a short story

fresh n new for ur review!


Morning and Evening
Once, in the town of Hanachiv, a boy was born on the night of his father’s death. It was winter, 1881, the night forty pogromchiki took the train from Yelizavetgrad with blades between their teeth. In place of train tickets, they clasped hundred-gram bottles of vodka between their palms. On they came, singing and shouting; first they swept through the town of Przemyslany, which was well-situated and had a railway station, and where the path from the broad hill was paved with cobbles. Down they came stumbling between the church and the general store, and burnt the synagogue. Its roof caved, slowly at first, and then quicker, until it looked like a sagged mouth, and the pale prayer-shawls piled on the lectern burnt from the fringes inward. And they moved on to Hanachiv under the thin moon’s sour grin, plying the air with song.
*
One night in late March Yossel left Oscher Schoenbrun’s house behind the other boys. On other days he ran from his teacher’s house with the other boys, and only then headed homeward, down the dirt path tamped nightly by homeward processions of cows. His mother’s house stood at the far edge of a little hillock, where tufts of fescue showed blue already and fanned up into the approaching dark. The house stood at the outskirts of the town, beside the birch forest that surrounded Hanachiv, and now, in April, the sticky new leaves had managed at long last to unfold completely. Each night except the eve of Shabbes Yossel ran home headlong from Schoenbrun’s house, trying to outstrip the gathering dark, for at twilight a boy had at least a chance to avoid the stones and stinging-nettles that dotted the hill. But in the winter that chase was hopeless, for the darkness set in long before Schoenbrun swung open his door with his spotted hands and let the boys home in a flurry of homespun scarves and dark coats, too often into swirling snows. There were many evenings when Yossel had to follow the angular lines of the letters with his fingers, so dim was the light of Schoenbrun’s guttering candle, with its stinging smoke.
But tonight the spring, so slow in its arrival, had set in at last, lengthening the days, and the light persisted even after Schoenbrun had grunted his farewell to his students. As usual, even before the boys had left, he dipped under his wood lectern for the hundred-gram vodka bottle he kept wrapped in a prayer shawl beneath it. The other boys—all ten—gathered their tattered books and their overcoats and sprang from the low wood benches, their bodies tensed in anticipation of the long race downhill to the town square. Little Leibush was the last of them; the youngest, at six, he was hard-pressed to keep up with their furious pace. Mendel, the eldest—only a few weeks from his bar-mitzvah and already nearly as brawny as his father the butcher—liked to pinch at the boy’s arm where it showed through his ragged sleeve, and put on airs with his own bought greatcoat from Brody. Today Yossel lingered over putting on his coat, lingered until Schoenbrun half-roused himself from his chair, poised to strike the idling boy, and muttered a curse under his breath; but before he could get within arm’s length Yossel slipped out of the narrow room like a shadow and let the door slam behind him. If Schoenbrun recalled this tomorrow, he might make Yossel the special target of his ire; but if Yossel was lucky the drink would plunge him into a dreamless sleep tonight, and dim the wrath in his pin-sharp eyes.
Outdoors the light broke in gold over the big hill outside Hanachiv and seemed to shatter into pieces along its shaggy edge. A cool wind blew, unrelenting, and tugged at Yossel’s coat with its broad hands, and rustled his hair with its palms. Yossel knew that his mother would not return until late tonight from the tavern she ran; it was Thursday, the night the traders from Przemyslany would pass through town on their way to the Friday market in Lviv. She would come home with her hair plastered to her temples with perspiration, and reeking of their tobacco, so weary she braced herself on the doorpost of each room. On those nights she could hardly kiss him before falling into a dreamless sleep; and he would eat bread and onions for supper, which she brought home wrapped in a cloth from the tavern.
After long days in the heder he had helped her at the tavern, sweeping the floors and fetching spirits from the cellar, and tethering the horses of the guests to the posts. How fat they were—the guests—and how they belched and sang—and leered at his black-haired mother when she fetched their cups—Yossel could hardly believe. How different they were from Schoenbrun, with his pale skin stretched over his bones like carding-wool on too big a loom, spittle in his beard, his black eyes made narrow by long hours of squinting at letters in the gloom…his body hunched, his face screwed tight in the service of his impossibly big voice, with its endless, its eternal monologues. The goyim had a thousand songs—and once in awhile one would fetch him a cuff on the ear or press a kopek into his palm; curse him for a Jew, or bless him with good fortune, and sometimes both in the same moment. Their faces were red with drunkenness, and with the sun that fell with careless abundance onto their wagons, filling each crevice with gold. Their hands were rough, and their voices were thick with life—their cruel eyes were blue with abundant life…
But lately Yossel’s mother had shooed him from the premises, telling him a boy this year to be bar-mitzvah had no business blackening his hands as a tavern-keeper, a tavern run by a widow… and she held her own sooty hands to his cheeks, black from stoking the tavern fire, and kissed him on the brow. And said—how fine it would be when he was a rebbe, with students of his own, in a city; and with a fur hat all his own and a golden robe; and how good he must be until then, how good, and work hard in the heder until he could go off to a yeshiva someday; far from the little house where the two of them slept, alone at the edge of a birchwood. Next year—if he were good—after his bar-mitzvah—he might be sent to a yeshiva…and if he were impossibly good and impossibly lucky it might be the most famous yeshiva of all, the Yeshiva of Volozhin—the best in all Russia—and far from Hanachiv—ten days by rail, they said…
Today Yossel’s hands were black as his mother’s. All day he had copied an argument from the Talmud over and over—about the time one might rise from mourning on the Ninth of Av, the day one smeared one’s face with ashes and read a book of laments—and on the eve one ate an egg to recall one’s death and bread dipped in ashes instead of butter…At noon one might rise from the floor and sit on a bench of wood, said Rav Eliezer, and the other, Rav Ashi, said only at night. All day he had tried to understand the argument—it was based on a verse in the Book of Lamentation, a wily rereading of the text; but it fled him and the letters whirled around his head like the demons that the Talmud, elsewhere, prescribed should be caught in an upturned bowl; and he gnawed at his fingers and wondered how such a creature as him could be sent to a yeshiva at all—much less acquire a golden robe—and Schoenbrun had struck him a glancing blow to the nape of his neck, where, he said, the evil impulse sits, clouding the mind…
And now the sun breaking over the hill blinded him when he stared into it, and when he shut his eyes the world shrank to a red egg. He pressed his thumbs against his eyelids and a burst of light radiated from that touch, thin as a star or an aleph. He found his feet climbing – to the crest of the hill... The same light that bled now into the furrows of the hill was dying over Przemyslany, over L’viv, over Volozhin itself. It was sinking between the birches and behind the beechwood fences of the Poles. And beyond that – to places he could not imagine—Warsaw, Lublin—Moscow…
And how brightly the same sun must shine over the desert where Moses once walked, Moses and his weary people, a desert which surely existed even now somewhere in the world…Yossel had walked as a child to the great synagogue in Przemyslany with Heiml’s father, the scribe, a man with perpetual ink-stains on his fingers and a face sour as a carp’s; on they had trekked over too many hills, trampling the heads of the chicory flowers in their shoes. Yossel had been so weary afterwards he drowsed through all Deuteronomy’s curses, until a sharp blow stung him awake, a blow with the flat of a prayer-book printed in Warsaw… If the climb to Przemyslany could weary a boy so, how weary Moses must have been, Moses who had wandered so far over the water before he could even speak. The Talmud said Moses had been struck dumb when a coal fell on his tongue, and God had taught him to speak again when he came to him in the fire… suddenly Yossel felt sorry for Moses, and then for himself, feeling the ache of Schoenbrun’s blow still.
