Article
When a famous writer knocks at the door
March 21, 2012
*
We’re pushing sixty and inevitably the conversation revolves around age. A friend tells Z that old age is the square root of your present age multiplied by ten. When you’re nine, thirty seems old; when eighteen, sixty. But I’m struck by Z’s mother’s dream. She’s eighty-five, which is old for us. When not fretting over our own ailments, we attend to the decline of our parents. And yet the dream speaks otherwise. This morning, upon waking, Z’s mother’s dream returned to occupy my thoughts. I myself had dreamt plentifully, but as soon as I’d kicked off the sheets whatever dreams I had had receded from memory, as though making room for Z’s mother’s dream.
*
Indeed, my first thought had been that Z’s mother had dreamt her son’s dream. Perhaps in old age we become the transmitter of other people’s dreams. For I cannot help seeing her in the role of the intermediary, the go-between between her son Z and the great Hebrew writer Haim Yosef Brenner who comes knocking at their door. Why Brenner? Ashkenazi, for “burner”, the name apparently stuck to the descendents of a distiller of spirits. Brenner’s own father, however, eked out a living in the small Ukrainian town of Novymlini as a melamed or traditional schoolteacher. Unvocalised, we get four hard consonants—b-r-n-r—in which one of the letters is reduplicated. Bet resh nun resh. A sort of Urr-sound, as in Bialik’s Revealment and Concealment in Language: “Then a kind of savage sound burst spontaneously from his lips—let us assume, in imitation of nature—resembling a beast’s roar, a sound close to the r . . . r to be found in words for thunder in many languages.”
*
In a sense Brenner was a distiller of spirits. Of Hebrew. And of his own anguished soul. He arrived in Palestine and—unlike Gnessin, (early) Agnon and Bialik—stuck it out; he held his ground in what was at the time an impoverished outpost of the Ottoman Empire. In spite of it all. He bore the troubles of the Land on his back as he had lugged copies of the short-lived HaMeorer (The Awakener) in a sack slung over his shoulders in London. That would have been in 1905, the year of the October Revolution in Russia. Four years later he landed in Palestine. Breakdown and Bereavement. The title speaks for itself. The first modern Hebrew novel written in Palestine was unsparing in its portrayal of life in the Yishuv, the Jewish population in Palestine. And yet for Z’s mother’s generation, Brenner loomed larger than life. She was born, after all, only two years after Brenner was killed defending a homestead outside of Jaffa from Arab rioters during the May Day disturbances of 1921.
*
Brenner then was “The new Hebrew narrator of our age,” as Bialik would say, he was the Originator, the conscience of the Second Aliyah, who had shed all the accoutrements of the Diaspora in coming to Palestine “as a man longing for the sun” and who increasingly took on the role of the ascetic and vagabond, tramping across the land as a teacher of Hebrew in the small Jewish farming settlements, laying his weary body down wherever a plank slung across two oilcans was made available. Squinting through the peephole of Z’s apartment door, his mother might have been impressed by “a short man with a full blond beard and beautiful blue eyes,” which is how Agnon describes Brenner in Only Yesterday, dropping in on friends in the then new neighborhood of Neve Tzedek—today a fifteen-minute walk from Z’s home: “His movements are informal and his clothes are threadbare, and he is bashful among people. Such reticence isn’t because people are held in such high esteem in his eyes, but because he thinks little of himself. But his wisdom shined forth from within his bashfulness without ever exceeding his innocence.”
*
“A mother cannot but help conceive of her child as remaining forever in his prime,” Z shrugs his shoulders, running his fingers through his gray-peppered beard. “For her Brenner and I were—are—of the same age.” Z’s mother has summoned up a meeting between kindred souls. With a touch of hyperbole one might say that for a short while all that separates the brooding, saintly figure of Brenner and the author of the hyper-contemporary, bluesy Double Click is a door in a Tel Aviv apartment and a mother’s solicitousness. The question remains: why does Z wave Brenner away? Ain le koach beshvilo. In the course of our conversation, Z speaks of his father’s mental deterioration. They may have to hire a Filipino aide as his mother has no strength left for him. The same words again. Z’s father, whom I remember as a robust water engineer, was orphaned of his father as an infant in Russia and grew up in Mandatory Palestine, imbibing the pioneer ethos, singing Russian melodies around the campfire in Hebrew.
