Alan Morinis, in his Climbing Jacob's Ladder, does us a service by presenting the little known movement within Judaism known as Mussar, which concentrats on ethical conduct and what we would now call “self-help.”
In a rabbinical Judaism dominated by study, ritual, and communal duties, Mussar often goes off the tracks, stressing internal development, meditation, withdrawing from public life, and actions that help the individual lessen negative traits.
Mussar is firmly connected to the world of Orthodox Judaism, and Morinis needed to travel to Far Rockaway to learn Mussar first hand from Rabbi Yechiel Yitzchok Perr, scion of a long line of Mussar rabbis. Morinis paints Rabbi Perr in very appealing shades, showing how Mussar is just as much, if not more, a movement of example rather than book learning (another way that it veers from traditional Jewish preoccupations).
Morinis does a good job showing what Mussar is, as well as providing practical examples of how to inject Mussar into the reader’s life. He tries to show how one can use Mussar without being orthodox; it seems that Morinis wants Mussar to join Jewish Renewal and Neo-Hasidism: using elements of the original form of religious or ethical movement, and fashioning it for a non-practicing (or semi-practicing) audience.
This is born out by Morinis' founding of The Mussar Institute, which has the stated goal of teaching Mussar to the masses.
Yoram Kaniuk is not as well-known an Israel writer as Amos Oz or Y.B. Yehoshua, despite most of his novels being published in English by major US publishing houses. He belongs to the same generation as Oz and Yehoshua, born in pre-Palestine Israel, but unlike them old enough to take part in the War of Independence. He was shot in the legs by an Englishman in a kaffiyeh and sent to New York City to recuperate. There he stayed for sometime, painting, writing, and absorbing the Greenwich Village post-war artistic culture.
His early novels were straight up narratives with difficult subject matter, like Himmo, King of Jerusalem, about a solider wounded in the War of Independence, his legs and arms blown off and blinded, yet somehow still alive. Himmo becomes involved with a young nurse named Hamutal, and their "relationship," tortured and bizarre, becomes a type of metaphor for the evolving sense of Zionist identity in the new state of Israel.
Later, Kaniuk's novels would take less traditional forms. At this point, a wider audience outside of Israel (and even within) seemed to allude him, despite the fact that some of A.B. Yehoshua's most beloved novels have non-traditional forms, like The Lover, A Late Divorce. But by and large, Yehoshua does not try to carry that complexity to the level of sentence structure and syntax. A.B.'s forms are complex, but his language is more traditional.
This is not the case with Kaniuk, who produces complexity on nearly every level. Take his novel His Daughter, a novel with elements of traditional storytelling, fantasy, mystery and crime genres rolled into one package. This makes for a layered and difficult novel (although not as difficult as some of his other recent works), with dense sections of dialogue and quickly shifting moods, styles, and levels of narrative intensity. Kaniuk takes a plastic form like the novel and uses it with great dexterity.
So, only a careful, patient reader should try this novel. But if such a reader does, the rewards are plentiful. This work is a deep investigation of the nature of Israeli society, the Zionist vision, the changing nature of a culture and a society under rapid transformation. Only a complex narrative can mirror such a complicated society. Kaniuk leaves no easy answers to the questions his work raises. We get mystery and density, and the feeling, even after having read 293 pages, that the last work has not been said.
אל מלא רחמים,
אלמלא האל מלא רחמים
היו הרחמים בעולם ולא רק בו.
אני, שקטפתי פרחים בהר
והסתכלתי אל כל העמקים,
אני, שהבאתי גוויות מן הגבעות,
יודע לספר שהעולם ריק מרחמים.
אני שהייתי מלך המלח ליד הים,
שעמדתי בלי החלטה מול חלוני,
שספרתי צעדי מלאכים,
שלבי הרים משקלות כאב
בתחרויות הנוראות.
אני שמשתמש רק בחלק קטן
מן המילים במלון.
אני, שמוכרח לפתור חידות בעל כורחי,
יודע כי אלמלא האל מלא רחמים
היו הרחמים בעולם
ולא רק בו.
God-Full-of-Mercy, the prayer for the dead.
If God was not full of mercy,
Mercy would have been in the world,
Not just in Him.
I, who plucked flowers in the hills
And looked down into all the valleys,
I, who brought corpses down from the hills,
Can tell you that the world is empty of mercy.
I, who was King of Salt at the seashore,
Who stood without a decision at my window,
Who counted the steps of angels,
Whose heart lifted weights of anguish
In the horrible contests.