When he reached the top of the hill the light—sifting down through the clouds, like a dust of flour through a miller’s sieve—made him feel flushed, full, ripe to bursting. A hot feeling, like the rush of oncoming sleep, immersed him from head to toe, accompanying the light, and it filled him with unease. It was as if, fully awake, he was caught in the grips of a throttling dream. He recalled a dream he had had again and again in his first year of heder—the year Schoenbrun first taught him the aleph-bais, at five, and let him lick honey off the letters when he learned them, and cuffed him when he forgot… He had dreamed that he was climbing the slope of a great aleph—too wide for him to fling his arms around; on he climbed, scrambling, falling, clutching for any hold on the unyielding black surface, slippery as ink and glossy as marble. For months Yossel had exhausted his strength each night, dangling above a broad and yawning darkness. His heart balked and danced in his chest at the memory.
The cool wind set him shivering. Yossel turned back to the village before darkness could descend. The gold light framed each blade of serge-grass and lit the nettle thorns where they nestled beneath the sharp leaves, and each grain of the sandy earth seemed weighty and precious. He walked slowly down to the valley where the town square lay—grudging each step—watching the gleam of the church dome with its lopsided cross. The church had seven windows, each wider than the last, and a towering flight of steps led up to the arched wood doors. Though it loomed over the low square—taller, much taller than the row of shops and his mother’s tavern, squat as a goose—it was a building never to be entered, or approached. The Poles filed toward it in procession each Sunday, the women in kerchiefs, the girls in plaits, with crosses to kiss dangling at their breasts. And the men barrel-heavy in wool trousers; and Father Arkadi with his censer waiting at the top of the steps; he beckoned with his dangling black sleeves, his brown beard heavy as bear-fur. The Ukrainians had their own church, in the neighboring village of Glinyany… In the lemon-yellow light just after dawn on Sundays, Yossel would wait for the crowd to pass before continuing on to Schoenbrun’s narrow house. Now he stopped before the church—then turned his eyes away—eastward, toward home.
Suddenly he heard a soft voice from above him on the church steps:
“Hey, Jew-boy…”
He looked up with his heart in his mouth—the unsettled feeling he had up on the hill hardening now into fear in his stomach. For a moment the light from the west blinded him; all he saw was a face in shadow and a halo of gold hair lit from behind, a gold dome of impossible brightness.
“Hey Jew-boy!”
And a thin figure began to descend the steps. As he reached the bottom Yossel saw it was the one-eyed Pawel, the Polish boy who sat always on the church steps. He had been born without an eye, undersized, a scrap of a boy; and the villagers said he was cursed. Kazimierz the dairyman, who drank away his wages as fast as he earned them, swore the devil had been present at Pawel’s birth, for his mother had broken the icon-lamp in the throes of labor. And now—thanks to the devil, no doubt—the boy was a weakling, too small to help his father in the fields, and clumsy to boot. The Polish boys, sunburnt and strong, cursed him and drove him before them, and kept him from their raucous games. So he sat on the steps and chewed scraps of sacred bread, sweeping the stairs for the priest and weeding the grave-mounds in the church courtyard.
Pawel was older than Yossel, a boy of thirteen; but he looked twelve like Yossel or even younger, though a few sparse gold hairs had begun to sprout above his lips. He was so thin his shoulders’ bones seemed fit to cut through his shirt. His left eye was empty; its pink lid sagged inward, into the dark cup where an eye never was. His right eye was blue as a disc of glass. He sat each afternoon on the church steps; and he watched, silently. Kazimierz said he must be mad—to sit alone on the church steps all day—mad or an idler, or both. He and Walery the cowherd had agreed, over a long gossip that sent them deep into their cups, that Pawel was a boy set upon by demons, from hearth to hill, and everywhere in between; only Father Arkadi the priest wished him well. At last Pawel reached the bottom stair and sat there, clutching a lump of bread in his hand. He was smiling.
“I saw the other Jew-boys running home together,” he said. “Why are you here all alone?”
“Good evening, Pawel Janowic,” Yossel stammered in response, in the rough Polish he had picked up at the tavern. “I went up the hill...”
“Good evening,” Pawel said, peering at him. His voice was thin, and it cracked when he said ‘evening,’ as if the word were splitting in two in his throat. “What’s your name, Jew-boy?”
“Yossel.”
“Your mother runs the tavern.”
It wasn’t a question. Pawel sniffed at the bread in his hand and began to chew it; crumbs dropped to the hairs that clung to his sharp chin, but he kept his eye trained on Yossel.
“Yes.”
“Where’s your father, then?” Pawel asked.
“He died,” Yossel answered. “He was killed. On the night I was born. My mother is a widow.”
“That’s bad luck,” said Pawel, around his mouthful of bread. “Bad fortune. Christ should bless you with better luck. He has mercy even on Jews… that’s what Father Arkadi says. He says Christ’s mercy is as boundless as our sins, or even more, and no one is cursed that can’t be forgiven, if only you confess to your sins and the blood on your hands.”
Yossel looked at his smudgy hands, for lack of a better answer, and then back into Pawel’s restless eye—bright in the deepening dusk, like a blue hole cut in the night.
“Does Father Arkadi teach you?” he asked, finally—curious about the boy he had passed so often, perched at the top of the stairs like a gangly raven. Up close, Pawel’s face was gaunt, and dappled with freckles.
“He teaches me the good word of Christ. But I can’t read, yet. Father Arkadi says if I sweep the nave and keep the crosses straight on the graves ‘til Easter he’ll teach me to read then.” Pawel looked down and scuffed his feet on the ground like a child. Then a thought came to him and he looked up at Yossel. “You – what do you and the Jew-boys do in that old man’s house? –the old man with the limp – that’s your teacher, isn’t it? I see him go in to Guttman’s shop—he spits on the ground when he walks, too. He should have three hands for all the bottles he tries to carry at once!”
Yossel laughed at that—thinking of the hundred-gram vodka bottles that littered the grass around Schoenbrun’s house, their labels worn blank by wind and water. Pawel grinned back.
“All we do in the old man’s house is read,” Yossel said. “We read our holy books. And when we finish them, we start them over again. A rebbe spends his life that way. –that’s what we have—rebbes—not priests. They sing songs, and they have a hundred students, or a thousand, or ten thousand, and some can work miracles…healing the sick, or speaking with God, or anything you could imagine.”
“I didn’t know you Jews had miracles too,” said Pawel. “—Christ’s will be done. I’ve never talked to a Jew-boy before…though I’ve seen you all from up here...”
The darkness was deeper now, enveloping them, rising up from the rich tamped earth at the foot of the church steps. In the last gleam of light Yossel could see Pawel’s one eye shine icily; and the dusk seemed to enter his parted lips. Yossel wondered if Pawel was truly mad, or cursed, or set upon by demons; his face seemed unnaturally white now, and the wind had returned, seizing fistfuls of his hair and releasing them. The silence stretched between them—Pawel seated, still clutching his nub of bread, and Yossel standing over him, nearly close enough to touch the rough fabric of his shirt and the jutting bones beneath it.
“I have to get home,” he lied, suddenly uneasy; a hot feeling, a radiation of the nerves, was beginning in his belly. “—my mother will be wanting me.”
“Goodbye, Yossel,” said Pawel, and the dark was too deep for Yossel to make out the expression on his face. “Maybe I’ll say hello now when you pass…since you and I are both unlucky.”
“Goodbye,” said Yossel; and turned away eastward, where the first stars were gathering over the birches, heavy with light, strewn carelessly across the sky like ears of summer grain.

