Erotic/Neurotic? - Jewish writing and identity

Joshua Sobol

I MUST APOLOGIZE FIRST OF ALL FOR SPEAKING IN AN organized way. I wish I could speak in a very disorganized way. My experience of living nowadays in Israel is of living in a period of the post destruction of Jewish life in Europe. The most dramatic part of this experience is that you cannot reconstruct what has been destroyed. You cannot reconstruct an individual or a people or a language or a culture from piles of toothbrushes, hair, clothes, shoes and suitcases. It's impossible to do it.

It is also almost impossible to think, let alone to express our experience. It is certainly wrong to try to do it in an ordained manner. My free associations lead me at this moment to the French philosopher Pascal, before his thoughts have been put in a certain arbitrary order by his posthumous editors. Pascal's original project was to write his thoughts on pieces of paper, then to cut them out with scissors, to mix them and to throw them into a box. The way of reading Pascal correctly would be to buy a copy of Pascal's "Pensees," to cut out each "Thought," to throw it into a box, mix it with his other thoughts, and then to pick out haphazardly the shreds of paper with his separate thoughts, without trying to add them up to form a systematic way of thinking.

Another philosopher whom I have in my mind at the moment is Spinoza. In my mind he is the most Jewish philosopher of all. My way of reading his "Ethics" is similar to my way of reading Pascal. I don't think that Spinoza's endeavor to create a geometric system of thought succeeded. I think of Spinoza as of someone who had incisive intuitions and insights into human emotions. and passions, into the human heart. He tried to glue them together and to construct a geometrical system. But Spinoza's thought is basically fragmented.

So is my experience of the world. I wanted to bring with me my hat, to throw into it various thoughts, and to pick them out here in front of you, but I forgot my hat in Israel, so I'll try to do it straight away out of my head which I've brought with me.

I'm supposed to talk about Israel and Jewish writing. What is Jewish writing? What is it for me? Which Jewish writing influenced me most of all?

I was born in Israel. I grew up in a village in the center of the country. The village is called Tel Mond. When I started as a child to discover the world around me, I discovered a society of people talking a whole cocktail of languages. I discovered people talking Yiddish and Hebrew, German and Rumanian, Russian and Polish. We had Arab neighbors who used to come and sell vegetables, and they would speak Arabic--but they would also speak a kind of broken Yiddish with my grandmother or with my mother in order to sell their merchandise.

There were the British soldiers in the camp in the outskirts of the village who were on friendly terms with the inhabitants of the village and with them our people spoke a sort of an English which I heard too. And there were Italian prisoners of war who were kept in this British camp. They were given full freedom to run around the village and to work on the farms. They used to sing Neapolitan songs--and they too used to talk somehow with the inhabitants of the village. This was the linguistic atmosphere in which I grew up. It was a very irreverent linguistic atmosphere where you could use any means of expression in order to make yourself understood either by your neighbor or by the Arab villager living on the other side of the road.

I think that this influenced me very strongly. I mean, this mixture of languages, this growing up amidst people who were torn away from their places and who spoke this wild mixture of languages.

I myself grew up as a child talking two languages simultaneously, Hebrew and Yiddish because my grandmother was a Bundist and she refused to learn Hebrew until her last day, and she spoke Yiddish and read Yiddish. She used to receive the Yiddish Press from the United States from family members who lived in Brooklyn. They used to send her the "Zukunft" ("The Future") and the "Der Americaner." When I was six years old my grandmother taught me to read and to write Yiddish. I read the Americaner. And I remember even what interested me most of all: it was "Vitzen vos Blitzen," "jokes that sparkle." I grew up with these two different languages in a time when it was very unfashionable for a child or for a youngster in Israel to know Yiddish or to admit that he knew Yiddish. But these two languages, so unfriendly towards one another, suited me well, and I lived in peace with the two of them.

Nowadays I am so grateful to my grandmother for her having insisted on teaching me Yiddish. The book that influenced me most of all was a diary written in Yiddish in the Vilna Ghetto. It was Herman Kruk's Diary of the Vilna Ghetto. This book has changed my writing and my career as a playwright and it changed many things in my life. It happened to me when I was already over 40. I heard about a theater that has been functioning in the Vilna Ghetto during the Second World War. I am a man of the theater and my life is bound with the theater. When I heard about that ghetto theater, I got intrigued and curious and stimulated. I felt that there was a secret sticking in that story, a secret that must be important for me. I was asking myself many questions about my activity as a man of the theater in Israel, such as: what is the sense of making theater in our society, in our situation, and in our special context. I even thought that sometimes it might be better to abandon the theater altogether and turn to politics, if you want to influence the life of the country.

When I heard about that ghetto theater I started to look for material. A survivor from the Vilna Ghetto asked me if I had read Kruk's Diary. I said no. "Then you must read it!" I got hold of the Diary, and the moment I opened it I couldn't put it away. Everything that happened in the ghetto, including the story of the theater, is described in Kruk's Diary with the greatest precision and the minutest detail. The Diary became my bedside book. I kept reading and rereading it. I tell you all this because for me Kruk's Diary became almost the epitome of what one can call Jewish writing. Let me try to explain.

Kruk was a cultural activist of the Bund in Poland between the two World Wars. Before the Second World he founded no less than 400 libraries and cultural centers of the Bund throughout Poland. He wrote stories for children, and he was a man of style. In his Diary, written in the Vilna Ghetto during the Nazi occupation, he apologizes for having abandoned his style "because" he says, "I have no time to deal with style." He was too concerned with recording precisely everything that was taking place in this ghetto, and he had no time or patience to bother about style.

