substantiating my peculiar existence in the most consolidating way I know, taming temporarily with a string of words the unruly tyranny of my incoherence.
In To the Land of the Cattails [I wrote], a Jewish woman and her grown son, the offspring of a Gentile father, are journeying back to the remote Ruthenian countryside where she was born. It’s the summer of 1938. The closer they get to her home the more menacing is the threat of Gentile violence. The mother says to her son, “They are many, and we are few.” Then you write: “The word goy rose up from within her. She smiled as if hearing a distant memory. Her father would sometimes, though only occasionally, use that word to indicate hopeless obtuseness.”
The Gentile with whom the Jews of your books seem to share their world is usually the embodiment of hopeless obtuseness and of menacing, primitive social behavior — the goy as drunkard, wife beater, as the coarse, brutal semisavage who is “not in control of himself.” Though obviously there’s more to be said about the non-Jewish world in those provinces where your books are set — and also about the capacity of Jews, in their own world, to be obtuse and primitive, too — even a non-Jewish European would have to recognize that the power of this image over the Jewish imagination is rooted in real experience. Alternatively the goy is pictured as an “earthy soul … overflowing with health.” Enviable health. As the mother in Cattails says of her half- Gentile son, “He’s not nervous like me. Other, quiet blood flows in his veins.”
I’d say that it’s impossible to know anything really about the Jewish imagination without investigating the place that the goy has occupied in the folk mythology that’s been exploited in America by Jewish comedians like Lenny Bruce and Jackie Mason and, at quite another level, by Jewish novelists. American fiction’s most single-minded portrait of the goy is in The Assistant by Bernard Malamud. The goy is Frank Alpine, the down-and-out thief who robs the failing grocery store of the Jew, Bober, later attempts to rape Bober’s studious daughter, and eventually, in a conversion to Bober’s brand of suffering Judaism, symbolically renounces goyish savagery. The New York Jewish hero of Saul Bellow’s second novel, The Victim, is plagued by an alcoholic Gentile misfit named Allbee, who is no less of a bum and a drifter than Alpine, even if his assault on Leventhal’s hard-won composure is intellectually more urbane. The most imposing Gentile in all of Bellow’s work, however, is Henderson — the self-exploring rain king who, to restore his psychic health, takes his blunted instincts off to Africa. For Bellow no less than for Appelfeld, the truly “earthy soul” is not the Jew, nor is the search to retrieve primitive energies portrayed as the quest of a Jew. For Bellow no less than for Appelfeld, and, astonishingly, for Mailer no less than for Appelfeld — we all know that in Mailer when a man is a sadistic sexual aggressor his name is Sergius O’Shaugnessy, when he is a wife killer his name is Stephen Rojack, and when he is a menacing murderer he isn’t Lepke Buchalter or Gurrah Shapiro, he’s Gary Gilmore.
Here, succumbing finally to my anxiety, I turned off the desk lamp and sat in the dark. And soon I could see into the street below. And someone was there! A figure, a man, running across the dimly lit pavement not twenty-five feet from my window. He ran crouching over but I recognized him anyway.
I stood at the desk. “Pipik!” I shouted, flinging open the window. “Moishe Pipik, you son of a bitch!”
He turned to look toward the open window and I saw that in either hand he held a large rock. He raised the rocks over his head and shouted back at me. He was masked. He was shouting in Arabic. Then he ran on. Then a second figure was running by, then a third, then a fourth, each of them carrying a rock in either hand and all their faces hidden by ski masks. Their source of supply was a pyramid-shaped rock pile, a rock pile that resembled a memorial cairn and that stood just inside an alleyway across from the hotel. The four ran up and down the street with their rocks until the cairn was gone. Then the street was empty again and I shut the window and went back to work.
In The Immortal Bartfuss, your newly translated novel, Bartfuss asks irreverently of his dying mistress’s ex-husband, “What have we Holocaust survivors done? Has our great experience changed us at all?” This is the question with which the novel somehow or other engages itself on virtually every page. We sense in Bartfuss’s lonely longing and regret, in his baffled effort to overcome his own remoteness, in his avidity for human contact, in his mute wanderings along the Israeli coast and his enigmatic encounters in dirty cafes, the agony that life can become in the wake of a great disaster. Of the Jewish survivors who wind up smuggling and black- marketeering in Italy directly after the war, you write, “No one knew what to do with the lives that had been saved.”
My last question, growing out of your preoccupation in The Immortal Bartfuss, is, perhaps, extremely comprehensive, but think about it, please, and reply as you choose. From what you observed as a homeless youngster wandering in Europe after the war, and from what you’ve learned during four decades in Israel, do you discern distinguishing patterns in the experience of those whose lives were saved? What have the Holocaust survivors done and in what ways were they ineluctably changed?
He’d taken nothing. Not even a sock was missing from the bureau drawer where I’d laid my loose clothing, and, in searching for the check that meant everything to him, he hadn’t disarranged a thing. He’d borrowed Tzili to read while waiting on the bed for my return but that seemed to have been the only possession of mine — my identity aside — that he had dared to touch. I began to doubt, while I packed my bag to go, if he actually had searched the room and, disturbingly for a moment, even to wonder if he had ever been here. But if he hadn’t come to claim the check as his, why had he risked my wrath (and perhaps worse) by breaking in?
I had my jacket on and my bag packed. I was only waiting for dawn. I had but one goal and that was to disappear. The rest I’d puzzle out or not when I’d successfully accomplished an escape. And don’t write about it afterward, I told myself. Even the gullible now have contempt for the idea of objectivity; the latest thing they’ve swallowed whole is that it’s impossible to report anything faithfully other than one’s own temperature; everything is allegory — so what possible chance would I have to persuade anyone of a reality like this one? Ask Aharon, when you say goodbye to him, please to be silent and forget it. Even in London, when Claire returns and asks what happened, tell her all is well. “Nothing happened, he never turned up.” Otherwise you can explain these two days for the rest of your life and no one will ever believe your version to be anything other than your version.
Folded in thirds in the inside pocket of my jacket were the fresh sheets of hotel stationery onto which I’d copied, in legible block letters, my remaining questions for Aharon. In my bag I had all our other questions and answers and all the tapes. I had managed despite everything to do the job, maybe not as I’d looked forward to doing it back in New York … I remembered Apter suddenly. Could I catch him at his rooming house on my way out of Jerusalem? Or would I find Pipik already waiting there, Pipik pretending to poor Apter that he’s me!
The lights were off in my room. I’d been sitting in the dark for half an hour, waiting at the little desk by the large window with my fully packed bag up against my leg and watching the masked men who had resumed their rock conveying directly below, as though for my singular edification, as though daring me to pick up the phone to notify the army or the police. These are rocks, I thought, to split open the heads of Jews, but I also thought, I belong elsewhere, this struggle is over territory that is not mine … I counted the number of rocks they were moving. When I reached a hundred I could stand it no longer, and I called the desk and asked to be put through to the police. I was told that the line was engaged. “It’s an emergency,” I replied. “Is something wrong? Are you ill, sir?” “Please, I want to report something to the police.” “As soon as I get a free line, sir. The police are very busy tonight. You lost something, Mr. Roth?”
A woman spoke from the other side of the door just as I was hanging up. “Let me in,” she whispered, “it’s Jinx Possesski. Something terrible is happening.”
I pretended not to be there, but she began rapping lightly on the door — she must have overheard me on the