*

Sabbath day dawned bright between the blinds. The sun fell on Yossel’s eyelids and roused him, scattering the scraps of his dream. Half blind, staggering, he rose, planting the pads of his feet in the dust at the foot of his bed. The lace curtains his mother had bought in the city were studded now with morning light as if pricked with a gold needle. Yossel dressed mechanically, half-drowsing, and slipped on his shoes in the gloom of the little house. He could hear his mother’s heavy breathing in the next room. She would sleep on deep into the morning, as she always did on the Sabbath.
No women came to the prayers at Guttman’s shtiebel. It was little more than a wood room where the men gathered to pray each morning, between the fish-house and the butcher’s yard. Alter the baker’s boy would stand at the lectern and murmur the prayers aloud, and Heiml’s father the scribe would read the Torah. Whatever light entered the room was squeezed through the seams of the plank walls, and in winter the shtiebel was plunged into darkness. Ganachiv had no rebbe and hardly any prayer-books, and a tattered Torah carried from the railway station in Przemyslany. The men prayed in a guttural undertone, though Srul the butcher and the old men wailed out the name of Jerusalem in plaintive lament, a nasal, ululating cry. Yossel had no father to accompany him, and, not yet bar-mitzvah, he was too young even to wear a prayer shawl. Usually he sat at the back; and when the other boys’ fathers tucked them under their prayer shawls during the priestly blessing, he covered his eyes with his hands. And when he came home his mother would be waiting with a hot pot of cholent, a smell of barley and beef scraps filling the house up to the brim; and she would look at him with gleaming eyes, and touch his earlocks, and say, —my boy, my little rebbe…And sometimes: my little man… Sometimes she asked him to sing prayers to her—and he tried, stumbling, with his tongue between his teeth, clutching the prayer book she could not read. And sometimes they ate in silence, under a hanging lamp of amber glass.
Today Yossel slipped out the door in silence, letting the sun hit him full in the face. The scent of lavender and chicory-flower rose up from the side of the hillock—heady and bright in the dry hot light, which stung his eyes, though it was early yet. This morning his limbs felt strange to him; his arms hung heavy against his sides. Usually he hurried to the shtiebel, and arrived before the completion of the first blessing. But today his steps felt weighty. The dense light pressed him down into the earth. He ordered his feet to move—he whispered a scrap of a prayer… And he found his feet moving not towards the butcher’s yard, where the earth was thick with stale blood, and not towards the fishmonger’s. Limp to an unknown will, Yossel moved like a dreamer through stands of fir, then between the Poles’ fences, where dogs bayed at the gates and penned lambs gave forth plaintive utterings. Red buds clung to the bushes; shrikes and warblers cried out like peddlers, singing their wares to the juniper trees.
And suddenly Yossel found himself in the town square, at the foot of the church steps. He shook himself; up on the hill the cows were lowing, and the hot, rich smell of their dung was carried down to him on the wind. He closed his eyes, letting them hide behind the blinds of his lids. And when he opened them—Pawel appeared to him, descending from the top step clumsily and slowly.
“Good morning, Yossel,” he called out.
“Good morning, Pawel Janowic,” Yossel replied.
When Pawel reached the bottom stair he held out his hand in greeting. The lines of his red palm were thin and deeply etched, his fingers coated in dust; he must have been sweeping the church. Yossel lifted his own hand tentatively; it felt so heavy he thought it might slice the dry air in two. Pawel clasped it in greeting and let it go at once—as if the moist heat of Yossel’s palm might burn him.
“It’s hot today,” said Pawel. In the full light, the sagged lid of his left eye showed a blue vein, the skin nearly translucent. He cocked his head, gazing at Yossel. “Isn’t it your Sabbath day?”
“Yes,” said Yossel. And then: “Today we read prayers from the prayer-book and words from our holy book. And then we go home and bless our bread and sing to God.”
“But you’re not praying now,” said Pawl. “—you came to the square.”
“I know,” said Yossel. Hot light spilled over Pawel’s folded knees, swaddled in brown broadcloth; again he stood silent over the older boy, where he sat on the bottom stair, bracing himself with frail white hands. Yossel wished his shoes were gone so he could feel the hot earth on his feet—hot enough to anchor him here—lest he float and hover, skimming the church spire and the village roofs... His heart was hammering, straining up toward his collar; the sun was big and yellow as a round of fried dough on a blue plate of sky. Yossel felt a thousand miles from the dark shtiebel, penned between muck-yards where even the trees had died; he shuddered, thinking of the fishyard where cut skulls studded the dust, burst eyes, gaped mouths, and a snow of scraped scales draping the sides of the barrels...
Pawel grinned—and spit into the dust, a white mound that bled quickly into the parched earth. “—It’s your luck… I hide during Sunday Mass, behind the altar, in a backroom full of water-jugs, ever since Wincenty Jankowski beat me for a cursed boy in front of them all… and I listen through brick to the hymns. Father Arkadi says – you can pray where you wish, and Jesus will hear you. I don’t know if your Jews’-god has big enough ears for that.”
Yossel had never thought of God’s ears. God was a force—an outstretched arm—a wind that bore locusts and hailstones…God’s ears: he imagined them now—pink; cupped; big enough to take up the whole horizon. He laughed at the thought.
“Come with me,” said Pawel, suddenly. “I’ll show you where I pray best.”
Yossel swallowed. Under the advancing midday sun the day seemed unbearably quiet…even the birds had stopped singing, stilled by the unseasonable heat. The town square—framed by the church and shops—seemed like a magic circle of earth, tamped smooth…. He could not imagine leaving it now—much less in Pawel’s company. The boy’s blue eye glimmered like a gem; and under the other eyelid—a secret darkness…
But somehow his lips let loose an assent. With a last glance up at the church doors Pawel scrambled to his feet—and turned east towards the forest. The two boys moved silently. The bright sun washed the little footpath clean of detail; Yossel tried to focus his eyes as beads of sweat rolled from his brow, clear down to his lips. Soon they reached the little path at the forest edge; Yossel could faintly see his own brown house in the distance, where, no doubt, his mother was just waking.
Pawel beckoned him into the wood. In the shade of the birches Yossel reeled at the sudden darkness. As a boy he had feared the birchwood—though he lived at its edge; he had ventured in a little at times, but never strayed from the path, which was fringed with bright with berry-bushes. Sometimes on the Sabbath he and the other Jewish boys would lie in the mown fields of inattentive farmers, on days when they had gone to market in Przemyslany, and thrown stones at the grouse when they swooped at the oaks. But always the full blue sky hung over them then… and now the canopy of trees swallowed the light, oak and aspen and pine, and the wind picked up again. The branches of pines bobbed and sagged around them, and their trunks dripped with sap; the sticky new leaves of the birches were bright, jagged still where they had unfolded from the bud. Pawel was moving fast under the trees, fading into the shadows in his brown broadcloth; far from the path, as he cut through the scrub, his loping gait seemed touched with sudden grace. Not far off Yossel could hear a stream’s sudden rushing, as he struggled to follow, losing his balance on oak-roots branches fallen to winter storms. Pawel turned to him only when they reached the bank of the little stream; a ray of sun like a spilled flask of medovukha played on the water.
