David Prashker's Book Of Days: October 28

1941, 1806

This entry might have appeared under June 14, with the year 1952, as that is the birthday of Leon Wieseltier, for many years the literary editor of New Republic, the man whose "Kaddish" inspired me to write two of my own books, "A Myrtle Among Reeds" and "Day Of Atonement".

"Kaddish" is a book that I like to browse from time to time, just a page here or there to recapture the inner mood that it is capable of generating in me; but one passage, when I came upon it again today, took me completely by surprise; that sense that ageing memory can inflict, in the manner of Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" which is the precise opposite of Proust's "petites madeleines": that you have never read this in your life, even though you have a diary entry from fifteen years ago that proves you did. I checked that diary entry, which began with a note to myself to include the passage from Wieseltier as an afterword to "The Flaming Sword", a novel which included the invention of a fictional Rabbi who spent the war in the cellars of Kovno, providing spiritual support and guidance to those Jews who had formed a resistance movement there, and who were the central subject of my book. "Invention" is the word I used; and intentionally. This is what Wieseltier wrote:

“From 1941 to 1944 Ephraim Oshry was a rabbi in the ghetto of Kovno. He taught Talmud in that charnel-house, and the devout Jews who shared his captivity often sought his opinion on the ways in which they could observe Jewish law in their obscene circumstances… After the war, Oshry came to New York and served in a shul on the Lower East Side… between 1959 and 1976 he published his Holocaust responsa in four volumes. In the second volume I find this. ‘Question. On the 11th day of the month of Cheshvan, on the third day after those master butchers the Nazis, may their name be blotted out, removed more than ten thousand people – men, women and children – from the Kovno ghetto, and transported them to their slaughter in the Ninth Fort – where they were murdered in bitter and excruciating and horrible ways, with a terrible cruelty that it is hard to describe – a refugee from the valley of slaughter appeared before us. He was a young man who had managed to escape, and he related all the details of that fearful event. The cursed Germans ordered the doomed to undress and to leap into the pits that had been prepared for them, and then fired upon them with machine guns, and when they completed the murderous deed they covered the pits with earth and buried them all – the living and the dead together, for many of these martyrs still had the breath of life in them, and had only been wounded by the bullets. There was not a house in the ghetto where there were not some dead. Here a man wept bitterly for his brother, and there a man lamented for his wife; here a man wailed over his children, and there a woman howled for the husband of her youth. Oh papa! a man cried. My son! My son! a woman cried, pouring out her pain. The inmates of the ghetto who survived were covered in sorrow and agony, and they were full of mourning and lamentation. And there came before me Bertchik the glazier, the treasurer of the burial society of Kloyz, and he asked me whether we are required to mourn the martyrs and to recite the kaddish for them.”

Wieseltier's shocked response to Bertchik the glazier reflects my own: "This is what Bertchik needed to know! In the anus mundi, a point of law." But Wieseltier goes on to insist that "this, too, is Jewish resistance". What Bertchik and his chevra kadisha did was trauma-response, exactly as George Eliot describes Silas Marner taking refuge in the mechanical skill of weaving when his gold is lost. The scale of persecution over two thousand years, the constancy of its repetition, meant that we have developed complex and elaborate rituals to deal with massacre and martyrdom, each one rabbinically approved and stamped with a hechsher label, each part elevated and exalted to the status of tradition. Fixed rules to lament the rape of one's grandmother or the strangulation of one's youngest child (if it is a boy-child and he has not yet been circumcised, the programme of bereavement is different from a third-born girl in her seventh year). I find all this almost as atrocious as the massacres themselves (but necessary; I understand that they are necessary) and am driven back to my fictional Rabbi, in my version of the cellar at Kovno, likewise below the Ninth Fort, along The Way To The Heavenly Journey:

“Baruch took him down to the cellar which was the headquarters of 'Lochamei ha-Geta’ot' - the ghetto fighters. On the top floor, in the Hasidic synagogue that no longer was, the devout had once swayed and chanted in the ecstasy of the living God. On the ground floor a family named Chernovitski had sought to purchase their own survival through the operations of the black market, hoarding the gold coins which in the end only bought their way still faster into the great banking house in the sky. But in the cellar forty-six young guards, not one of them yet old enough to vote, had sworn in Hebrew and on the Torah to stand against the Ubermensch, even unto death if necessary. And because they were not yet old enough to vote, and because the Jews had been struck off the electoral register, their oaths should have been wiped out of the record books. But they were not wiped out."

