Summer 2011 Feature
The Tenth Anniversary of 9/11 Leo Haber
Anne Frank: Tragedy and Triumph by Jeffrey Meyers Jeffrey Meyers
A Biographical Note and an Unpublished Interview with Chaim Grade Curt Leviant
Editorial: Memoir The Tenth Anniversary of 9/11
by Leo Haber
The year 2001 proceeded pleasurably for me and for my family. My elder son’s birthday took place in February and my younger son’s and mine in May. Also in May came the long-awaited publication of my first novel, The Red Heifer, by Syracuse University Press. Sylvia and I then celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary in June. Sylvia’s birthday occurred in July, and my reluctant but climactic elevation to the editorship of Midstream was signaled by the publication of the July/August issue with my name and position in black print to prove that it was not a dream. And then—the world seemed to fall apart and make personal triumphs and family joys of minimal or no consequence with the sudden national trauma of September 11, 2001. The permanently etched symbol of 9/11 and the devastation at ground zero, a new term of sorrow in our language made everything else seem to be almost irrelevant.
Most of us have a penchant for remembering where we were when major national events took place, especially the heart-stopping tragedies. At age 14, I was a student at the Herzliah Hebrew Teachers’ Institute in Manhattan, attending classes two evenings a week and on Sunday afternoon. On this wintry Sunday afternoon in December, in a break between two subject periods (after a Hebrew literature class with the superb Hebrew poet and Dean /Founder of the institution, Moses Feinstein, and a class in the grammar of the Hebrew language with the great grammarian and weekly columnist for the HaDo’ar magazine in New York, Daniel Persky), two of the guys in class, much older than I, decided to scoot out during the short break to the local candy store for a snack. I urged them to find out the score of the football game between my New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers (yes, a short-lived professional football team in those halcyon days), and to report back to me. Five minutes later, they burst into class with the semi-hysterical announcement: “The Japanese have bombed Pearl Harbor!” We younger students neither knew what or where Pearl Harbor was, nor did we seem initially to be concerned. One of the two young men shouted angrily: “Don’t you all realize what this means? We’re now at war with Japan!” I don’t recall if they ever managed to tell me the score of the football game.
I looked forward to three important activities I had scheduled for a Friday in November of 1963. In the morning, I was submitting a novel manuscript for consideration by a major publishing house in midtown Manhattan. At 1:00 p.m., I planned to be at a hospital in Brooklyn to visit my mother who was undergoing a series of diagnostic tests over several days and nights. At 3:00 p.m, I hoped to be back home at our apartment not far from Coney Island in Brooklyn to help my wife Sylvia welcome the first visit of a local piano teacher whom we had hired to teach our children. Our eleven-year-old elder son was awaiting his first lesson in classical music, with our eight-year-old younger son to follow in a few months. Oh yes, I was on sabbatical that year from my high-school teaching position and attending a doctoral seminar in English literature at Columbia University. I was free that day to roam around New York because the class didn’t meet on Fridays. (I never completed a dissertation because I wanted to write fiction and poetry. Nor did I ever contemplate becoming an editor.) Past noon on that Friday, I left the publishing house after submitting my novel to a nameless secretary who was very kind and strolled down an avenue in midtown Manhattan toward a subway station. Suddenly, I spied a crowd on the sidewalk ahead of me pressing against the partly open door of a street-level stockbrokers’ office, apparently listening intently to a radio inside and groaning. My first thought was that the stock market must have suffered a major fall in prices. When I inquired of one of the bystanders, he said, “President Kennedy has been shot in Dallas.” I was shocked and gasped audibly. I suddenly felt that I must hurry to my mother’s side in the hospital. She would need me to cushion the shock. When I got there, the elderly folks in my mother’s ward were almost hysterical at the news that the president had died. My mother was equally moved but in control. She said to me after five or ten minutes, “Go home to Sylvia and the boys. They’ll need you at this time, especially at the first piano lesson. I’ll be all right. Don’t postpone the first lesson. Continue normal life. Make shabes on time.”
On September 10, 2001, my wife, my wife’s sister Cecile (now my indispensable volunteer part-time editorial assistant at Midstream), and my younger son were attending a night game at Yankee Stadium to see if Roger Clemens could win his 20th victory of the season. It began to rain before the first pitch was thrown, and the game was delayed for more than two hours because of the inclement weather. Finally, the inevitable announcement came that the umpires had decided to postpone the game to a later date because the rain would not let up. By the time the massive crowd dispersed and we got to our respective homes, it was past one in the morning, and I, for one, slept late the next day. I had long since retired from teaching and did most of my editorial work for Midstream at home. So I could indulge myself by sleeping late after a wearisome night out. A phone call from my wife at her part-time job in the Registrar’s Office at Brooklyn College woke me up and sent me hurtling to our TV set with the news of the two jet airliners that had slammed into the Twin Towers in Manhattan. I turned on the television set just as the first tower crashed to the ground. Once again I gasped audibly, and tears clouded my eyes uncontrollably. When the second tower fell, I sped to the phone to call my younger son who was a senior recordings engineer at radio station WNYC, working in the Municipal Building in the general area of the catastrophe. But I did not call him at work; without thinking, I called him at his apartment in Manhattan, and when he answered the phone, I heaved a sigh of relief and cried again. I could not reach my sister-in-law Cecile (whom we all addressed by her Yiddish name Zeasel [Zisl]), who worked, at that time, as a supervisor in the State Labor Department. She had been assigned to attend a conference that morning in an office only one city block away from the Twin Towers at the very time of the catastrophe. We did not reach her until the evening, again to our enormous relief. She told us that as she approached her destination, she heard a loud crash. When debris of all sorts began falling from the sky around her, she and others in the area were quickly instructed to walk north to escape being hit by whatever was hurtling down. She and colleagues did so and reached 14th Street before they took shelter in the home of a colleague. They soon enough learned what they might have escaped. But there was no relief for any of us and for all Americans and people of good will the world over as we contemplated the enduring enormity of this world-changing terrorist abomination, of grown men committing suicide by commandeering planes into civilian skyscrapers in order to kill thousands of innocent human beings.
The work of the minuscule staff of two on the September/October 2001 issue of Midstream had been delayed by many factors so that the issue was not ready for the printer in time for publication at the beginning of September or even by September 15. This gave me the opportunity to write my first formal editorial in our journal entitled, “Lessons from the New Day of Infamy.” I had borrowed the term from an article by William Safire in The New York Times who, quite clearly, was comparing the awful event with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 that President Roosevelt had referred to as “a day that will live in infamy.”
I recently reread my own editorial that I published in Midstream under that evocative title. I began by urging America to take good care of the bereaved families of those who perished in the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers, on the Pentagon, including the doomed but brave passengers on the four planes that crashed, the last one going down in an open field in Pennsylvania short of its intended target. That also included heroic police and firefighters who came as first responders to the aid of victims in the towers, so many of whom became victims themselves. Ten years later, America is still grappling with the problems of the first responders who survived 9/11 but still suffer from maladies that were probably contracted in the dust and lethal debris of the fallen towers. I’m not competent to judge whether various cancers can be traced to the heroic actions of those awful days of digging for survivors, but I wish that our government would not quibble over an issue like that.