“Follow the stream,” he said, pointing east—deeper into the wood—deeper now than Yossel had ever traveled on his own.
Yossel nodded—he was breathing too hard to speak. But the scrub was sparser by the water, and they moved slower now over the rocks at the bank, which glimmered with mica. They kicked up a fine silt of dust with their heels, following the turns of the stream for what seemed like miles. At last, after a span of time Yossel could not measure, they reached a gap in the trees. Blinded again by the onrush of light, Yossel blinked until the green spots in his vision faded. A lake spread out before them, a rough, brilliant oval sealed in by birches. Pawel turned to him—a sudden shyness creeping into his face, a bow in his shoulders—and he shrugged at Yossel.
“Here it is,” he said, “my little church in the wood…”
And he turned again to the water, skirting the edge of the pool, until he stopped at an outcropping of rock, half-draped in a white cloak of bellflower. He scrambled to the top of the rock, finding holds with a practiced ease. Bending low, he held his hand out to Yossel, who grasped it—clinging with the other to the damp leaves of the vine, and crushing a fragrant bloom with his shaking palm. The rock was hot to his hands, dappled with flecks of silver.
When Yossel reached the top Pawel began undressing. Slowly he pulled the brown broadcloth shirt over his head, damp and clinging with sweat, and loosed his belt with his thin white hands. A gold down grew on his chest and belly, which was a pale white--alabaster white, snow-white, all-white--whiter than the newest prayer-shawl shipped from Odessa… And then Pawel’s trousers, too, were pooled at his ankles, and he slipped off his white cloth shoes; stood looking down at Yossel for a moment from the tip of the rock, all limbs—and dove into the water, so fleet, Yossel thought, he ought to have left a gold trace in the air.
His hands were shaking as he pulled at his own collar, dressed as he was for the Sabbath. The surface of the water shone like a Prague diamond; Pawel was still submerged. The wind calmed for a moment and the lake was smooth as a silver coin. Slowly Yossel removed his shirt; underneath, his tzitzis, the four-cornered garment he had worn since infancy, let his shoulders and neck out to the air. He held his breath and slipped out of his trousers until all he wore was the tzitzit, and its four fringes dangled at his hips. The hot wind plucked at the black hairs on his legs.
Pawel burst up from the water and stretched his arms to the sky. Kicking at the water to stay afloat, he spoke in a language Yossel could not understand.
“What are you saying, Pawel Janowic?” he asked, shivering—resisting the urge to cover himself with his palms.
“A prayer,” said Pawel, in Polish again. “Come into the water!”
“I can’t swim,” said Yossel.
“Why not?”
“The Talmud says a father has to teach his son to swim. But I have no father. And my mother can’t swim and can’t read either.” Yossel sank to his knees on the rock. He could feel the cool breeze off the water on his legs and his hands.
“Unlucky…” said Pawel. And he dove down again under the water, resurfacing beside the rock. He stood in the water by the bank.
“Come in a little,” he said. “—feel God on your belly…”
Yossel stared into his blue, blue eye, and, dazed, put his hand to the fringes of his garment; and slipped it over his head, and walked into the water, hemmed in at the fringes by birches and sky.
Holding his breath for fear he walked out until the water reached his neck, feeling the mud and water-plants suck at his ankles. He was only a few feet from the bank, but he felt utterly immersed. Pausing in the middle of the silver surface, he felt plunged into the sky. The water pulled at his legs and between them; and he stole a glance at Pawel, who floated a few feet beyond him, squinting into the sun. Under the whistling of the wind and the soft slap of the water he muttered a benediction of his own—stumbling, as always, with his tongue between his teeth. Up on the rock the wind seized on his tzitzis until they billowed out like a frog’s throat or a half-slit flag.
Pawel swam behind him, clambered up the rock, and lay there under the sun without dressing, and closed his eyes. Yossel froze in the water. Pawel’s neck, turned up like a swan’s, was open to the wind, and his thin white body was bare on the rock. A lump in his throat—unease, not God, clutching at his belly—Yossel glanced between his legs… and there, rising up from a soft gold tuft, silver drops clinging to each hair, Pawel’s penis dangled down almost to his thigh. Clearing his eyes of light and water, Yossel stared…unlike his own, it was uncircumcised. He had seen, once or twice, the other heder-boys play naked by the river—bathing as children… But now he was almost a man; he was near to bar-mitzvah; and Pawel near-grown at fourteen… A sheath of skin covered the whole length of the penis, its wrinkled dark surface emblazoned with veins. The light caught at the opening where the head showed; the rim of the foreskin flared with light to Yossel’s eyes, like a crown, angled up toward the unsullied sky.
Yossel flushed—he wished suddenly he could wet his dry lips with vodka—and burst out into song like a Polish cowherd—or cry out with laughter and clutch his belly—and strike any man that stood in his way… His cheeks burned like lamps—he stared until the wind stung tears from his eyes—and he licked at his lips, which had til now tasted only dry bread, and stumbled too long over dead men’s words. The sun was better to stare at—it hurt his eyes less than this gold-white boy, who gleamed with silver water... And he thought of the verse from the Song of Songs—His belly is as bright ivory… Pawel was silent now, half-asleep in the sun—to be a rough Polish butcher with calloused hands and without scars between his legs!—red with sun and life—a head of thick curls—broad arms like beams—to take his desire in his hands, and to sing, not in lament or argument, but in praise of all life’s bounty…
The wind rose suddenly and scattered a rain of leaves into the water. Pawel shook himself drowsily and shivered, raising himself on his haunches. The sun was already passing its height; Yossel knew that prayers would nearly be over and he must hurry home before his mother began to worry. Clumsily he climbed from the water, scraping his knees on the rock, and dressed, tzitzis first, the white cloth clinging to his wet chest. He turned away from Pawel—covering the swelling at his crotch with his palm—and hurried into his trousers, which were rough against his wet skin. Pawel dressed too, unhurried, easing into his shoes with dripping feet.
The two of them walked back together along the stream, under the swollen sun; silence hung between them, dense as shadow, wreathing the water, and rising up through the new birch trees.
*

A new post after fifty billion years... about time travel.

This is an essay about time travel. It was supposed to be for a prompt in an application for the January Creative Writing Arts Intensive at Harvard, and then... morphed. And got away from me in the pleasant way writing does when you are enjoying it. It is also the first non-academic piece of writing I have produced in ages, and I felt like I wanted to share it somewhere. It is certainly nonacademic. And mostly, but not entirely, nonserious. So. Here it is!