*
So whose dream are we talking of? Or perhaps we should ask: for whom was the dream intended? If solely Z’s mother’s, one might say that her son voices her own exasperation, her helplessness as she peers through the peephole at the spent glory of her past. Should she let in the image of youthful virility, whether spouse, lover, or poet of the State-in-the-making—and I now recall Z boasting on more than one occasion how Haim—Haim—Gouri had tugged at his mother’s braids in kindergarten—or not? Dreams complete themselves in the telling. Z’s mother rises from bed and calls her son. Hello? Z. Yes? I’ve had the strangest dream. Nu. Guess who appeared in my dream? Nu. Someone knocks at the door and I look through the peephole and lo and behold Brenner is standing there on the other side. You’re kidding. Honestly. Haim Yosef Brenner? That’s right. So then what happens? I call out to you, Z, Brenner is here to see you, and you call back from the armchair at the far end of the room, ain le koah beshvilo. There is a long pause. I snubbed Brenner? Yes, dear, he stood there on the other side of the peephole for a while with those soulful eyes of his and then left.
*
We share a world when we are awake; each sleeper is in a world of his own, writes Heraclitus in one of his surviving fragments. We can never know for sure what Z’s mother dreamt. In each telling and retelling the dream undergoes its own transformations in the teller’s and the listener’s mind. Yet I would like to believe that Z’s mother was not so much telling her dream as handing it back—redirecting it—to her son, like a letter slipped into the wrong mailbox. In another dream of Z’s mother that Z recounts to me that same afternoon of which I remember only a fragment, someone exchanges shoes with Z (if I’m not mistaken). So perhaps this is what is going, Z’s mother gets to walk in her son’s dream, where the latter has no time for Brenner. Idiomatically speaking, ain le koah beshvilo would be more like, I just don’t have the patience for the man anymore. And all of this is conveyed, or rather boomed from the son’s armchair across the living-room to his mother.
*
To interpret the dream as a Family Romance in its senescence, Mother and Son shutting off doddering Father from their cozy habitat, seems pat, even though I have hinted as much earlier on. No, I’d rather like to suggest that Z is turning away from Brenner himself, the man and his shadow: the mood swings, the soul-searching and self-torment, the yatush (mosquito), as Beilin writes in his memoir Brenner in London that ate at Brenner’s heart, and of course life’s high drama lived out in the throes of a catastrophic era: the pogroms, the October Revolution, the Yiddish-Hebrew war of languages, World War I, the jostling for power within the Zionist movement, an oppressive, poorhouse Palestine. Is it not possible that Z is asking (in the name of Hebrew literature?) for a reprieve? Leave me alone Brenner, leave us alone: we’ve had enough of the Fate of the Jewish People. Let me be. Let me shuffle to my study in my advanced years (as old as the state, Brenner) from where I can look out at the rooftops of Tel Aviv to write my ‘Blues for Lunch’:
Solfeggietto for whiskers
Prelude for pestering
Ragtime for palpitations
Symphony for mounting anxiety
Suite for a complicated grief
Impromptu for a birthday
Sonata for clarity
Rock for strong things
Bebop for a shower
Con brio for a cup of tea
Pianissimo for a door
Blues for lunch
Zali Gurevitch’s mother’s dream sparks a conversation between Zali and his friend, the poet and translator Gabriel Levin, about some figures in Hebrew literature and the weight of the past.