I also made a plea that Americans resist holding every Arab citizen of the United States accountable for the disaster of that day. It is still an issue ten years later. Within these ten years, we have been shocked to learn that some young American Arabs traveled to the Middle East to join terrorist groups where they underwent training and then attempted to return to the U.S. to carry out bombing plots. This has provoked some of our citizens to condemn all Arabs as supporters of terror. This is unfortunate. As editor of Midstream, I occasionally receive submissions of manuscripts that express this bigoted point of view. One, for example, writes that there are no “moderate Arabs,” that all Muslims covertly support the terrorists even if they don’t plant bombs themselves. It does no good telling these writers that one cannot and should not make blanket statements about a billion and a half Muslims or about three hundred million Arabs in the world. The old witticism many of us learned in college courses in logic that “all generalizations are false except this one” is one generalization that we must take seriously. I would hope that enlightened readers of Midstream would agree. We Jews, who have suffered, not only from a two-thousand-year history of totally false accusations, but also of unfair and cruel generalization about our national character, should know better.
The brunt of that editorial dealt with two issues: an absolute condemnation of the practice of suicide bombing and a condemnation of those in the enlightened West who were quick to find reasons for justifying the terrorist suicide attack on the United States, i.e., because of American foreign policy vis-à-vis the Arabs in the Middle East, that is to say, because of American support of Israel. My point was a simple one—that targeting and killing 3,000 people in the 9/11 attacks cannot be justified by any foreign policy issue. (My reference in that editorial to 6,000 casualties was thankfully reduced by a later, more accurate report.)
I also insisted that teaching young Arabs to immolate themselves with bomb belts hidden under their clothing to be exploded in pizza parlors or open markets or on public buses in Israel to kill other young and old people is a double atrocity never to be justifiable; as is piloting planes into buildings to kill and be killed.
I still feel the same way. Less than a year after 9/11, almost daily suicide bombings against Israeli civilian targets culminated in a ghastly attack upon a communal Seder in a Netanya hotel on Passover that killed dozens and maimed many, many more at this family ritual. Such suicide attacks in Israel began long before the atrocity of 9/11. The training of young Arab men and women, many of them teenagers, to kill themselves by being suicide bombers among other young people is the horror story of our time. The young Arabs are brainwashed with assurances that the Muslim religion promises that they would be rewarded as martyrs in heaven with sexual delights (a concept that many “moderate Muslims” reject as a distortion of their religion). In my 2001 editorial, I labeled this terrorist practice as barbaric. It reminded me of ancient barbarisms. I compared it to the ancient sacrifice of children to the god Moloch that was condemned unequivocally as an abomination in the Hebrew Bible.
But Islamist suicide bombings in the ten years since 9/11 have reached an even greater number with the constant reports still being made of such atrocities in Iraq where Arabs have murdered Arabs, even by blowing up holy mosques. There seems to be an unending supply of Arab men willing to kill themselves, if not with bomb belts around their waist under their clothes, if not by piloting planes filled with innocent passengers into buildings, then by driving bomb-filled cars into open-air markets and mosques.
One would expect, post 9/11, that the world would react with righteous anger and widespread public condemnation. The result in these ten years? Hardly a murmur of dismay from the Arab League or Islamic religious leaders. I would have expected imams to issue a fatwa against this disgusting practice. It is one fatwa that all of us could applaud. And there were only pro forma expressions of dismay coming from officials of the United Nations with no formal resolutions of condemnation followed by sanctions to stop the practice of suicide bombing. The same goes for tepid reactions from the world’s human rights groups. This is beyond belief.
Will the widespread protests in this year of 2011 by Arab youth against Arab dictatorships in the Middle East, commonly referred to as “the Arab Spring,” come to grips with this scourge of our time? Or will Islamist parties sneak into positions of power as a consequence of so-called democratic elections in many Arab countries just as Hamas did in Gaza and Hezbollah did in Lebanon? I don’t know the answer. But I do know that it is very difficult to persuade well-meaning Americans, Israelis, and others in the free democratic world that not every Muslim is a supporter of terrorism when thousands of suicide bomb attacks take place. In 2001, moderate Muslims seemed to disappear when so many in the Muslim world cheered the mass murder perpetrated on 9/11, or attributed that atrocity to Israel and to Jews.
I hope an editor or memoirist ten years from now will be able to chart the decade’s decision in the Arab world and the world-at-large to make suicide bombing under any circumstances a crime against humanity and those who plan such atrocities and train their young to carry them out as war criminals to be brought to justice at the Hague. If such a resolution is supported by Arab and Muslim countries and by most of the imams of Islam, it will then prove that they mean what they seem to say only in the West. It will then be a new day that honors best the victims of 9/11. That day, whenever it comes, will also be a turning point in world history, and may even lead, albeit gradually, to the inevitable era of reformation and enlightenment in the Muslim world that will reconcile East, Middle East, and West. And finally—the miracle of miracles, Muslim acceptance of a friendly Christian West and a secure and permanent Jewish state in the Middle East. Is this foolish fantasy? I pray and hope not.
Let me end by a return to the personal, which in Western philosophies, is sometimes as meaningful as the mass public interest and the political drama. Just a few days after the tragedy of 9/11, two of our dearest Israeli cousins, Ziva and Asher, who had been visiting other relatives in Canada, felt that they must come immediately to New York to support us and all New Yorkers in our difficult travail. Sylvia, Zeasel, and I did not take them to ground zero, which was impossible so soon after the destruction and a very dangerous area for the first responders digging in the debris that brooked no visitors. We took our beloved guests instead to other places that reflected the momentous inner drama of the time.
Somewhere near Bellevue Hospital on the East Side of Manhattan, we came upon an extended wall that was plastered with hundreds of notes with photographs put up by relatives of loved ones who were still missing. They hoped that the missing survived the destruction of the Towers in which they worked and would be recognized by passersby. Our relatives from Israel and countless others perused these anguished notes with tears in their eyes.
Asher had served as a tank commander in the Six-Day War of 1967 and in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 in Israel. He recalled his deep emotions that he felt because of the many casualties in his own unit as they fought to repel the invasion from the Golan Heights in the Yom Kippur War aimed, as in the Six-Day War, to crush the young Jewish state and to drive the Israelis into the sea. Asher murmured that reading these notes provoked similar anguish in him. Ziva, a lawyer, who had served as a high-ranking legal officer in the Israeli Police Department, expressed similar emotions. Other notes were simply letters of consolation and poetry written by people from all over the world visiting New York and addressed to the families of victims and to all Americans. Strangers all, who understood the personal and the national anguish.
In Union Square off East 14th Street in Manhattan, the young hippies who gathered there almost every weekend had put down a giant white sheet on the ground in a wide open space on which everyone was invited to write something and/or to sign their names. We did so. In fact, the Hebrew written by our Israeli relatives, Asher and Ziva, added a special poignancy to many other notes in many other languages. Had any other country suffered as many acts of heartless terrorism and suicide bombing over as many years equal to that of the Jewish State of Israel? Consequently, their Hebrew note of sympathy for all the victims of 9/11, seemed especially moving coming from an Israeli family.