Have you ever wanted to travel back in time? Why? What was there that interested you?

Author Chuck Klosterman, in his unreasonably serious essay on the cultural history and ethics of time travel, concludes that time travel is “the desire of the depressed and the lazy” – the hypothetical refuge of those who “would rather change every element of society except themselves.”¹ The desire for time travel, according to his thesis, is a desire for escape, compounded by a desire to have every element about oneself remain unchanged in the process. Barring the distinct (and exhaustively pondered) possibility of causing a catastrophic paradox, or accidentally trapping myself in the cruel embrace of a recursive time loop, I would absolutely love to travel in time. And I don't care if this makes me seem depressed or lazy.

The essence of time travel and its many cultural incarnations is the possibility of intervention—the chance to reverse or at least redirect the flow of life's events. And despite the potential for chaos contained in any active intervention, the notion of a panacea for regret, the chance to eliminate regret before it can develop, is a deeply compelling prospect. Given a handy time machine, perhaps contained in a retrofitted Delorean, I might never have done so much inappropriate vomiting in freshman year, or had my heart broken so many times. Disguised as my younger self, I could have corrected a variety of shattering mistakes; stopped up a number of ugly confessions before they were made; plucked the first cigarette from my younger self's hand and engaged in a lengthy, eloquent, and mind-bending anti-smoking PSA. And yet – despite the various iterations of trauma and chaos that have played their role in my life, regret is not sufficient motivation for me to embark upon the risky endeavor of time travel. Ultimately, the notion of correcting past mistakes is appealing, but not sufficient; I am cocky enough to conclude that my own repository of humiliating and unfortunate moments ultimately form part of a reasonably satisfactory present whole, and that my mistakes have not been catastrophic enough to upend my life in any permanent way as of yet.

There remain, however, a number of other options with regards to time travel. In order to consider them we must depart from the Back to the Future model (which postulates that problems with one's own present are imperative enough to justify potentially screwing the universe) and variants thereupon (such as Jack Finney's fantastic 1995 novel Time and Again, which depicts a secret government project that sends agents to make small but crucial interventions in the nation's past). There remains, however, the notion of traveling forward in time – seeing the future. In this tightly focused schematic of time travel, there could only be one goal in seeing the future—seeing one's future self (and, perhaps, changing one's present life accordingly).

As an early teenager, and in my first years of high school, there is no doubt I would have jumped (or even quantum jumped) at this chance. I spent many hours engaging in elaborate dialogues with my future self, many of which were focused around the theme of my college self having become a 24 Hour Party Person, or at least much closer to conventional notions of cool. There would be boyfriends (oh there would be boyfriends), some casual use of substances, and a variety of fantastically imagined friends, who managed to combine Ivy League smarts with the crass panache of rock musicians too cool to need to know how to play (here's looking at you, Sid Vicious). But now—having attained Ivy Leaguedom, but still at a distance from cool—I feel ambivalent about the goals of fourteen-year-old Talia. The notion that I would in many ways be a disappointment to my fourteen-year-old self is dispiriting, but not crushing; while I have rarely partied for more than, say, 5 hours in a given day (leaving a massive, 19-hour lacuna in my Party Person Status), I feel that I have discovered things in the world that my fourteen-year-old self was simply too young to know about. For example, I have learned to speak Russian and spent a total of four months in the Former Soviet Union since matriculating; this was something that fourteen-year-old me, or indeed freshman-year me, could not have anticipated. And while I imagine fourteen-year-old me would not be displeased at the sight of me, say, picking sunflowers in Moldova, she would no doubt question my continuing lack of sexual prowess, and/or lack of concretely measurable worldly success (I'm fairly certain I was supposed to have published a few novels by now... sorry, younger Talia). The result: I am forced to concede that my past self's expectations are not the best guidelines for my life's appropriate course in the present; and, therefore, that imposing twenty-two-year-old Talia's life values (or confusion) on the life of, say, forty-year-old Talia might face similar limitations. That life, as checkered with regret as it is, seems to be capable of granting enriching experience (or at least providing the space for self-education).

The only remaining truly desirable form of time travel, then, is one that totally transcends my own life. Woody Allen's recent movie Midnight in Paris follows the adventures of Gil, a Hollywood screenwriter who displaces himself in present geography (moving to Paris from California), only to find himself mysteriously displaced in time (back to the Lost Generation's literary Paris). Despite sharing some themes with other cultural touchstones of time travel – most notably, the recurring trope of the time-traveling automobile, although this one is a neat vintage model complete with vintage drunken passengers-- Midnight In Paris has a different take on the purposes of time travel. True to Klosterman's notion of the self-congratulatory time traveler, Gil is transported without any particular mission, and the vague sense of dissatisfaction that is his animating feature remains unchanged. He moons around the picturesque streets of '20s Paris, and is, improbably, embraced by a broad swath of Paris's intellectual elite; Stein, Dali, Picasso and the Fitzgeralds, among others, weigh in on his mediocre novel and his inchoate, seemingly irresolvable life problems. Moreover, he allows himself to be lost in the bewitching gaze of Marion Cotillard, who, like him, is romantically obsessed with a previous time. Back in the future, he finds himself a footnote in the life of a footnote (Cotillard's character is briefly one of Picasso's many concubines; she writes in her journal about a “charming American” whose only salient features seem to be his soothing voice and continual air of confusion). Time travel, in Allen's conception, is little more than an extension of geographic tourism; like many members of the modern literary upper-middle class, Gil travels to discover an enduring truth about himself, with the aid of implausibly helpful natives. (In this case, the ultimate conclusion he draws is that his wife-to-be is kind of bitchy, and that love is easier in French.) For all its lush cinematography, Midnight in Paris is little more than the thinking man's “Eat, Pray, Love,” with a host of celebrity cameos you can actually feel good about, because the relevant parties have been dead for long enough to be chic again.

Perhaps because I am lucky enough to not be a Woody Allen character – as a female, I would no doubt be either a manic pixie or a shrill blonde-- my ideal time travel into the past would not involve such ahistoric machinations. I will confess I have fallen in love with times past. In particular, the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century-- roughly 1890 to 1920-- have struck me over and over again as one of the most culturally fertile periods in the world's history. The seeds of a changed human existence were sown then; the Hebrew language was revived, in a strange time paradox of its very own; Dadaism and Surrealism flourished, as did their Fascist counterpart, Futurism, in an efflorescence of bizarre manifestos; the world erupted in a meaningless war and a proletarian revolution; and above all Europe was united in a prevailing and absolute faith in the power of ideas (although that power often turned out to be almost mind-bendingly evil). And yet—were I to travel back in time and observe my favorite era, one which I have obsessively studied over much of my educational career, I would not presume to talk to Tristan Tzara in person. I would not (though I would be tempted) break up the Paul Eluard-Gala Eluard-Salvador Dali love triangle and take one for myself. I would not seduce the Hebrew poet Shaul Tschernichovsky, no matter how appealing I currently find his moustache. Instead, I would like to be a mute observer, without participating in any way.

