, in Switzerland. Nietzsche claimed that Burckhardt’s were the only lectures he ever enjoyed, and the model for the kind he himself hoped one day to deliver. Burckhardt recognized the younger man’s genius, yet was slightly wary of him, knowing how different were their intellectual methods and points of view. Nietzsche was of course a philosopher, of literary bent, trained in the classics. Burckhardt called himself “a contemplative historian.”
What a contemplative historian does is on dazzling exhibition in The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, the pre-eminent work of B
urckhardt’s career and an unparalleled work of history. He also wrote an introduction to the art of Italy called Cicerone, as well as The Age of Constantine the Great and A History of Greek Culture and a little book on the Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens. Late in life, he published his lecture notes under the title Judgments on History and Historians.
The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, despite its formidable title, runs to a mere 341 small pages in my Phaidon Press edition. Burckhardt claimed that he could easily have made it three times as long, and that a larger book would doubtless have earned him “more respect among a lot of people.” Instead, as he noted in the first sentence of the book, he had written “an essay in the strictest sense of the word.” By this he meant a work that did not aim to be either complete or definitive.
Burckhardt’s book is unlike any other historical work in being neither narrative in its construction nor devoted to unraveling historical problems. What it provides is a brilliant survey of those cultural tendencies—and “culture,” Burckhardt thought, “always precedes art”—that made the Italian Renaissance “the leader of modern ages.” Not least of the book’s attractions are its judgments of leading political and literary figures in the period, making it both a work of history and of astute criticism.
The Ideal of Culture Page 48