On Sunday night that weekend, we attended a play at the Jewish Repertory Theater on East 14th Street in Manhattan. The play had nothing to do with the horrific events of that week and must have seemed irrelevant to many, if not inappropriate. But at the final curtain, the audience, rose almost unanimously and sang “God Bless America.” And when the audience exited, many of them turned to the left and walked past the local firehouse a few houses down the street that had lost several men on that awful Tuesday morning who had raced to the scene to save as many lives as they could before the towers collapsed on them.
That weekend of community and unity among Americans and sympathetic foreign visitors has not been duplicated since. Does it take a disaster of ghastly violence to bring people of good will together? Perhaps so. It was a moment of sincere patriotism. And it was also a week of national shiva, when we mourned the sacred dead and comforted the bereaved. As with the memory of the Holocaust, it is not enough to bask in the glow of patriotism or even to mourn and to comfort. We must also say, “Never again!” •
About the author
Leo Haber, editor of Midstream, was educated at C.C.N.Y. (Phi Beta Kappa) and Columbia University, earning degrees in English language and literature, and at the Herzliah Hebrew Teachers’ Institute in New York. His novel, The Red Heifer, was published in 2001 and reissued in paperback in 2005.
Anne Frank: Tragedy and Triumph
by Jeffrey Meyers
I
Anne Frank’s brilliant and complex Diary of a Young Girl (1947; definitive edition 1995) has the power to engage the reader’s deepest sympathy. It has been translated into more than sixty languages and has sold more than thirty million copies to adults and children around the world. As she moved towards self-awareness and maturity, Anne spontaneously and intuitively incorporated several kinds of books in her Diary. It belongs with the works of precocious writers, with the diaries of young girls, with accounts of the accelerated development of wise children, and with narratives of people hiding from oppressive authority and afirming their independent existence while threatened with death. Placing her Diary in the context of these literary genres illuminates the meaning of her book.
The works of the most precocious writers include Daisy Ashford’s popular The Young Visiters (1919), which she wrote when she was only nine years old; Rudyard Kipling’s journalistic sketches in the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, India, which began to appear when he was sixteen; the poems of Thomas Chatterton, William Wordsworth’s “marvelous boy,” who committed suicide at seventeen; the two French novels of Raymond Radiguet, who died of typhoid at nineteen; and the poems of Arthur Rimbaud, the most influential French poet of the nineteenth century, who renounced his career, at the peak of his powers, at the age of twenty. But no fifteen-year-old author in history ever wrote as well as Anne Frank.
The Portuguese Diary of a Young Girl (1942) was translated by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop as The Diary of Helena Morley (1957). Helena (1880-1970), whose real name was Alice Dayrell, was the daughter of a British mining engineer and a Brazilian mother. She grew up in the remote town of Diamantina, two hundred miles north of Belo Horizonte, in the state of Minas Gerais. Helena kept her diary from 1893 to 1895 at exactly the same age—thirteen to fifteen—as Anne Frank, who kept her diary from 1942 to 1944.
The settings and circumstances of the two girls were very different. Helena, a Catholic and poor student, roamed the wilds of the Brazilian highlands. Anne, Jewish and an excellent student, was confined to a small Secret Annex. As a writer, Helena was more naive and childlike, and did not revise her work. Anne, more sophisticated and dramatic, especially when her life was in danger, made extensive revisions. Helena’s Diary, alluding to her grandmother’s legacy, ends positively by noting, “We shan’t suffer for the lack of the necessities any longer.” Anne’s Diary inevitably ends with a sense of foreboding. Like Jean-Paul Sartre’s assertion in No Exit (1944), “Hell is other people,” Anne concludes: “if only there were no other people in the world.” Helena, a grande dame, lived to be ninety; Anne, still a child, died at fifteen.
But the two young diarists also had a good deal in common. Both extrovert, clever and resourceful girls, isolated outsiders in their communities, recorded closely observed details about themselves and their constricted family life, and described their awakening consciousness and growth into maturity. According to Bishop, Helena’s lively, idiomatic language was (like Anne’s), “fresh, sad, funny, and eternally true.” Both girls were threatened by dangerous thieves in their neighborhood. Both were show-offs and saucy to grown-ups; they loved Hollywood movie stars; and they worried about their food, tattered clothing and physical appearance. Both adored their distant grandmothers, but were bored, irritated and often enraged by their immediate families. Like Anne, Helena wrote that everyone always repeats “the same stories, all the time,” that when a relative “has a toothache, she drives the whole household crazy,” and, with justified self-pity, “It’s my fate that everyone who loves me makes my life miserable.” Neither girl, for very different reasons, wrote anything besides their diaries, and both diaries became major works in Brazilian and in Dutch literature.
Anne’s Diary is closer in style and mood to the Journal of the Russian painter Marie Bashkirtseff (1858-84), who was transplanted to France, began to write when she was thirteen, and died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five. Like Anne, Marie was attractive, gifted and eager for fame, and felt the flowering of her talent just before her early death: “I have the desire, if not the hope, of staying on this earth by whatever means possible. If I don’t die young, I hope to become a great artist. If I do, I want my journal to be published. It cannot fail to be interesting.” While Anne, though often depressed and terrified, hoped—somehow—to survive, Marie knew that her disease was fatal. In the last year of her life, she wrote: “I may linger for a while, but I am doomed. . . . Here it is at last, then, the end of all my miseries! So many aspirations, so many hopes, so many plans—to die . . . at the threshold of everything.” Both Marie and Anne had contentious passages suppressed by their parents.
Anne’s Diary combines the portrayal of a clear-sighted and precociously wise child—like the eponymous heroine in Henry James’ What Maisie Knew (1897) and Flora in The Turn of the Screw (1898)—with the personal development and new imaginative awareness in Thomas Mann’s “Tonio Kröger” (1903) and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Comparing her prewar and wartime existence, she observed, “When I was at home, my life was filled with sunshine. Then, in the middle of 1942, everything changed overnight. . . . The Anne Frank who enjoyed that heavenly existence was completely different from the one who has grown wise within these walls. . . . Even though I’m only fourteen, I know what I want, I know who’s right and who’s wrong. I have my own opinions, ideas and principles, and though it may sound odd coming from a teenager, I feel I’m more of a person than a child—I feel I’m completely independent of others.” Though she lacked experience and knowledge, Anne knew she was more intelligent than the doltish adults—Dussel and Petronella van Daan (to use their fictitious names in her Diary)—who criticized her, demeaned her and ordered her around. The Diary provided a safety valve that settled scores when Anne could not confront her adversaries directly.
Deprived of a normal childhood and forced into maturity by violent events, Anne was granted a brief respite between her prewar happiness and her horrible death. As her body and mind changed with astonishing and sometimes alarming rapidity, she became more critical of and hostile to the seven people who shared her increasingly difficult confinement: her parents Otto and Edith, Otto’s business partner Hermann van Daan and his wife Petronella, the dentist Albert Dussel, Anne’s sister Margot and Peter van Daan, both three years older than she. At the same time, she became interested in falling in love with a boy (“I’m half crazy with desire for him”) but was soon disillusioned with the inarticulate and intellectually limited Peter van Daan.