Unmoored in time, and existing before my own birth, I would be squarely in the yawning gap in human knowledge that precedes and follows the brief tenure of our lives. True to Klosterman's indictment, I would not significantly change any element about myself—but I wouldn't seek to change the society around me, either. Instead, I would seek a kind of self-erasure: paralyzed by the idea that any action of mine would have impossible, catastrophic ramifications, I would sink into that paralysis with the easy comfort of a dreamer. I would be a tourist that takes no pictures and has no conversations. I would not try to discover any enduring truth about myself or anybody else; I would not seek out the ultimate history "scoop," kick-starting a prominent academic career. I would try very hard not to catch diptheria, but otherwise would take no precautions at all. Slipping behind the wheel of my time vehicle of choice, I would fly back, back, back to a time before any choice I have ever made or will ever make could possibly matter. I would fly back to a time when everything I have ever loved to study was in a perfect state of irresolution. It would be like the small and inconsequential act of backwards time travel that occurs each time you watch a movie again, knowing the ending, but it would be my continual, all-enveloping present. It may very well be that a life of absolute nonintervention is the perfect refuge of the truly lazy. But I, the indolent, ponderous, perpetually yearning prospective time traveler, am perfectly OK with that.

1Klosterman, Chuck. “Tomorrow Rarely Knows.” Eating the Dinosaur. 2009.

The whole earth is intoxicated into blossom.

Reblogging this passage from the Brothers Karamazov, inspired by spring:

""I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them.... I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it’s a most precious graveyard, that’s what it is! Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I’m convinced in my heart that it’s long been nothing but a graveyard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach. One loves the first strength of one’s youth. ""

On Novels in Time

Today as I was out having a smoke on the red, rainy Mac-quad picnic table, someone looked at the copy of Infinite Jest I had in my lap. The book is a stout thousand pages, and I am a little more than halfway through; I read the first five hundred pages on winter break and am finally, finally getting back to it. Anyway, this boy asked: "Are you reading that for one of your classes or for fun? It's huge."

I have had a fair amount of experience reading through huge novels "for fun." I put 'fun' in quotes because reading a big, fat novel tends to be a commensurately big and complicated experience for me. Everything about these novels, these fat-ass, inflated, mostly nineteenth-century novels is big (except the print): big characters, big, involved storylines, big voices narrative or otherwise, big arcs. Each one of them has a different set of experiences attached. One thing that runs consistent through an array of novels as diverse as The Adventures of Augie March and Anna Karenina, though, is the length of time it takes me to read them.

I've shopped Phillip Fisher's class "The Classic Phase of the Novel" twice in my almost-three years here, each time dropping out after the first lectures, too intimidated to read a Big Fat Novel every week. I can't remember if Phillip Fisher said it or my brilliant friend Spencer Lenfield did, but something also rankles my nerves about trying to cram all that prose into my head every week. It's entirely possible that I am making a virtue out of my own vice of slow reading, but something strikes me as a little off about trying to apply the values of industry and desperate effort into the act of novel-reading. Which is not to say that I haven't had to do my fair share of reading under duress--that's definitely an integral part of my experience as a comparative literature student. But something about Big Fat Novels demands the succor of an extended period of time, at least for me. It took me eight months to read Augie March in senior year of high school; I would dip into Bellow's dense, antic, rolling prose for an hour each night, or less, with many-week intervals in which I simply went around the business of my life and came back to it when I remembered.

The result of that attachment is a kind of sentiment that links the book, somehow more intimately, with the time I read it. It's true that rapid reading, which I often engage in and allowed me to devour The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, hungrily, on buses in one weekend and practically lick my fingers, leaves a vivid and dreamlike impression. The product of years of writing falls feverishly on you, leaving a knotted jumble of images and incidents, a muzzy sense of "style" enveloping your memories of the book without individual phrases and sentences. But slow reading--lazy reading, unindustrial and casual, spread out over months--confers an unseen benefit. Reading Augie, I had the sense of a life running parallel to mine. Neatly in the confines of the book, Augie had the air of an occasional confidante, someone I checked in with once in awhile. I was desperately enraged at that book at one point: Augie spends the first three hundred pages or so in dense, urban Chicago, pinging like a stoop-ball through the city having unlikely adventures. Then midway through the book he follows a black-haired woman to, no shit, write about iguanas in Mexico. This was practically the last straw for me; I threw the book across the room and let it lie dormant for a few months. Then I came back, penitent, and sat with Augie through Mexico and the iguanas and his flight to France. At the end of the book Augie is sitting on a train. He left me then--on the train past the end of the book, perpetually in motion. The feeling I had then was a feeling of bereavement--that Augie, my antic, nomadic hero, was finally still.

The Magic Mountain, a Thomas Mann mammoth which took me a similar period of time the next year, had a different feeling almost. The book takes place in a tuberculosis sanatorium, and chronicles in exasperating detail the experience of one Hans Castorp, in the sanatorium for seven years. Almost nothing happens. He speaks to the woman of his dreams, a fellow patient, exactly once. In untranslated French. He smokes cigarettes without relish (all the tuberculosis patients smoke, gotta love the 1800s) and has interminable conversations about ideas. I complained bitterly about this book (my family will attest to how much I complain over my books) but finished it out of some dogged sense of duty and curiosity. In the end, Hans also leaves the sanatorium. On a train. Indefinably changed. I read the book on my year in Israel, miserable over the expectation that I would learn Torah for twelve hours every day and even more miserable at my failure to live up to that. The big, humpy mountains, like dried-out breasts, lowered their slanted brows at me, and the date trees withered under the sun. The plows were grey with dust and the cowbarns were biley with shit. I liked to dip in to Hans's sanatorium, watch him eat platters of smoked meats and steal the X-rays of his beloved and babble on and on about philosophy. It was a kind of exasperating peace, a restless stillness to contend with mine. I battled that book to the quick through three consecutive copies (one fell apart and one was lost and one remains on my shelf at home, with the rest of my spiny conquests). A novel read over time creates a sense of parallel universes. Creates a distilled past that enters the bloodstream of your present, and makes your life a queer amalgam of both.

Reading, in the conventional wisdom, will shortly be or already has become a rare experience precisely because of the time it takes. In a digital era of ease and leisure so it goes, the time that a novel takes up has become demode, burdensome, impossible. I guess it's no surprise to anyone that I am a Luddite about everything and especially my books (no surprise Kindle presents please), but to me it's precisely that burden--or gift--of parallel time that give novels their value. It reminds you of the arc of your life, present as it passes, logs the growth of its characters in a way that reminds you of your own growth.

