Red Cavalry
For SR, Yeshea (Rabbi Jesus) was a life-long presence. He was a father-substitute without the authoritarian demands, allowing “Mishillim” (Roth’s Hebrew name, used when contemplating his spiritual existence) to live in “his own sweet [sensual] state of chaos.” In My Friend Yeshea, for example, Yeshea gave Mishillim, as his companion on the final ministry in Jerusalem, Lilith herself. Lilith in Roth’s novel is not a baby-stealing consort of Satan, but a beauty out of, to be vulgar, a Hollywood epic, or a Roth illustrated edition of borderline erotica: “Hers were the flowering breasts, the full haunches and the moving hips of nymphs out of mind.” Mishillim was “thrilled to his toes.”
Roth’s image of Yeshea is not adolescent. Rabbi Jesus has a“genialness so deep, so rich and so widesweeping”that it could only be defined as “an all-conquering love of life.” Compassion is inseparable from it.
Yeshea’s implicit invitation is to join him in a harmony not possible in isolation from other humans. Communal solidarity in worship is a prerequisite for many acts of sacrifice and piety. That is why many Jews carry around with them copies of he Psalms of David, in Biblical times recited around the altar.
Such ideals of human potential are exemplified by the Hasidic masters.
A majority of the most appealing characteristics of this Godhead (a Christian term) are those of Hasidism: tikkun (renewal), shekinah (holy light), sacrifice, atonement, and menschlekeit (love of others). I describe in Chapter 10 of _SR, Infamous Modernist_ Roth’s Jewish literary models for Yeshea’s mission.
The most significant story of the Jews And Yeshea is Sholem Asch’s The Nazarene, written in Yiddish. Appalled by what seemed to be a betrayal of Judaism in the apocalypse of Nazism, The Jewish Forward refused to serialize it. Asch’s stand-in for The Wandering Jew says this about his own final acceptance of Yeshea: “I struggled with him. He conquered me! . . . He took me as one takes a pot and breaks it.” After centuries of resistance, he is “like a fish which is caught on a hook. . . . And so I am fastened to him.”
There were many of Jewish writers who thought with heartfelt struggle about Rabbi Jesus—despite the radicalism. I’ve mentioned several in Ch. 10. Here are some others, woven into the fantasies of Jewish writers: Issac Babel, Sholem Asch, Philip Roth
Isaac Babel, “Pan Apolek,” in _Red Cavalry_ (1926)
A Jewish wedding in Russia, sometime about 1900. The bride, Deborah, retires to her chamber, to array and ready herself.
But the world turns upside down!
The groom enters and the bride—loving her husband but very nervous-- throws up.
Exit the bridegroom, thundering his fury. The woman’s family, disgraced, curses their daughter. Immediately she becomes an exile. She goes back to her room, where, waiting for her in the clothing of the groom, is Jesus. “Full of compassion, [he] united himself with Deborah as she lay in her vomit. Then she came out to the guests, loud with rejoicing and slyly turning away her gaze like a woman who is proud of her fall.”
Babel hears this story as a journalist attached to a unit of Red Cavalry on a brutal campaign through Jewish Poland. A town (“my plundered Jews”; Babel was Jewish) lies smoldering. A local artist who wants to paint his portrait, for money of course, tells it. So he is being flattered. But he is “converted”—not to Christianity, but to the truth of the tale, truth that encompasses both monotheistic faith systems. Far from home himself, and wondering what the future atrocities of military campaigning he must write of, he walks home with a “homeless,” “loitering” moon for company, “keeping warm within me unfulfillable dreams and out-of-tune songs.” The world is full of madness, and of an incomprehensible beauty. Jesus is in there somewhere, the ultimate outsider, along with Russia’s poverty-ridden Jews.
Sholem Asch, “Christ in the Ghetto,” in _From Many Countries_
Asch’s The Nazarene (1939) was the most renown novel about the Jews and Jesus. The author was tredmendously popular with Jewish audiences; the Jewish Daily Forward had serialized many of his novels, using the best known translator and public figure Maurice Samuel to translate from the Yiddish. But The Forward would not publish The Nazarene. Many Jews were furious at what seemed apostasy.
“Christ in the Ghetto” is set in Poland during the Nazi tyranny. A group of devout Jews is herded into a bombed-out church and told they may desecrate the altar and the statue of Jesus. They refuse. The Nazis, hoping to incite a riot that will lead to destruction of the Jewish ghetto, force some of the Jews to don Catholic priestly vestments over their prayer shawls. They do not notice that the effigy of Christ over the altar has come to life. It’s hand points to its side, and its wounds freshly bleed (the image is eerily similar to that used by Roth in his unpublished novel Transfiguration, written in prison c. 1938). Christ moves out into the street to stare at the rioting mob. At this point He resembles a rabbi whom the Gestapo has shot dead because he refused to lift a hand against the church fixtures. The resemblance includes the prayer shawl. Jesus has taken on the look in the eyes of the Rabbi: “neither anger nor bitterness, but heart rending pity for all of Mankind who had fallen so low.” Christ puts on the dead rabbi’s clothes. “From his eyes, as from open wounds, there fell round tears of pity and sorrow.
This melodramatic fable reveals the unity of the Jews and Christians, which with humility, suffering, and refusal to indulge in aggression, can defeat Hitler. Asch repeats the image of light: “the gaze of the Rabbi of Nazareth was like a living flame from the Garden of Eden”; “the light of pity”; “the resources of light and love.” The reference is to shekinah, the light of god, to be revived when humanity is redeemed.