The response of my hero-protagonist Bernhard Aaronsohn, codename Argaman, to all of this was revulsion and rebellion: the two senses of the word revolt. What he rejected, what I still reject, is that herd mentality in which Jews have always taken comfort. It is an enormous strength, but every strength is latent, and proportionate, with vulnerability. For every action of our lives there is a rule, and we can follow it unquestioningly, because its source was Sinai.

   They drove him to the marshalling yard of the nearest railway station, and dumped him like a sack of mutton in a shed, among other sacks of mutton, dressed up as paschal lambs. Jews, it was clear. If not the sort that he was used to mixing with.
   “Oi va voi!” they groaned.
    “Alas! Alack! O, woe is me!” they sighed.
    Until Argaman could almost begin to sympathise with those who wished to put their bleating to an end for good.

And as to Bertchik's Kaddish, Argaman wrote the real Kaddish for the victims of the Holocaust after the war ended, in this, his "Prayer For Adolf Hitler":

               Though your body died in the bunker
               May your name and your spirit live for ever
               Disbarred from oblivion
               Displayed in wax effigy
               In some Madame Tussauds of the universal unconscious

In real life, as Wieseltier recounts, Rabbi Oshry instructed the enquirer that there is to be mourning for the martyrs of the Ninth Fort, and Kaddish is to be said for them. "Indeed, it was an awesome and terrifying sight to see," Wieseltier continues, "when the congregation that survived in the ghetto said kaddish together, with one voice, for those dear to their hearts. May He who heals the broken-hearted bind up our sadness, and hasten the rescue of His people, and send them salvation, and save them forever."

Nor did their prayers go unanswered. For he sent them salvation, in the form of Communists bearing rifles, and Americans with hand grenades, and not a little help from Argaman and his band of teenage Robin Hoods.

“There were about 30,000 Jews in the Kovno ghetto. The atrocity… took place on October 28th 1941. It was known as ‘the big Aktion’… 9,000 Jews, half of them children, were taken [to the Fort] and murdered. And to make sense of what happened - to deny the Nazis the attainment of their objective, which was not only the extinction of the Jews but also the extinction of Judaism – the survivors of 1941 consulted the survivors of 1389!”

So Bertchik's question enables the community to survive the grief, but only until the next catastrophe, which will add them to the list of martyrs. Argaman's response, to wage war, however abjectly ineffective, was rejected by the Jews at the time. Yet here we have the two possible responses to the calamaties and catastrophes of life: to stand up and fight, or to collaborate in one's own victimhood. Or does Rabbi Oshry show us a third way, one that is applicable with dignity when the circumstances are so extreme that no alternatives are tenable, a way that appears to collaborate while also appearing to resist. Trauma-response is Wieseltier's chosen term for it. Yes, but how do you create a rational philosophy, with workable codes of right and wrong, with benchmarks to judge success and failure, out of the mere desperate necessity of trauma-response?

Leon Wieseltier's "Kaddish" is published by Alfred A. Knopf (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/47179.Kaddish)

"The Flaming Sword", the first part of The Argaman Quintet, is intended for publication by The Aragaman Press at an as-yet-unscheduled date, but certainly before the arrival of the Messiah.

For Rabbi Oshry's heroics after the Holocaust, click here

CharlotteTurner died today, October 28 1806. Charlotte Smith was her married name, and the one on her books; but she was née Turner on May 4 1749, and reverted to the maiden name when she walked out on her husband. Generally she is remembered as one of the two women without whom there would probably never have been either Coleridge or especially Wordsworth - the other, and perhaps even more so in Wordsworth’s case, was Helen Maria Williams, for whom see June 17.

Not many encyclopediae will tell you the above quite so flagrantly, preferring something more chauvinistically gentlewomanly like “she was an English novelist and poet of the School of Sensibility whose Elegiac Sonnets contributed to the revival of the form in England”. Sensibility? Doesn’t that just word-associate you straight to Jane Austen? Back to that in a moment. “She also helped to set conventions for Gothic fiction and wrote political novels of sensibility”. Sensibility again, but “Gothic novels”? You mean, like Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and John Polidori’s “Vampire”? And does Dickens’ “Bleak House” count as a Gothic novel? More on that too in a moment.