Discussions of Anne’s Diary usually focus on how keenly she observed domestic life in the Secret Annex. But she also charted the major events of the war, and the progress of the war ran parallel to her own emotional and intellectual development. In this way she was forced, or forced herself, to mature. Though cut them off from normal existence, the Franks had an illegal radio, and Anne was remarkably well informed by the BBC’s announcers and by the stirring speeches of Winston Churchill. The family’s protectors, working in Otto Frank’s old office below the Secret Annex, also provided essential information. Anne knew about the English exile of the Dutch royal family, the increasing acts of sabotage against the Nazis in Holland, the arrests of Dutch Jews and deportations to the gas chambers in Poland. She knew exactly what might happen to her family if their hiding place was discovered. From terrifying personal experience, she was also aware that British planes flew over Holland to bomb northern Germany, and records that several aviators were shot down and either captured or executed. She mentions the Allied landings in Casablanca, Algiers, and Tunis; the victory at Stalingrad (a major turning point of the war); the fall of Mussolini; the British landing at Naples; the battle of Cassino; the fall of Rome; the advances on the Russian front; the capture of the Crimea and Vitebsk; the D-Day invasion of Normandy (her first reference to Eisenhower and the American army); the seizure of Cherbourg and the Cotentin Peninsula; and the heartening attempt to assassinate Hitler. Each advance brought hope of the long-awaited final victory. Few adolescents see themselves so closely connected to contemporary history. Anne’s awareness that her own survival depended on the success of the Allies kept her constantly alert to the latest news.
Anne’s Diary is in a class by itself, but the superb, little-known memoir, In Hiding: The Life of Manuel Cortes (1972), as told to Ronald Fraser, resembles it in important ways. After the Spanish Civil War Cortes, the Socialist mayor of Mijas in Andalusia, was threatened with certain execution by the fascists and forced to hide in his wife’s house for thirty years. (I knew Cortes when I lived in the next village in the 1970s.) When he became ill, his wife simulated his symptoms and procured his medicine. When his daughter got married, he watched the festivities through a crack in the door. The dynamics of his secret family life, the constant danger of discovery and his courage under threat of death were very like Anne’s. Like Anne, he had never committed a crime and was entirely innocent. But Cortes was finally pardoned and survived his long ordeal.
II
Anne’s father, Otto Frank, foresaw the Nazi threat to the Jews and left Frankfurt for Amsterdam after Hitler took power in 1933. But he did not foresee the German invasion of Holland, which had been neutral in World War I and in 1918 had provided refuge for the deposed German Kaiser. Otto provided furnishings, clothing and food in the hundred-square-foot Secret Annex—high above the street yet psychologically underground—and took his family into hiding when Margot was suddenly called for duty in a labor camp. He still regarded Anne as a child and, surprisingly insensitive to her physical and emotional changes during the turmoil of puberty, made her share a tiny room with a stranger. He could have put Dussel, the middle-aged dentist, with the young Peter van Daan and allowed Anne to have the attic room.
Treated like a child but expected to behave like an adult, Anne was subjected to a series of terrifying torments, threats, and dangers. She had close and irritating contact with seven other people, whose petty quarrels blew up into major conflicts and whose sudden shifts of mood resembled the behavior of adolescent cliques. Anne had an uneasy rivalry with her exemplary older sister—a sort of “Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded.” Constantly picked on by the grown-ups, she craved a real friend who’d provide true understanding and love. The little chatterbox had to be absolutely silent during the day when workers were in the building, and lacked normal privacy when bathing and using the toilet. She not only suffered from poor food and illness, but was also terrified by several break-ins and burglaries in the office, and by air raids and fires. She experienced hopeless passivity and psychological anguish, uncertainty and fear, alternation between hope and despair. She was constantly afraid of arousing suspicion that would inevitably lead to betrayal and arrest, deportation, and death. There was no possibility of escape and no emergency plan, for Jews had no place to go if they were forced out of hiding. Their hiding place, once a refuge, became a trap. All this was compounded by a cruel sense of injustice: she suffered merely because she was a Jew. Anne hoped to live; her readers knew she would die. But she spoke for thousands and thousands of child victims who did not keep a diary.
When the people and governments actively resisted Nazi policies in occupied Denmark and Bulgaria, there were no mass arrests and deportations to the extermination camps. Most of the Jews in those two countries survived the war. In Holland, by contrast, where the authorities cooperated with the Gestapo, almost the whole Jewish population was deported. Of 140,000 Dutch Jews, fewer than 35,000 survived—the lowest survival rate of any country in western Europe.
If Anne had been able to hide for only a month longer, Hitler’s best-known victim might have survived the war. After hiding for twenty-five months, she was arrested on August 4, 1944, nine months before the liberation of Holland. On September 3, she was sent on the very last train from Holland to Auschwitz. In October 1944, she was transferred from Poland to Bergen-Belsen, near Hannover, three months before the liberation of Auschwitz. She died in March 1945, only one month before the liberation of Bergen-Belsen. Emaciated and ragged, tormented by fleas and lice, ulcerated and febrile, the frail and sensitive child saw her sister die. Separated from her parents and believing them dead (Otto survived), she lost her will to live. She died of typhus, a more prolonged and even more agonizing death than by cyanide gas. Both Jew and German, Anne was born and died in Germany, and was buried with thousands of other corpses in an unmarked mass grave. As a German woman remarked, with unintentional irony, after seeing the stage version of the Diary, “that girl at least should have been allowed to live.”
III
Anne Frank’s literary reputation was greatly enhanced by her physical beauty and her early death. She was sensitive, intelligent, and charming, with an engaging personality, a photogenic smile and a cute cleft chin. Her Diary would have been far less successful if she’d been named Elfrieda Kneuebuhler and looked like Alice B. Toklas. Though Anne had to wear a defensive mask, and noted the difference between her inner and outer selves—she directed one to the Diary, the other to the people in the Secret Annex—her character is the most appealing part of the Diary. She was brave and honest, inquisitive and perceptive, self-aware and analytical, and uncommonly talented as a writer.
Despite her grim situation, Anne had a keen sense of humor. She sees through the pretentiousness and absurdity of the adults, the naiveté of Peter and the goody-goody quality of Margot. Peter was fond of using foreign words without knowing what they meant. Unable to flush the toilet during the day, he put up a notice warning the others about the unpleasant odor: “RSVP—gas!” Their worn-out clothes also had a comic aspect: “Mama’s corset snapped today and is beyond repair, while Margot is wearing a bra that’s two sizes too small.” The audible demise of the girdle reveals both the need for conventional dress and the difficulty of keeping up appearances in the Secret Annex, while the inadequate Büstenhalter suggests Margot’s discomfort as well as Anne’s impending inheritance.
The vignette of Petronella van Daan worrying about cooking her soup and food while being tormented by Dussel the in-house dentist has a Chaplinesque quality:
After a lengthy examination . . . Dussel began to scrape out a cavity. But Mrs. van D. had no intention of letting him. She flailed her arms and legs until Dussel finally let go of his probe and . . . it remained stuck in Mrs. van D.’s tooth. That really did it! Mrs. van D. lashed out wildly in all directions, cried (as much as you can with an instrument like that in your mouth), tried to remove it, but only managed to push it in even farther. . . . After a great deal of squirming, kicking, screaming and shouting, Mrs. van D. finally managed to yank the thing out, and Mr. Dussel went on with his work as if nothing had happened.