I'm not one to judge the quality of Kruk's Yiddish in the Diary, but it feels like a very instrumental Yiddish, not a flourishing Yiddish, not a colorful one but a very precise one. I've rarely read a document written with such precision and with such an incisive look into reality. It is written with an unflinching courage in observing a horrible reality in real time, and not sentimentalizing it. Just to note down everything--like the opening of a brothel in the ghetto, or the orgies which took place in the Judenrat together with German officers. They are recorded with the dates and the names of the participants.

Reading that book revolutionalized my vision of the Holocaust. The diary suggests a vision of a society very busy with living and not preparing to die. All this happened to the 15 to 16 thousand Jews who were left after the mass massacres, the remnant of the almost 80,000 Jews who were the inhabitants of Vilna before the war. Kruk's Diary depicts the vitality, the energy, and the will to live that inhabited and inspired those 15 to 16 thousand Jews who lived in the ghetto.

When I first read the Diary I didn't have the slightest idea that I was going to write a play about the theater of the Ghetto. I was so overwhelmed by the Diary, by this kind of writing which I didn't encounter in any other culture. I read Hebrew, French, English, German, and Yiddish. I can hardly imagine a culture and a language other than the destroyed Yiddish one which could produce such a gaze on reality as Hermann Kruk offers you in his Diary. It compels you to change all your opinions and your prejudices about a reality that has been otherwise mythified. Reading Kruk was for me an act of demystification.

One day my students asked me what I was writing at the moment. I said I wasn't writing anything, but that I was reading about that theater in the Vilna Ghetto. Before I knew what I was doing, I found myself telling them the story of the theater of the ghetto. It went on for two hours, and they were sitting there looking at me with great amazement.

When I finished telling them the story, I knew that the play was there, that it was written before I knew it, and that I had become a kind of a pipe, and simply had to let that story flow through me to become a play because this is the only way I know to express myself. Every time I want to write a story or a poem, I sit down to write and I write a play. So it came out as a play.

This play somehow wrote me more than I wrote it. When I wrote the play I didn't know where it was going to take me.

The play has been produced almost all over the world, and to my great astonishment three years ago I was invited to the opening night of the production of the play in Kobe, Japan. The town of Kobe had been shattered by an earthquake and the premiere took place some three months after the catastrophe. The city was still bearing the marks of the earthquake.

I admired the high quality of that production and the way they managed to reproduce what seems to me to be the Jewish quintessence of that play. But what surprised me most of all was the extremely warm reaction of the audience. They told me that after the earthquake the play showed them that a society struck by a catastrophe could and should find its own solidarity with itself and draw its power, its strength, to struggle against calamity from that solidarity with itself.

I realized that what the play meant to Israeli audiences it also meant to foreign audiences and that the bitter experience, the terrible, the tragic experience of the Jews of Vilna was not lost into a vacuum. It has not gone down the drain of humanity. No, it is a precious heritage that we Jews can share with other people. Probably in the future our mission as Jews is to open ourselves up and to develop free dialogue with other nations, with other people and with other cultures, be they English, Japanese or German, and we shouldn't shy away from any dialogue. The dialogue should be inspired by the terribly tragic experience of our people. This is maybe one of the most precious experiences that we are carrying with us, and which we should share with other peoples and cultures.

I will try to say what I hope will be the development of Israeli culture in the years to come. I believe that societies, like people, go through two phases in their life, which are two possibilities of being. One is of being erotic, the other is of being neurotic.

I believe that when people are erotic they open themselves up, they're interested in the other, they are sometimes sexually harassing. I know that this is not very accepted in this country but I think this is because they are interested in intercourse, in exchange. They want to permeate and to be permeated by others. They want to have a living metabolic exchange with other people, and to really exchange material and spiritual contents with others. That is true also about cultures. We know that with individuals it happens when they are young or when they stay young in their spirit. When one becomes neurotic, one closes oneself off one isolates oneself and creates walls and digs ditches and doesn't allow any contact. We become neurotic when we are consuming ourselves within ourselves and not allowing anyone to peek into the darkness of our soul or into whatever goes inside us. This way we condemn ourselves to death.

I experience within the Israeli cultural domain exactly the clash between those two tendencies. Israeli culture has been very erotic until a certain moment. It was very open. It was very stimulating to others. It was interested in the other and in otherness. Now there is a tendency in Israeli culture to become exclusivist, to close ourselves against others, to separate ourselve from others. This is the recent neurotic tendency in our culture. I hope very much that the future years will prove that the neurotic tendency was only temporary disease. I hope that we can still overcome it.

I believe very much that the quintessence of Jewish writing and of Jewish culture is eroticism, more than anything else. I think the Jew had always that image of being an erotic creature and this is what frightened others, that he wanted to penetrate their culture, that he wanted to change it. It was true. And it was rightfully so, I think, because this is a lively contact with others.

I will end my contribution here with a joke which Kruk tells in his Diary, a most terrible joke. He quotes it to characterize the kind of humor that developed in the Vilna Ghetto. A Jew asks another Jew what's the difference between a partial liquidation and total liquidation. And the other Jew answers: "If they liquidate 50,000 Jews and not me, that is partial liquidation. If they liquidate me, that is total liquidation." When I read this joke in Kruks' Diary I understood what I was supposed to do if I dared to put my hands into the fire and write that play. I had to become as irreverent as could be in dealing with that material. It is the spirit which can send a shiver down your backbone which is the authentic spirit of Judaism. It is that spirit which tells you not to lower you eyes when you are confronted with truth, but to look truth into the eyes. Go all the way with it and you will do your job as a human being and as a writer.

This reminds me of a Hasidic maxim, saying that you should never celebrate finding the truth in the place where you found it because it is no longer there.

YEHOSHUA SOBOL was born in 1939 and is one of the leading playwrights in Israel today, He has written an extraordinary number of plays (35), which have been translated into an astonishing number of languages (25), and has also received an extraordinary number of prizes.

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