Under This Blazing Light

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Book: Read Under This Blazing Light for Free Online
Authors: Amos Oz
Despite the terrible poverty, no one ever starved to death, and there was not a man who could not at least read and write. There have been few ‘normal’ states, either then or now, that could boast as much. But Berdyczewski does not sing the praises of the rock from which he was hewn, and I do not want to sound an over-sentimental note: for all its intellectual resources, this Jewish shadow state was riddled with contradictions; it was founded on sexual repression, on suppressed emotions, on submissiveness, on benighted fanaticism and dead letters. That is the other side of the coin.
    This was the state from which Berdyczewski hailed. There he was married to his first wife without either party being consulted first, and there she was taken away from him by forcible divorce when he ‘went to the bad’ and started reading forbidden books. He never returned to those places to the end of his life. Yet though he did not return, his stories never left. In all his stories he wrote about that Jewish shadow state, with hatred and longing and bitter mockery and compassion and contempt. He wrote with gnashing of teeth, like someone ‘maddened by what he had seen’. This is not an unusual attitude in literature in general or in the Hebrew literature of this period that is known, for some reason, as the ‘period of revival’. So Dante stood on the threshold, in the twilight of the Middle Ages. So stood Cervantes and Shakespeare in the twilight transition from one age to another. So stood Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Chekhov, the lovers, haters, gravediggers and immortalisers of the ancient, mighty, dying Orthodox Russia. So stood Thomas Mann, the lover, mocker, elegist and immortaliser of the bourgeois age. So too, among our own writers, Mendele, Bialik, Berdyczewski, Brenner and all that crew stood ‘on the threshold of the Talmudic academy’. The writer turns to the world that made him, observes it with terror, hatred and intimacy, digs deep inside it until the digging itself becomes a form of killing, and as soon as the killing is over he starts to mourn and memorialise and preserve in words and raise a monument. Even perhaps to feel nostalgic.
    Even so, Berdyczewski, also known as ‘Yerubaal’, ‘A Distant Relation’, ‘An Accursed Hebrew’, sat in Berlin and Breslau doing a terrible thing: he described a world that was still alive and breathing (forty or thirty years before Hitler) as though it was dead and buried and as though it was his task, writing as an archaeologist, to bring it back to life from scattered potsherds. A terrible yet fascinating standpoint: erecting a monument to the living; casting a death-mask while his loved/hated ones were still alive. Although he blurred the signs in places, by giving biblical
    Hebrew names to the shtetls of the Ukraine: for example my mother’s birthplace, Rovno, is renamed Mishor.
    Berdyczewski’s stories are always steeped in longing for something that is always over there, far away, ‘across the river’. He was a keen collector of Hebrew folk-stories which he reworked, although not in the same way as Bialik and Ravnitzky. On the contrary, Berdyczewski tried to produce a sort of anti-Sefer Ha-Aggadah, stressing an opposing mythology that was not ‘Judaic’ but ancient Hebrew. Against the ‘pedigree’ of rabbis, heads of academies, halakhists, Hasidic masters, Berdyczewski attempted to establish a ‘Canaanite dynasty’ of accursed ones, that would shed a different light - perhaps one should say cast a shadow - on the whole history of the Jewish people. They were the rejected heroes, victims of desires, ostracised and excommunicated. He tried to break up the religious topsoil, so as to get at an earlier, wilder, more passionate and carnal stratum underneath. This he did in a generation whose other writers were all devoting themselves to denouncing the distortions of Jewish society and believed, some more than others, in the possibility of reforming the Jewish

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