Anne felt a gratifying Schadenfreude when watching the intensely irritating woman lose control of her body—and dignity—and be reduced to the level of a squealing infant.
Anne suffered a similar indignity when she caught the flu and was unwillingly examined by the dentist:
The worst part was when Mr. Dussel decided to play doctor and laid his pomaded head on my bare chest to listen to the sounds. Not only did his hair tickle, but I was embarrassed, even though he went to school thirty years ago and does have some kind of medical degree. Why should he lay his head on my heart? After all, he’s not my boyfriend! For that matter, he wouldn’t be able to tell a healthy sound from an unhealthy one. He’d have to have his ears cleaned first, since he’s becoming alarmingly hard of hearing.
The incongruity of “play doctor,” his foppish “pomaded head” and her “bare chest” is both excruciating and amusing. Anne slyly transforms the pretentious quack into a romantic swain. In any case, as she knows all too well, her roommate’s ears are clogged and he’s half-deaf.
Anne’s analysis of the defects in her parents’ marriage and in her mother’s character suggests an additional strain in her life. Her father does not ask her mother’s opinion nor confide in her about important matters. Intensely idealistic about marriage, Anne notes their lack of real passion: “Father’s not in love. He kisses her the way he kisses us. He never holds her up as an example, because he can’t. He looks at her teasingly, or mockingly, but never lovingly.” Anne’s refusal to allow her mother, instead of her father, to listen to her nightly prayers, reveals her hostility and provokes a serious quarrel. After her tearful mother confesses, “I can’t make you love me!,” Anne, honest as always, regrets yet justifies her behavior: “how mean it was of me to reject her so cruelly, but I also knew that I was incapable of answering her any other way. I can’t be a hypocrite and pray with her when I don’t feel like it. It just doesn’t work that way.”
Anne’s descriptions of the external world reflect her inner turmoil and depression: “The atmosphere is stifling, sluggish, leaden. Outside, you don’t hear a single bird, and a deathly oppressive silence hangs over the house and clings to me as if it were going to drag me into the deepest regions of the underworld.” She’d been studying classical mythology, and this passage suggests Eurydice’s descent into Hades without the possibility of rescue by Orpheus. But her forced sequestration has also made her more responsive to the natural world, glimpsed through the attic window, as if the sky had been created for her private pleasure. In a lyrical passage she writes, “The dark, rainy evening, the wind, the racing clouds, had me spellbound; it was the first time in a year and a half that I’d seen the night face to face.”
No one read Anne’s Diary until Otto returned to Amsterdam after the war. Though she hoped to publish it some day, Anne is remarkably honest and illuminating about her body and discusses sexual details, even with Peter, which would have made most adolescents squirm with embarrassment. She mentions menstruation, which coincides with her sexual awakening and desire, and exclaims, “Oh, I long to get my period—then I’ll really be grown up.” When her period comes, as she’s longing to be kissed by Peter, she feels “in spite of all the pain, discomfort and mess, that I’m carrying around a sweet secret. So even though it’s a nuisance, in a certain way I’m always looking forward to the time when I’ll feel that secret inside me once again.” Desperately seeking an emotional outlet, Anne remembers an earlier time when her bold sexual suggestion and rejection by a close friend (Jacqueline called Jacque) became a moment of ecstasy: “I had asked her whether, as proof of our friendship, we could touch each other’s breasts. Jacque refused. I also had a terrible desire to kiss her, which I did. Every time I see a female nude, such as the Venus in my art history book, I go into ecstasy.”
Anne’s mother had told her about periods when she was eleven, but feigned ignorance when asked to explain the function of the clitoris. Though the details of sexual life were mysterious, Anne was pleased to discover the great truth by herself: “My own intuition told me what a man and a woman do when they’re together; it seemed like a crazy idea at first, but when Jacque confirmed it, I was proud of myself for having figured it out!” She gives an anatomically precise description of the female genitals and, with sweet innocence, concludes that the vaginal “hole’s so small I can hardly imagine how a man could get in there, much less how a baby could come out.”
Danger was always present and Anne’s intensely active imagination inspired some eerie foreshadowing of her fate in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. She observes, “perhaps the day will come when I’m left alone more than I’d like!” She self-reflectively dreams of a friend who was deported, “dressed in rags, her face thin and worn. She looked at me with such sadness and reproach” and seemed to say, “Help me, help me, rescue me from this hell!” When Anne’s precious fountain pen is accidentally burned in the fireplace, she’s “left with one consolation, small though it may be: my fountain pen was cremated, just as I would like to be someday!” This incineration, ironically, was the fate of many Dutch Jews. Despite all her suffering, Anne finally realized her idealistic goal, and became a voice from the grave: “my greatest wish is to be a journalist, and later on, a famous writer. . . . If God lets me live, I’ll achieve more than Mother ever did, I’ll make my voice heard, I’ll go out into the world and work for mankind.” Like a burnt-out star, her light, though extinct, continues to shine. •
About the author
Jeffrey Meyers, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, has recently published Samuel Johnson: The Struggle (2008), The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe (2009), George Orwell: Life and Art (2010)—his fifth work on Orwell—and John Huston: Courage and Art (2011). Thirty of his books have been translated into fourteen languages and published on six continents.
A Biographical Note and an Unpublished Interview with Chaim Grade
by Curt Leviant
In 2010, Jews who love books marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Chaim Grade, one of the major figures in modern Yiddish literature. He was born in Vilna, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, in 1910, into a poor family whose father was a Hebrew teacher and a maskil, and his mother, after she was widowed, sold apples in the marketplace to support her only son. From his childhood on, Chaim was inspired to follow the paths of Jewish and general learning. He was educated in various yeshivas, but as he himself states and describes in thinly disguised autobiographical fiction—he was not a keen Talmudic scholar.
In 1941, he fled the oncoming Germans and made his way to the Soviet Union where he stayed until after the end of World War II. Then, after returning briefly to his destroyed Vilna, he spent two years in Paris, active in reconstituting the cultural life of the vast colony of Yiddish-speaking refugees. Grade came to the United States in 1948 and lived in The Bronx until his death at 72, in 1982.
Grade differed from most other Yiddish writers in that he had been a yeshiva bokher for most of his youth. There may have been others like him who wrote in Yiddish, but he was the only one who depicted rabbis and yeshiva life, not as hagiography—but spoke honestly and was a faithful and objective pointillist about all its bumps and warts. It should be said that he was immediately expelled from the yeshiva when a teacher caught him writing secular poetry.
His first book of poems, Yo! (Yes), was published in 1936, and from that time on, the young Grade became a major voice in Yiddish belles lettres. Although he was a private student of the revered Rabbi Avraham Karelitz—the Chazon Ish—Grade considered himself a secular Jew, not a shomer mitzvot; (keeper of the commandments), yet some tradition adhered to him. Witness the Seders he organized in his home, his attendance at High Holiday services, and his warm relationship with the Lubavitcher Rebbe.