Someone knocks at the door and my mother looks through the peephole and announces, Brenner is here. I don’t have the strength for him, I call back from my armchair. This is not Z’s dream but his mother’s, which she recounts to her son on the phone the other day and which Z now relates to me over coffee at the Smadar where we’ve come to mark the occasion of his early retirement from the university. Today he’d taught his last class and before arriving at Smadar he’d partied with his students, who had passed around ice-cream cones. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. *
We’re pushing sixty and inevitably the conversation revolves around age. A friend tells Z that old age is the square root of your present age multiplied by ten. When you’re nine, thirty seems old; when eighteen, sixty. But I’m struck by Z’s mother’s dream. She’s eighty-five, which is old for us. When not fretting over our own ailments, we attend to the decline of our parents. And yet the dream speaks otherwise. This morning, upon waking, Z’s mother’s dream returned to occupy my thoughts. I myself had dreamt plentifully, but as soon as I’d kicked off the sheets whatever dreams I had had receded from memory, as though making room for Z’s mother’s dream.
*
Indeed, my first thought had been that Z’s mother had dreamt her son’s dream. Perhaps in old age we become the transmitter of other people’s dreams. For I cannot help seeing her in the role of the intermediary, the go-between between her son Z and the great Hebrew writer Haim Yosef Brenner who comes knocking at their door. Why Brenner? Ashkenazi, for “burner”, the name apparently stuck to the descendents of a distiller of spirits. Brenner’s own father, however, eked out a living in the small Ukrainian town of Novymlini as a melamed or traditional schoolteacher. Unvocalised, we get four hard consonants—b-r-n-r—in which one of the letters is reduplicated. Bet resh nun resh. A sort of Urr-sound, as in Bialik’s Revealment and Concealment in Language: “Then a kind of savage sound burst spontaneously from his lips—let us assume, in imitation of nature—resembling a beast’s roar, a sound close to the r . . . r to be found in words for thunder in many languages.”
*
In a sense Brenner was a distiller of spirits. Of Hebrew. And of his own anguished soul. He arrived in Palestine and—unlike Gnessin, (early) Agnon and Bialik—stuck it out; he held his ground in what was at the time an impoverished outpost of the Ottoman Empire. In spite of it all. He bore the troubles of the Land on his back as he had lugged copies of the short-lived HaMeorer (The Awakener) in a sack slung over his shoulders in London. That would have been in 1905, the year of the October Revolution in Russia. Four years later he landed in Palestine. Breakdown and Bereavement. The title speaks for itself. The first modern Hebrew novel written in Palestine was unsparing in its portrayal of life in the Yishuv, the Jewish population in Palestine. And yet for Z’s mother’s generation, Brenner loomed larger than life. She was born, after all, only two years after Brenner was killed defending a homestead outside of Jaffa from Arab rioters during the May Day disturbances of 1921.
*
Brenner then was “The new Hebrew narrator of our age,” as Bialik would say, he was the Originator, the conscience of the Second Aliyah, who had shed all the accoutrements of the Diaspora in coming to Palestine “as a man longing for the sun” and who increasingly took on the role of the ascetic and vagabond, tramping across the land as a teacher of Hebrew in the small Jewish farming settlements, laying his weary body down wherever a plank slung across two oilcans was made available. Squinting through the peephole of Z’s apartment door, his mother might have been impressed by “a short man with a full blond beard and beautiful blue eyes,” which is how Agnon describes Brenner in Only Yesterday, dropping in on friends in the then new neighborhood of Neve Tzedek—today a fifteen-minute walk from Z’s home: “His movements are informal and his clothes are threadbare, and he is bashful among people. Such reticence isn’t because people are held in such high esteem in his eyes, but because he thinks little of himself. But his wisdom shined forth from within his bashfulness without ever exceeding his innocence.”