One of my favorite Big Books as a kid was "Sophie's World," a novel that was also an introduction to some of the major ideas of Western philosophy. Fittingly for a book that dealt with the quandaries of being, the novel ends with the heroine discovering she is in a book and having an attendant crisis that dissolves the narrative. Reading that growing up -- well, it freaked me out, but also made me wistful. Like a lot of articulate and highly self-centered people, I've often imagined being a character in a book, with the end of the novel being my death. But something that intrigues me about these novels is that the novel doesn't end in death; the death is implicit, in metaphor, but it isn't written out. The fact that the novels end before the life does--just as I finish a novel before I finish my own life--implies that there is living beyond what can be captured on the page, any page, even a perfect one. I cherish the illusion that Augie and Hans Castorp and Vronsky and Levin are all alive somewhere, animated by the act of my reading, like Neil Gaiman's idea that gods we believe in are physically created by that belief. Regardless, I've had the pleasure of living in their lives as well as in mine for awhile, a gift granted to me in exchange for the time I put in, the months I colored with their adventures. To me, great novels (although Fat Novels are not always great novels) retain their relevance precisely because they demand an outmoded sacrifice of time. I hope to always be ready to give that to them.

it's official

I have bought my tickets to Odessa, and there I shall be, from June 10th to August 17th. The thought is unbearably exciting, if terrifying. I will be alone in a city by the sea, one that by all accounts hit its heyday in the nineteen-twenties, but for the time being is full of beaches, nightclubs, and monuments to dead writers. I'm bursting with excitement for the hundred stairs that loom up from the sea, for the stuffy environs of the Jewish museum, for the soft lime buildings, for the black and winsome decrepitude of Babel's infamous Moldovanka neighborhood, the site of Judaism's most colorful criminals. I'm excited to see the old offices of Ha-Shiloah, the first real Hebrew periodical, if they still exist.

I'm excited -- scared, excited-- to write my first novel, which is my plan for the time. I'll be writing the story of Moyshe Berger, Hebrew poet, born, like Xena Warrior Princess, in the heat of battle -- or, at any rate, pogrom. I'll be landing in two thousand eleven and writing my ears off back into the nineteenth century, borne (as Gatsby) ceaselessly back into the past. The waves beating on the port, the bazaar you have to hide your wallet so carefully when you walk through, the mayonnaise-doused food, slippers on your feet when you're a guest, and some apartment I haven't rented yet and can scarcely imagine -- the stuff of lonely and marvelous adventure. I seem to always undertake my adventures alone in the summers--or at any rate with no one I know along. Everything feels slightly unreal, sun-crisped and very un-Cambridge, and I take all the colors back with me to be sorted through at a later date.

Ten days or so after I arrive -- as if to punctuate the foreignness of the endeavor--is the Eve of Ivan Kupala, which I've seen depicted with beauty and nostalgia in the films of Dovzhenko already.

Here's the Wikipedia description:
"Kupala Day (Feast of St. John the Baptist; Russian: Иван-Купала; Belarusian: Купалле; Ukrainian: Іван Купала; Polish: Noc Kupały or Noc Świętojańska) is celebrated in Poland, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine currently on the night of 6/7 July in the Gregorian or New Style calendar, which is 23/24 June in the Julian or Old Style calendar still used by many Orthodox Churches. Calendar-wise, it is opposite to the winter solstice holiday Korochun. The celebration relates to the summer solstice when nights are the shortest.

...

Many of the rites related to this holiday within Slavic religious beliefs, due to the ancient Kupala rites, are connected with the role of water in fertility and ritual purification. Youths would jump over the flames of bonfires. Girls would float wreaths of flowers often lit with candles on rivers and would attempt to gain foresight into their relationship fortunes from the flow patterns of the flowers on the river. Men may attempt to capture the wreaths, in the hope of capturing the interest of the woman who floated the wreath.

There is an ancient Kupala belief, that the eve of Ivan Kupala is the only time of the year when ferns bloom. Prosperity, luck, discernment and power would befall on whoever finds a fern flower. Therefore, on that night village folks would roam through the forests in search of magical herbs and especially the elusive fern flower Chervona Ruta."

Bonfire festivals! Wreaths in the hair of Ukrainian maidens! And me, little chubby dark Jew, catapulting herself into the middle of it. I can hardly wait. Maybe a fern will flower just for me.

HOLY CRAP WHOA SCHOLAR MOMENT

so i'm up at 3am after working on my junior paper for basically two days straight, freakin out too hard to really write, reading myself into corners upon corners.

finally I am translating in lieu of getting perhaps to the meat of my paper and I come across this ABSOLUTELY MAGNIFICENT AND RADICAL QUOTE by the dude I am writing about, Micah Yosef Berdichevsky, called by some the Hebrew Nietzsche, a guy who was forced to divorce his first wife at the age of nineteen for reading forbidden books,

a guy who learned german and french and hebrew et alius and produced a troubling and magnificent corpus largely untranslated into english,

and here i am just working away at him like a devil on a handsaw for my obscure reasons

and here is this marvelous countermyth against all those stagnant narratives of rabbinic judaism
this argument for strength that was to closely prefigure some of the ideals surrounding the early pioneers of Israel, obviously somewhat derived from Nietzsche whom he read a lot of but just INTERESTING AND AWESOME especially for people familiar with biblical narratives as i have been lucky or strange enough to have my head soaked in CHECK THIS OUT especially jews especially:

We had two kings. One ruled over all of Israel, and the other began his command as king of Judah: David and Saul! Saul was head and shoulders taller than the rest of the nation, a man of sentiment, great and brave of spirit. …when he fell upon his sword before the Philistines could abuse his body, then all in us was silent, astonished at his fortitude of spirit. And David, a small youth, ruddy, was not fated to be chosen as king by the people. He was taken from his flock of sheep and rolled in the filth of rebellion, until he rose to greatness; he brought down the tribe of Saul in blood, ousting one and burying another. He made promises and broke them, bloodshed was in his house, malice and separation between him and the people. … And hark to this: Saul did not sing a song to God, on the day God saved him from his enemy David; and when the spirit of God was upon him, he commanded another to take the lyre in his hands and play before him. –But David the king was the sweet singer of Israel, and the creator of prayers for innumerable generations. Who understands this contradiction—perhaps the greatest sinner is also the most prayerful. Prayer comes to man for his mistakes! He who kills the shepherd and takes the flock—it is his heart that strikes at him and he who pours out his heart.

I see before me Saul the King of Israel, sitting and leaning upon his spear, and his eyes gazing at the hills of Israel. Many great thoughts are in his heart, of his throne, of his kingdom and of the future of the nation, which differs from that which secures its path by the ways of the histories of our people, and he sees the shadow coming from a distance, the shadow of David. –What a song would have remained of his divulgence, had the king opened his mouth and given us from his soul a song of his terrible strength. And David inherits him in life, and after his death is our mouthpiece… God, what I have loved and what I have hated! The lyric of the sinner and he who causes others to sin comes to cleanse our lives. The songs of our man became our prayers. Instead of the song of expansion and conquest of life in strength, the song of outpouring and the fracture of life. We shall not sing, unless we pray; we shall not live in trumpet-blasts of strength, but in lament… … Our weeping, our entreaties, are abundant; but of the songs of expansion, that which does not come out of the suffering of life, but conquers life—we have not one of its attributes. We cannot live; but how quick and resourceful we are at blessing and cursing…

haunting.
amazing.

nabokov and me

I am an unabashed Russophile. Anyone who knows me knows it. Chances are if you see me in the street I will be wearing my roommate's frayed herringbone coat, smoking a cigarette with one side of my mouth and with the other side muttering absently in Russian--whether recently memorized vocabulary words, lines from movies, songs from Kazan' (the Russian city in which I spent last summer), or just a simple muttered "nu, chto eto takoe?!" ("What the hell is this?!)" --the latter provoked by Boston's hyperfickle weather.