During the last decade of his life, I had the good fortune to translate three of his novels and a Holocaust memoir and, by so doing, developed a close friendship with him. I remember visiting him once before Pesach in The Bronx, and he showed me a box of shmura matza.
“The Lubavitcher Rebbe sent his personal sh’liakh (messenger) to bring me these matzas,” Grade said proudly and added that this was an annual tradition.
Another time he told me he could study a blatt Gemara bareheaded. “But when I look into Rashi,” he said, “and I’m not wearing a yarmulke, hebyt mir on der kop tzu brenen—I feel my head burning.”
It was through one of his books that I got to know Chaim Grade.
When his novel, The Well, Grade’s first book to appear in English translation, was published, The New York Times Book Review asked me to write an essay about it. A couple of weeks after it appeared, I got a letter from him asking me if I’d like to translate his novel, The Agunah. Of course Grade realized that I knew Yiddish, for The Book Review credit line stated that I had translated two collections of Sholom Aleichem stories.
But it wasn’t only my knowledge of Yiddish that prompted Grade to contact me. He was confident I knew another language crucial for an accurate translation, especially a Grade work. That language is Yiddish plus the suffix—keyt; i.e. Yiddishkeyt, a language I also call Jewish, which a translator must also be expert in, besides knowing Hebrew and Yiddish.
But when Grade read my review of The Well, he saw that I quoted from the Midrash and knew Jewish folklore and Jewish symbols. He felt secure I wouldn’t stumble when I encountered the rabbinics-laden, mostly Hebrew, dialogue of the rabbis in his novels.
After The Agunah—it was reviewed in The New York Times Book Review by Elie Wiesel, who called Grade “the greatest living Yiddish writer”—Chaim asked me to translate his two-volume The Yeshiva, one of the crowning glories of twentieth-century Yiddish fiction.
Grade told me he loved the 19th century Russian novelists, which is evident in the grand sweep of The Yeshiva. As Sholom Aleichem re-created the life of East European Jewry in all its nuances, in a broad geographic spectrum, so Chaim Grade took the entire spectrum of Jewish Vilna and preserved it for posterity. In his ten volumes of poetry and six of prose, Grade, the literary archivist, has brought back to life what the Germans and their enthusiastic Lithuanian helpers physically destroyed.
No wonder Grade confided to me one day, “Coort, you know what? I’m a better speaker than a writer.” In his wanderings through the United States, Canada, Mexico, South America, Israel, Australia, and South Africa, he established a reputation as a dynamic speaker and became a one-man ambassador-at-large for Yiddish.
In his prose, Grade has explored the tensions of religiosity in the face of both secular seductions and personal and national adversity, displaying his concern for Jews in their individual human struggles, and also probing his own personal world as an extension of Vilna. Although steeped in the twentieth century—in both outlook and literary technique—Grade holds all of Jewish traditional values and lore in his pen.
Sometimes writers are called upon single-handedly to counterpoint, indeed counteract, the events of history. The writer’s creative imagination has to undo, metaphorically speaking, what history has done. If history assumes the guise of a murderer, the writer must revivify the dead. Especially for the Jewish writer, it is the pen against the sword. Occasionally, a writer even begins the process in tranquility, and then is driven by the thrust of history to become such a foil.
That was Chaim Grade’s mission—and his grand achievement.
In looking through my Grade folder recently, I discovered the following interview which was conducted in Chaim Grade’s apartment in the Bronx. I had never submitted it for publication and so this is the first time it is being published.
*** ***
CURT LEVIANT: It is well known that you were a poet before you became a prose writer. Why did you turn to writing prose in 1950?
CHAIM GRADE: You know, of course, that I still write and publish poetry . . .
CURT LEVIANT: Yes, I do. . .
CHAIM GRADE: And in any case, if one is truly a poet, he can’t ever stop being a poet. Just as one remains a Musarnik even after one turns to the secular way of life—because once you’ve been exposed to Musar it invades the marrow of your bones and stays there forever—so one does not stop being a poet even after one ceases to write poetry, which I’ve never stopped doing. . . I’d say there are three reasons why I began writing prose in 1950. First, I was prepared psychologically and artistically, because in addition to short, lyric verse, I had written long narrative poems. My second book, in fact, was an eighty-page narrative poem entitled Musarnikes which came out in Vilna in 1938. Secondly, I felt that if the lyric was the proper form for me as an elegist of our Holocaust —and I have five volumes of poetry on that subject—then the narrative poem was too archaic and narrow a form for me to describe the downfall of the Jewish world of Eastern Europe. Thirdly, I wanted to reach a wider circle of Yiddish readers in America, and I knew that the way to do this was via fiction published in weekly episodes in a Yiddish paper. I began with the Morning Journal, then continued with the Day-Morning Journal, and since that paper ceased publication, I’ve been working for the Forward.
CURT LEVIANT: Did you ever write prose during your Vilna poetry period?
CHAIM GRADE: In Vilna I wrote only one piece of prose—a speech.
CURT LEVIANT: Did you write poetry or prose during your war years in Russia?
CHAIM GRADE: The war years in Russia were among the most creative in my life. I fled Vilna in June 1941 when the Germans were approaching the city. At first, I made my way on foot, and then continued with troop trains which were bombed by German planes. Overburdened with all these experiences and war scenes along the way, and missing my family who had remained behind by the Germans to the point of despair, I began writing as soon as I settled in a kolkhoz in the Saratov region, where I worked a couple of months. I continued writing during my anguished wanderings in Central Asia from 1941 to 1943, when I lived in Tashkent, Ashkhabad, and Stalinabad. These are the main cities of the three Soviet republics on the border of Iran and Afghanistan, at the feet of the Pamirs Mountains and surrounded by the Karkum desert. In rags and tatters, hungry and barefoot, but in a state of mighty spiritual tension, I wrote short lyric poems and longer narrative poems without a stop. I did the same later in Moscow where I lived in much better circumstances. I only stopped writing when I returned to the ruins of my native Vilna at the end of 1945. It was as though I had become paralyzed. But during my later peregrinations, and during my short stay in Poland, and for the nearly two years that I lived in Paris (1946-1948), I again continued writing without interruption. These collections of poetry were published in Poland, Buenos Aires, Paris, and New York. Even after coming to America in 1948, I still lived for a long time with that feverish tension of a refugee on the road.
CURT LEVIANT: Very few Yiddish writers in America, no matter how long they live here, write about their American experience. Is this true about your own writing? Why?
CHAIM GRADE: Ever since I came here I wrote poems about the magnificent American landscapes: Yellowstone Park, the Adirondacks, Colorado, and the Pacific. I wrote more about the American landscape than any other Yiddish poet who spent fifty years here. But I haven’t yet written one story about life in America. In this respect, I’m not up to other Yiddish novelists who indeed have written about America, even though these works are sparse and weak in comparison to their writing about life back home.
CURT LEVIANT: For example?
CHAIM GRADE: Sholem Asch comes to mind. But there were exceptions. There were writers like Opotashu, Raboy, and others who were able to write about America. But even they couldn’t penetrate a thoroughly American environment and write about younger people with a native-born American psychology.
CURT LEVIANT: But why should this be so?