I, who use only a small part
Of the words in the dictionary.
I, who must decipher riddles
I don't want to decipher,
Know that if not for the God-full-of-mercy
There would be mercy in the world,
Not just in Him.
The Other Zions got an excellent review (along with Kevin Brook's Jews of Khazaria) in OUTLOOK: Canada's Progressive Jewish Magazine:
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/outlook/current_issue/Outlook%20website%2010/Sep-Oct%2010/Jews.pdf
Here is a particularly flattering passage:
"Maroney is in fact not an academic historian at all, but an old-fashioned man of letters, the holder of an MA in Philosophy and the author of a book on religious syncretism as well as one of fiction. Nevertheless (or “therefore”) he writes well, lays out evidence and arguments clearly, and appears to be a reliable guide through the thicket of anecdote, rumour and legend which enshrouds the history of many of these far-off times and places."
OUTLOOK has an interesting mandate; they are a magazine well worth reading:
"Outlook Magazine is an independent, secular Jewish publication with a socialist-humanist perspective. Outlook was founded in 1962. It is published six times per year. The magazine has collectives in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, and Vancouver."
I write because for me it is a form of play.
That does not mean I don’t take it seriously, or that I don’t try to convey weighty and adult themes in my writing. All it means is that the actual act of writing for me is by and large fun.
I’m not especially interested in deep autobiographical soul searching, nor do I have an overt or consistent political or social agenda to my fiction (non-fiction is perhaps another story) what guides me is the sense that the story is ‘right’ and that creating it lends a sense of satisfaction and completion seldom found in other activities.
Again, it is an activity roughly akin to play. Play brings with it the satisfaction of creating a world that we can control. For me, writing is an analogous activity. The hidden source of its satisfaction lay in our childhood dream worlds.
Take one of my characters, the Hebrew poet Yasha Schulevitz. A few years ago I created and embedded him in a novel that took place in Europe between the wars. This Yasha was a Hebrew poet and Yiddish journalist. He inhabited this world, and was a fixture of it. He fit in, and when he did not, the novel ended.
I enjoyed creating him so much that I wrote short stories about him. Two were taken and published. The Yasha of the short stories is similar to the Yasha of the novel, but also different. Their biographies rhyme, but the form and demands of short story writing made me render Yasha differently, and happily so.
Finally, I took Yasha, a Diaspora Jew, and placed him in an ‘alternate, history in the State of Greater Israel in my novel People of the Land. Here, he is a solider and poet. Here, the demands of this new history thrust him into different roles than the two other Yashas. Even after two shots at him, there was more of the character to create and explore.
How else to explain these mutations of character than the inherent sense of play in writing? Writing is about the exploration of whatever the writer finds interesting, but without the joy in the act of writing, I think fiction often comes across as sententious and runs the great risk of being boring.
Of course this is an ideal that is often hard to follow. But when accomplished, the results are always pleasant to read. The joy of writing becomes the joy of reading
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89)
God’s Grandeur
THE WORLD is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings
My fiction is in written English, but most of the characters speak another language (Hebrew, Yiddish, and Italian, in that order). The narratives too, are supposed to be in another language. There really are two tracks you can take in this kind of narrative sleight of hand. Either you act as if the characters expressing themselves in this language they would never speak is perfectly normal (as in many Hebrew novels and stories before Hebrew was a widely spoken language), or you in some way express that other language in English through a type of re-rendering.
I have been reading Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, and he takes that latter course. The novel is in English, but everyone speaks Spanish. So Hemingway tries to create Spanish sounding English by stretching the syntax of English nearly to its breaking point, by rendering Spanish-ism into odd English phrases, like “what passes with thee?” for que pasa, a common Spanish greeting.
He also uses archaic English usages to present forms that exist in Spanish, but are gone from English, like thee and thou for the second person pronoun. It makes for strange but captivating reading. Here is a writer rendering English into Spanish forms. The results are startling and not always enjoyable; but it always gives you the impression that you have entered another world.
If the novel was written in more fluid English, the result would not have been so unusual. The very clumsiness of the language reminds the reader that this is a novel that is taking place in another, somewhat more formal language. And the English bears that imprint.
When we read For Whom the Bell Tolls we can see English both reaching into its past to create diction of current usage, as well as using an odd and foreign syntax to give the illusion of another language. Often, this effect was criticized. But an open reading of this novel shows what an effective technique this is and how well it does the heavy lifting of expressing another culture's values on the level of language from one tongue to another.