As to why I love Russia so much--the language and the culture--despite the former's difficulty and the latter's abundance of problems... This is something hard to answer, like any complex love developed over a number of years. I do know why I started studying it -- the literature. Ruslit is a glorious discipline unto itself, and its wealth is surprising, given that it developed relatively late. Russian literature was largely nonexistent until the nineteenth century; something about the largely illiterate population (but then again, most world populations were illiterate relatively recently), or the way nobles were so fiercely subject to the tsar, or the relative isolation from the influences of the West until Peter the Great had its way... regardless, Ruslit's first real hero was arguably Gogol, anyway a Ukrainian, vernacular and pungent, born in 1809 and matchlessly adept at pissing off the tsar. Russian literature was an infant compared to English literature, German lit, or French lit; and yet somehow even in its infancy it came out dancing. A clumsy Cossack reel. Reeking terribly, and speaking fiercely, an extreme and volatile condition of humanity. Dostoevsky's heroes are gnomic and coarse, wheeling, blind-sided and half-drunk, into their terrible fates. When I read these guys in high school, and also especially the bitter tonic of Soviet poets, I knew I had to learn the language they could pulse and be in. So I plunged into six cases and a set of phonics I described in a freshman-year blog post as "a glorious mouthful of throat cold." I haven't looked back since.

But all this brings me back to a certain Nabokov. He's always on people's lips, especially studiers of Russian, and especially around here, where he did something private and fetishistic with collecting butterflies; a friend unsuspecting of my animosities sent me an email when the Crimson (our newspaper) was doing an article about him, asking whether, given the sympathies mentioned above, I studied Nabokov.

Well.

I hate Vladimir Nabokov. I mean, insofar as you can hate someone who is (a) dead and (b) not a known committer of heinous crimes and (c) taught at Harvard and collected butterflies.

I am a compulsive finisher of books. It is near-physically painful for me to put down a book before I've finished it, and especially given how bumbling I am with objects this has resulted in more than one tearful loss on my part. I have finished books that took me eight months to a year to finish; I have finished books that I put down for seven months for a breather in the interim; I have finished books I actively and outwardly scorned, complaining all the while. But I just couldn't finish Lolita.

I got past all the tricky bits, too--the whole car chase, the florid word games, the steamiest of the rapes. But something in me snapped when poor pregnant Lolita was taking her stand and I just couldn't go on.

I guess in my head Nabokov is always, oddly, paired with Steinbeck--someone he would have undoubtedly scorned. Nabokov was all about scorning--there's one magnificently crabby interview with him in the Paris Review which is more than worth a full read.

A choice quote is here:

NABOKOV

... Many accepted authors simply do not exist for me. Their names are engraved on empty graves, their books are dummies, they are complete nonentities insofar as my taste in reading is concerned. Brecht, Faulkner, Camus, many others, mean absolutely nothing to me, and I must fight a suspicion of conspiracy against my brain when I see blandly accepted as “great literature” by critics and fellow authors Lady Chatterley's copulations or the pretentious nonsense of Mr. Pound, that total fake. I note he has replaced Dr. Schweitzer in some homes.

...

INTERVIEWER

What have you learned from Joyce?

NABOKOV

Nothing.

etc.

Anyway, what's in common between Nabokov and Steinbeck? Arguably nothing, besides some passion for cars in an American milieu, a kind of restlessness. No doubt Nabokov would have condemned Steinbeck as a simpering American--with his cutting word, "poshlost," about which more later in a subsequent post. (The quick definition, also in that interview: " Corny trash, vulgar clichés, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic, and dishonest pseudo-literature—these are obvious examples. Now, if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know. ") I find pairing the two, Steinbeck and Nabokov, in my head is most intriguing because of a fundamental opposition. Maybe one I invented. I read them in subsequent summers--I read East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath on my farm-summer, working out in the fields and reading into the setting sun. And I tried to stumble through Pale Fire and quit, puttered out, in my summer in Russia.

I guess what really bugs me about Nabokov--something I can't be mollified in by his stylistic pyrotechnics-- is ... well, the cumulative effect of reading too much of his work is a kind of attrition for your respect for humanity. At least mine. Nabokov is a jeerer; which is all well and good, there's a lot to jeer at in every society. But too much jeering and your face gets stuck in a grimace...Tolstoy always said that he intended Anna Karenina to be a very different book; Anna became so sympathetic a character almost of her own accord. In a piece of Nabokov's writing, everything feels very tightly controlled. And the jeer shows through everything. Tanned Lolita, the embodiment of temptation, is a cruel joke; the one book of his I've managed to finish, Laughter in the Dark, tellingly culminates in a man being blinded, then shot, by his kittenish sixteen-year-old lover. At the end of the day, the fate of the poor lecher is meant to be funny--his guts spilling on the floor, and the little lady absconding with the gun, into the sunset with the man he's been inadvertently financing her flings with. But I find it hard--maybe I take myself too seriously, am too easily offended--I find it hard to view a human being as a punch line. The joke falls flat, hollow, and makes a ghastly echo. I'm too ready to forgive the poshlost in others, recognizing it so fully in myself.

Which is where Steinbeck comes in. What made Steinbeck so powerful for me, in a very lonely summer when I tripped all over myself in a grotesque parody of manual labor and chopped rhubarb until I couldn't see straight, was the power of his forgiveness. For every crude broad character, for every archetypical exchange, there was a bracing dose of that powerful love, that redeeming love. When Rose of Sharon suckles a starving man at her breast at the end of The Grapes of Wrath, it's puzzling, jarring, even shocking--but it's not a punch line. The force of love courses through the breasts of the girl, as through human hearts suddenly reminded of their purpose.

Perhaps it's a flaw of mine that I look to literature for that kind of moral renewal. And there are a lot of writings I enjoy for their stylistic merit or pure entertainment value, outside of any spiritual resonance. But there's something about the active negation of that resonance in Nabokov--that willingness to utterly write off those who don't fit into his criteria, both in personal consideration and in his works, that makes me shudder in repulsion. Then any stylistic innovation feels like adding insult to injury; the ugliness of the statement is not made more palatable by its added fripperies, in fact the opposite. I guess I feel that literature, too, has an element of moral responsibility--one that it can evade but not utterly abdicate, or actively renege. I recognize that I might be part of a prudish minority on this, and lumped in with the poshliest of the poshlusty. But I think literature undermines its own relevance, already precarious, when it denies its own responsibilities.

Which is not to say I think that literature needs to be all sweetness and light--far from it. I will gladly climb down into the pit with Ivan Karamazov, and wallow in his importunate drunkenness. As long as I can stand with him and say to Aloshya,

"I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I’ve long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one’s heart prizes them.... I want to travel in Europe, Alyosha, I shall set off from here. And yet I know that I am only going to a graveyard, but it’s a most precious graveyard, that’s what it is! Precious are the dead that lie there, every stone over them speaks of such burning life in the past, of such passionate faith in their work, their truth, their struggle and their science, that I know I shall fall on the ground and kiss those stones and weep over them; though I’m convinced in my heart that it’s long been nothing but a graveyard. And I shall not weep from despair, but simply because I shall be happy in my tears, I shall steep my soul in emotion. I love the sticky leaves in spring, the blue sky — that’s all it is. It’s not a matter of intellect or logic, it’s loving with one’s inside, with one’s stomach. One loves the first strength of one’s youth. "