CHAIM GRADE: Why? Well, first of all, because a writer can only write authentically and deeply about an atmosphere and milieu with which he was saturated during his childhood and before he even knew he would grow up to become a writer. But besides coming to America as adults, the Yiddish writers lived of their own free will in an insulated Jewish ghetto and, what’s more, among a circle of Yiddish writers. Perhaps the Jewish-American world beyond their writer’s circle wasn’t sufficiently sophisticated from a spiritual and intellectual point of view; perhaps it wasn’t interesting enough for these young, talented immigrant prose writers who had a Yiddish-European culture. The Yiddish-American poets, however, were more successful with American motifs because they spoke only about themselves in the American environment and didn’t have to know America itself. There was a poet who actually got to know America: I.J. Schwartz, when he moved out to the country and wrote his famous lengthy narrative poem, “Kentucky,” which was about a Jew living on a farm.
CURT LEVIANT: But what about you?
CHAIM GRADE: As far as I’m concerned, I was too old when I came to America, and I’m too saturated with Jewish life and its destruction in the old country for me to begin anew.
CURT LEVIANT: Do you think you’ll ever write about life in the USA?
CHAIM GRADE: I don’t know if I’ll be able to tear myself away from the Vilna synagogue courtyard and write about America. And I don’t know, Coort, if you’d find one of my American stories sufficiently interesting to translate.
*** ***
CURT LEVIANT: Do you see your writing about Vilna and its surrounding towns and villages as a kind of memorial light to the destroyed past?
CHAIM GRADE: I don’t want to appear melodramatic, but I’ve always had the feeling that I remained alive in order to be able to describe our destroyed Jewish world in Eastern Europe. My readers feel this. They often say that my stories and novels immortalize—I wish it would be so!—our annihilated world, especially Lithuania and the Jewish town of Vilna. You use the term, yizker likht. “memorial light,” which has an aura of holiness—but I wouldn’t want to use it because I make an effort to describe the darker and mundane aspects, not only the radiant and holy sides of Jewish life in our towns and villages. This reminds me of a comment of Dov Sadan, professor emeritus of Yiddish at the Hebrew University. At a literary gathering in my honor in Jerusalem, he said: “Chaim Grande should really live in Israel, while according to their outlook, certain Israeli writers could very well live in America. But if Grade lived in Israel he wouldn’t long so strongly for Vilna and wouldn’t write about it that much. Vilna, the Jerusalem of Lithuania, deserved to have its writer. So let him be a recluse in New York and celebrate Vilna.”
CURT LEVIANT: Is there subject matter about East European Jewish life that you don’t wish to depict?
CHAIM GRADE: I would want to write about Jewish life in Eastern Europe in all its aspects. But I feel more capable writing about traditional Jewish life and the struggle of the younger generation to change this prevalent and traditional way of life.
CURT LEVIANT: Is there any difference between your attitudes to subject matter, the past, Vilna, etc., in your poetry and prose? Or is the distinction only linguistic and structural? To put it another way, is there more nostalgia, for instance, in your poetry?
CHAIM GRADE: This is a very complicated question. Naturally, in my writing too there is a difference between poetry and prose, especially in the music of the words, in the imagery, rhythm and rhymes, in the way one uses language. The second and more profound difference is in the approach. Whether the lyric poet says “I” or avoids saying this, he nevertheless always talks about himself. The prose writer has to write about other people and be aware of the background of the times, and the social, political, and cultural conditions. True, the prose writer sees the world from his particular angle of vision and perhaps describes himself in some of his characters. But he has to disguise himself in other characters and force us to believe that they live their own life. This very difference between poetry and prose is applicable to me. I would just like to add one trait which is remarkable as far as I’m concerned. While in prose I am continually absorbed with describing traditional Jewish life, in my poetry there is not one universal experience I haven’t treated. But I’ve also written about traditional Jewish life, the main theme of my prose, in shorter and longer poems.
CURT LEVIANT: For instance, your poem “Musarnikes.”
CHAIM GRADE: Yes. I began that poem even before the war. Many years later, I began writing prose here with a piece that was half essay and half story, “My Quarrel with Hersh Rasseyner,” and finally, I wrote my novel, The Yeshiva. In other words, the same theme in three different forms. My first poem in 1932 was called “My Mother.” I kept describing my mother in all my books of poetry and then devoted a whole volume to her, My Mother’s Will, published in New York in 1949. I also began writing stories about my mother in my first book of prose, My Mother’s Sabbaths, which came out in New York in 1955.
*** ***
CURT LEVIANT: Does the fact that you are a Yiddish writer, working within a Jewish tradition that has an ethical stance, put any constraints on you as an artist?
CHAIM GRADE: The sense of ethics which, along with the concept of the oneness of God, is the most important aspect of the Jewish spirit, is also the most important in my writing. On the other hand, one might think that Jewish ethics could be a hindrance to the artist. It is said that only when the Greeks stopped believing in the gods could the Greek mythology become a subject for Greek tragedy. My theory is that because the Bible has so penetrated the life and soul of the Jews and has become so sanctified for us, Hebrew literature, which was full of Biblical themes, still couldn’t achieve a great dramatic work on a Biblical theme. Also, in my own little words, I was brought up to hold certain people in such awe that I don’t dare to depict them as human beings in a work of art.
CURT LEVIANT: For instance?
CHAIM GRADE: The Vilna Gaon. I would have wanted to write about his battle with Hasidism, but I can’t see him as a human being devoid of his halo.
CURT LEVIANT: Whom do you like to read, and whom in Yiddish prose do you consider to have had the greatest influence upon your novels and stories? Who is your master in poetry?
CHAIM GRADE: You know what sort of library I have. . .
CURT LEVIANT: Yes, I see. It’s overflowing. There must be thousands and thousands of books here. . .
CHAIM GRADE: If I could have my way, I would read day and night and write only very rarely. Nevertheless, I’m not too original in my choice of favorite writers. I consider the greatest master of Yiddish prose to be David Bergelson. In my eyes, he is as great an artist in prose as was Cezanne in painting. You know, of course, that he was among that group of Soviet Yiddish writers whom Stalin murdered. Bergelson was also a prose master during the Soviet period of his creativity, but his novels lacked the human and artistic sincerity of his pre-revolutionary works.
CURT LEVIANT: And what about European writers?
CHAIM GRADE: From my youth I’ve always considered Dostoevsky the nineteenth century reincarnation of Shakespeare. For me, Dostoevsky has never become out of date. And as far as poetry is concerned, the one who had the greatest influence on me was the Hebrew-Yiddish poet, Chaim Nachman Bialik. Even during my first years as a poet, when I became a member of the group of writers called “Young Vilna,” people used to call me in jest “Chaim Nachman…Grade.” When my first book of poetry, Yo (Yes) appeared in Vilna in 1936, the Tel Aviv newspaper Davar had an article entitled “Chaim Nachman Bialik and Chaim Grade.”
CURT LEVIANT: I heard it said that you even resembled him.
CHAIM GRADE: Yes, that’s right, and besides having a similar temperament, we share the same major themes: mother, the yeshiva, Jewish martyrdom, and nature poetry.