*
“A mother cannot but help conceive of her child as remaining forever in his prime,” Z shrugs his shoulders, running his fingers through his gray-peppered beard. “For her Brenner and I were—are—of the same age.” Z’s mother has summoned up a meeting between kindred souls. With a touch of hyperbole one might say that for a short while all that separates the brooding, saintly figure of Brenner and the author of the hyper-contemporary, bluesy Double Click is a door in a Tel Aviv apartment and a mother’s solicitousness. The question remains: why does Z wave Brenner away? Ain le koach beshvilo. In the course of our conversation, Z speaks of his father’s mental deterioration. They may have to hire a Filipino aide as his mother has no strength left for him. The same words again. Z’s father, whom I remember as a robust water engineer, was orphaned of his father as an infant in Russia and grew up in Mandatory Palestine, imbibing the pioneer ethos, singing Russian melodies around the campfire in Hebrew.
*
So whose dream are we talking of? Or perhaps we should ask: for whom was the dream intended? If solely Z’s mother’s, one might say that her son voices her own exasperation, her helplessness as she peers through the peephole at the spent glory of her past. Should she let in the image of youthful virility, whether spouse, lover, or poet of the State-in-the-making—and I now recall Z boasting on more than one occasion how Haim—Haim—Gouri had tugged at his mother’s braids in kindergarten—or not? Dreams complete themselves in the telling. Z’s mother rises from bed and calls her son. Hello? Z. Yes? I’ve had the strangest dream. Nu. Guess who appeared in my dream? Nu. Someone knocks at the door and I look through the peephole and lo and behold Brenner is standing there on the other side. You’re kidding. Honestly. Haim Yosef Brenner? That’s right. So then what happens? I call out to you, Z, Brenner is here to see you, and you call back from the armchair at the far end of the room, ain le koah beshvilo. There is a long pause. I snubbed Brenner? Yes, dear, he stood there on the other side of the peephole for a while with those soulful eyes of his and then left.
*
We share a world when we are awake; each sleeper is in a world of his own, writes Heraclitus in one of his surviving fragments. We can never know for sure what Z’s mother dreamt. In each telling and retelling the dream undergoes its own transformations in the teller’s and the listener’s mind. Yet I would like to believe that Z’s mother was not so much telling her dream as handing it back—redirecting it—to her son, like a letter slipped into the wrong mailbox. In another dream of Z’s mother that Z recounts to me that same afternoon of which I remember only a fragment, someone exchanges shoes with Z (if I’m not mistaken). So perhaps this is what is going, Z’s mother gets to walk in her son’s dream, where the latter has no time for Brenner. Idiomatically speaking, ain le koah beshvilo would be more like, I just don’t have the patience for the man anymore. And all of this is conveyed, or rather boomed from the son’s armchair across the living-room to his mother.
*
To interpret the dream as a Family Romance in its senescence, Mother and Son shutting off doddering Father from their cozy habitat, seems pat, even though I have hinted as much earlier on. No, I’d rather like to suggest that Z is turning away from Brenner himself, the man and his shadow: the mood swings, the soul-searching and self-torment, the yatush (mosquito), as Beilin writes in his memoir Brenner in London that ate at Brenner’s heart, and of course life’s high drama lived out in the throes of a catastrophic era: the pogroms, the October Revolution, the Yiddish-Hebrew war of languages, World War I, the jostling for power within the Zionist movement, an oppressive, poorhouse Palestine. Is it not possible that Z is asking (in the name of Hebrew literature?) for a reprieve? Leave me alone Brenner, leave us alone: we’ve had enough of the Fate of the Jewish People. Let me be. Let me shuffle to my study in my advanced years (as old as the state, Brenner) from where I can look out at the rooftops of Tel Aviv to write my ‘Blues for Lunch’:
Solfeggietto for whiskers
Prelude for pestering
Ragtime for palpitations
Symphony for mounting anxiety
Suite for a complicated grief
Impromptu for a birthday
Sonata for clarity
Rock for strong things
Bebop for a shower
Con brio for a cup of tea
Pianissimo for a door
Blues for lunch
© Gabriel Levin
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