The “Elegiac Sonnets” were written in 1783, when she was precursoring “Little Dorritt” in a debtor’s prison with her husband and their children. Not a great distance from that title to the one Coleridge and Wordsworth put on their first book, a decade later: “Lyrical Ballads”. Wordsworth regarded her as an important influence on the Romantic movement, and he meant Romantic in its proper, its fullest sense: not sentimental love-stories, but the celebration of the individual, an intellectual assault on the corruptions of so-called social justice, and what may actually have been the same thing just differently phrased, the British class system.

But why the prison?

She had been born into the landed gentry (her mother died in childbirth when she was three), her father owning two prosperous estates, one at Stoke Place in Surrey, the other at Bignor Park in Sussex - until gambling destroyed his fortune and he tried to salvage it by marrying off fifteen year old Charlotte to a slave plantation owner named Benjamin Smith. “Legal prostitution” was Charlotte’s description of it later on, but by then she had mothered eleven children with him, one a year (the first child died a day after the second was born, and that child died aged ten, with three others gone in the meanwhile - poignant passages about childhood death in her novels give the lie to the notion that, because infant mortality in the eighteenth century was commonplace, the pain was less for those affected), spent time in debtor’s prison with him when he got into worse debt even than her father, and then simply refused to go with him when he ran off to France to avoid his creditors. She had spent the long hours in debtors’ prison writing poetry, and publishing them was her only means to earn survival money. It worked. As we shall see, she produced sixty-three books in her lifetime, including several novels, and stories for children. You can read the entire collection here and here.

But I need to get back to the Wordsworth connection. Between 1791 and 1793 Charlotte became involved with English radicals while living in Brighton, and it was there that Wordsworth visited her in the autumn of 1791, en route to visiting Helen Maria Williams in Paris and experiencing revolutionary France - he had his own copy of the fifth edition of “Elegiac Sonnets” while he was a student at St John’s, Cambridge, and had been told by people who knew that Smith and Williams were the two writers of real excellence of the day, and that if he wished to be another he should make the journeys. They were. He did.

But she didn't - she lacked the means for the boat trip let alone the hotel when she got there, and anyway her support for the Revolution had dwindled very fast when the Reign of Terror supplanted the Era of Enlightenment. Instead she devoted herself to Sussex - she lived at different times in Bignor, Storrington, Brighton and Midhurst - and to helping the refugees from France, in deeds as well as words; you can read the words here, in her poem “Emigrants”.

And I mentioned Dickens, whose "Little Dorritt" was actually based on his own experience of debt-prison as a child, but the coincidences throughout, and the personality of Little Dorrit, are extraordinary, especially as we know that he knew her books, and her life-story. Which Dickens novel am I about to describe?

"a convoluted and endless legal battle to recover family money owed her"

Yes, it was precisely her tale that he retold, in "Bleak House"; the years and the money that she spent disputing her father-in-law’s will in the Chancery Court - she paid for it by writing ten novels at the same time, and so successfully that no less an icon than Sir Walter Scott was another who wrote in praise of her.

And then Jane Austen, whose "Sense and Sensibility" I have already referenced, though scholars reckon that it's Charlotte Smith's "Sonnet Written at the Close of Spring" (read it here) that Anne Elliot is reflecting on in "Persuasion", just after she has eavesdropped on her beloved talking rather more intimately than she would have wanted to another woman (and see my piece on Feb 25)

Lastly a peek into Dorothy Wordsworth's journal, Christmas Eve, 1802:

It is a quiet keen frost …. my beloved William is turning over the leaves of Charlotte Smith’s sonnets, but he keeps his hand to his poor chest, pushing aside his breastplate.

It may not be insignificant that Wordsworth began to concentrate on the sonnet form soon after this.

Amber pages

Harvard College (now Harvard University) founded, today in 1636 (see Nov 26)

The Statue of "Liberty Enlightening The World" dedicated on Bedloe's Island (now Liberty Island, today in 1886 - click here to read my piece about this in "Private Collection"

Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh, novelist, born today in 1903

Dr Jonas Edward Salk. Who did what? developed the "inactivated polio vaccine (IPV)"? Seriously? but that's an enormous thing to have done - why have I never heard of him? Born today in 1914, but really he should be on April 12, the day in 1955 when he published the results of his experiments, and received his license to begin using the vaccine - click here for what happened next.