*** ***
CURT LEVIANT: Let’s turn now to your novel, The Yeshiva, in which the Musar movement plays an important role. Would you give us your view of Musar? How did it shape your life?
CHAIM GRADE: I’ve expressed my view of Musar in the books I’ve written, but to put it briefly, simply, and concretely, I would say: The students of Musar believe that man is born evil but that lifelong self-education can make him good. But I’ve maintained ever since I’ve been a young man that whether a person is born bad or good, he cannot change himself. This attitude not only didn’t permit me to remain in a Musarnik, but it also estranged me completely from the religious outlook that man possesses free will in the choice between good and evil. However, on the other hand, the ethical impulse in me was always as strong as my erotic impulse, and as was my life instinct in general. I was imbued with this ethical consciousness in a three-pronged fashion: I studied for years with the Musarniks; I inherited it from my mother; and it is the foundation of Yiddishkeit. But this ethical consciousness, with its guilt complex on the one hand, and my lack of belief that man can change himself on the other, split my life in half from head to toe.
CURT LEVIANT: A branch of Musar is the Navaredok school. This branch seems to me to be a particularly harsh one on a man’s psyche. It is possible for a movement to teach someone to be so good as to cripple him psychologically?
CHAIM GRADE: The Navardekers, as they were called, were indeed the most extreme of the Musarniks. Their ascetic self-denials of all the pleasures of this world, their sloppy way of dressing, and their wild behavior in order to cause astonishment and bring down scorn upon themselves from the non-religious community and from beautiful women in order that secular Jews should not want to be in the company of Musarniks, their running away from every temptation, their studying Musar books all night long, and their continual probing of their psyches—as if to say: “When I study Torah, isn’t there some self-interest in it? To marry well and then get a rabbinic position? Don’t I help a friend only to be considered good and have people honor me?”; their searching for the bad intention, both in one’s own good deeds and in others, in contrast to Hasidism, which looks for the holy sparks even in the low, earthy, and sinful man; their monotonous, gloomy Musar melodies during periods of self-scrutiny; their midnight Musar melody which rent one’s heart into little pieces, and their manner of going about always gloomy; their strenuous efforts to drive themselves into a pious sadness in contradistinction to Hasidism, one of those whose principal points was to serve God with joy; their perpetual sharpening and polishing of one’s own character traits; their constant self-criticism and sensitivity to the criticism of other Musarniks —all of this was bound to cripple, and quite often psychologically crippled, many Navardeker students.
CURT LEVIANT: In a Yiddish essay on The Yeshiva, I noticed a phrase which struck me as particularly apt: musar vunden. (Musar wounds) The writer said that writing about your experiences was for you a healing after your musar vunden. Would you comment on these “Musar wounds”?
CHAIM GRADE: The man who wrote about these “Musar wounds” was the last Yiddish philologist and editor of the Great Yiddish Dictionary, Yudel Mark. He knew the Musarniks not only from my novel The Yeshiva but also from his native Lithuania. But his statement that my writing about these “Musar wounds” was a healing for me is more metaphoric than true. Writing about a certain complex doesn’t free one from it.
*** ***
CURT LEVIANT: Since The Yeshiva describes a world that most English readers are unfamiliar with, it might be worthwhile to tell something about the novel’s leading characters.
CHAIM GRADE: Tsemakh Atlas, the protagonist of the novel, is a man of deeply in-rooted moral principles and is absolutely certain that man has free will in choosing between good and bad. But, although he believes in the Torah, he is not certain that there is a God who gave the Torah. His doubting in God causes him much anguish. Moreover, he is a passionate man with a domineering character. His fiery Musarnik impulse to always tell himself and others the entire truth constantly stirs up conflicts with himself and others, including his wife and her family. Naturally, in such a novel there had to be a person with a character diametrically opposite to Tsemakh Atlas. If not, this would have been a false picture of Jewish life and also incorrect artistically. Nevertheless, I wasn’t drawn to do this because of the tendency in modern literature to focus especially on the impure, the demonic, the negative. Nowadays, the sort of writer who shocks is very popular. And I didn’t want people to tell me that I was idealizing. But here my wife, Inna Hecker-Grade, came to my aid. Although she comes from a Russian milieu entirely estranged from the Jewish environment, she argued: “You’re always telling me about your great teacher, Reb Avraham-Shaye Karelitz. You said you studied seven years with him and that he was the greatest person you ever met. Introduce him into your novel. Don’t be afraid to portray a saint.” And so I brought him into the novel with a slight change of name, calling him Reb Avraham-Shaye Kosover. He is a man of stature, a great believer in God, a man full of inner enthusiasm for the Creator, for his Torah and his Jews. Although he lived a life of poverty and had a weak heart since his youth, Reb Avraham-Shaye is full of the joy of life. The rabbi creates an air of tranquility around him; the sanctity of Sabbath during weekdays. Although he is a world-famous rabbinic authority, he has an almost physical fear of people. During the winter, he lives in a Vilna suburb, and summertime, he hides in the woods not far from town. But when he has to battle for the principles of Yiddishkeit, the perpetual smile on his face vanishes, and he displays courage, strength of character, strategic cleverness, and firmness. His feeling of compassion is stronger than all the laws of the Torah, but he has no compassion when the matter concerns public desecration of God’s name. And Reb Avraham-Shaye Kosover maintains that Tsemakh Atlas, the Navardeker Musarnik, who is the principal of the local yeshiva, is causing a desecration of God’s name with his unrestrained, overzealous ways.
CURT LEVIANT: Perhaps the women in Tsemakh’s life and the youngsters in the novel should be mentioned, too.
CHAIM GRADE:: Yes, they should. In fact, among the many women depicted in The Yeshiva, three share the spotlight with the hero, Tsemakh Atlas. His encounters with them further confounds his passionate and complex character. One is his first fiancé, a modest, honest, and sincere girl, but who owing to the circumstances of her life, is too quiet, a crestfallen and gray little dove. For a variety of reasons, Tsemakh marries another woman—a beautiful blonde who comes from a wealthy family. She is clever, independent, experienced in love, and not religious. Nevertheless, she is attracted to Tsemakh’s strong personality. But because she and Tsemakh come from two alien and irreconcilable worlds, it turns out that Tsemakh is eventually tempted by a third woman. She is a mother of two children, married to a man who travels about constantly and who humiliates her with his neglect. She is tender, feminine, and hungry for love, but she has a weak character and a tendency to melancholia. These, then, are the three women in Tsemakh’s life. And as for the youngsters, besides a group of older yeshiva students who range in age from twenty to thirty, the book also focuses on a few adolescent students, and one eleven-year-old lad who is a leading character in one section of the novel. There are also dozens of other characters in The Yeshiva, and the reader will have to take the trouble to read the novel and get to know them. I hope The Yeshiva will bring readers closer to the world from which I come and which I portray in my books. •
About the author
Curt Leviant- Among the Chaim Grade works that Curt Leviant has translated is his two-volume The Yeshiva, which won a National Jewish Book Award. Leviant’s most recent fiction is A Novel of Klass, about a Yiddish painter from Vilna, an ex- yeshiva student who flees to Russian during WW2 and later tries to make it in the New York art world.