Philip Roth, “The Conversion of the Jews,” in Goodbye Columbus (1959)
Oscar, a prime noodnik, should have been studying for his Bar Mitzvah, not threatening to jump from the synagogue roof. But he could not get honest answer from Rabbi re God being able to do an immaculate conception. threatens to jump from window. Rabbi was teaching Judiasm over Xianity, and acting as authority, steering the boy from the question he asked to the authoritarian pedagogy of the Jewish interpretation of Jesus—he was a historical figure, not the son of God. He tried to reason with the boy, thinking he is an apostate. But Oscar sees that the interpretation does not answer his question.
When Oscar hears his parents discussing an airplane crash, and counting thew number of Jews killed, he says he wished all 58 people on an airline that crashed were Jews. The Rabbi tells him he needs discipline; he will talk to his mother. Threatening to jump, Oscar has used blackmail, presuming on his status. He has been manipulative. It works. His Rabbi does not want to have the kid die, although at first he threatened the exclusion of the apostate (Oscar) from the community. Oscar, unlike Sam Roth as the boy Mishillim, was not a spoiled egotist, but he was manipulative and relied on a threat of removing himself from the community by suicide. The Rabbi and Oscar’s parents now choose life over ideology. Oscar makes them all say they believe in Jesus Christ before he jumps “into the center of the yellow [fireman’s] net that glowed in the evening’s edge like an overgrown halo.”
Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956)
What is the remedy for the universal self-interest that strangles what is supposed to be democracy? It is exemplified by the humble wise man in Malamud’s The Assistant, the image of light in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, the wandering Jew in Scholem Asch’s The Nazarene, and the failed actor in Bellow’s Seize the Day. This response is the intuition of salvation conferred by a religiosity that depends on Jesus and the Jewish roots of his mysticism. Malamud said he “tried to see the Jew as universal man.” Alan Ginsberg, in the tear-filled process of writing of his mother’s madness and death in Kaddish, had a similar mystic, possibly Hasidic, insight, realizing “a great majesty and tenderness to life, a kind of instantaneous universal joy at creation.”
In Seize the Day, Tommy Wilhelm is close enough to the end of his rope to see sympathy with other people as the saving torture it is. His estranged wife and his father turn their backs on his weepy, morally indignant pleading. His father (Dr. Adler; Tommy had adopted a stage name) uses odd imagery. He will not let his son become his “cross. I’ll see you dead, Wilky, by Christ, before I let you do that to me.” He thus justifies his self-insulation from pity. Leave that for Jesus.
Tommy, a schlemiel out of Singer yarn, gets hooked up with Tamkin, a luftmensch (pointed shoulders, “claw-like” finger nails, pigeon toes, “deceiver’s brown eyes”), a noonday demon like those who take over Singer’s stories, or the golems, dybbuks, and soul-eating Liliths of Ozick’s tales (see “The Pagan Rabbi”), and those of a later writer, Steve Stern. Tamkin, kibitzing, tells Tommy everyone has two souls, a “pretender soul” who guides a poor schmuck into the thickets of worldly comfort, and the “true” one, originating in the Hasidic concept of the “true world.” In Tommy, the pretender soul is prostrate in defeat. His true soul, therefore, is all exposed. As Bellow put it in Herzog, Tommy faces “submission to the fate of being human.” He cries for a man he does not know, for his disdainful father, his estranged wife, his children no longer living with him, and for Tamkin even. This Jewish nudnick has become an avatar of Christ.
I wonder if this novella (1956) did not inspire J D Salinger a few years later, when Zooey tells Franny that the average torpid, unwell person listening to their quiz-kid radio show is "the fat lady" and "Christ himself."
Roth’s image of Yeshea is not adolescent. Rabbi Jesus has a“genialness so deep, so rich and so widesweeping”that it could only be defined as “an all-conquering love of life.” Compassion is inseparable from it.
Yeshea’s implicit invitation is to join him in a harmony not possible in isolation from other humans. Communal solidarity in worship is a prerequisite for many acts of sacrifice and piety. That is why many Jews carry around with them copies of he Psalms of David, in Biblical times recited around the altar.
Such ideals of human potential are exemplified by the Hasidic masters.
A majority of the most appealing characteristics of this Godhead (a Christian term) are those of Hasidism: tikkun (renewal), shekinah (holy light), sacrifice, atonement, and menschlekeit (love of others). I describe in Chapter 10 of _SR, Infamous Modernist_ Roth’s Jewish literary models for Yeshea’s mission.
The most significant story of the Jews And Yeshea is Sholem Asch’s The Nazarene, written in Yiddish. Appalled by what seemed to be a betrayal of Judaism in the apocalypse of Nazism, The Jewish Forward refused to serialize it. Asch’s stand-in for The Wandering Jew says this about his own final acceptance of Yeshea: “I struggled with him. He conquered me! . . . He took me as one takes a pot and breaks it.” After centuries of resistance, he is “like a fish which is caught on a hook. . . . And so I am fastened to him.”
There were many of Jewish writers who thought with heartfelt struggle about Rabbi Jesus—despite the radicalism. I’ve mentioned several in Ch. 10. Here are some others, woven into the fantasies of Jewish writers: Issac Babel, Sholem Asch, Philip Roth
Isaac Babel, “Pan Apolek,” in _Red Cavalry_ (1926)
A Jewish wedding in Russia, sometime about 1900. The bride, Deborah, retires to her chamber, to array and ready herself.
But the world turns upside down!
The groom enters and the bride—loving her husband but very nervous-- throws up.
Exit the bridegroom, thundering his fury. The woman’s family, disgraced, curses their daughter. Immediately she becomes an exile. She goes back to her room, where, waiting for her in the clothing of the groom, is Jesus. “Full of compassion, [he] united himself with Deborah as she lay in her vomit. Then she came out to the guests, loud with rejoicing and slyly turning away her gaze like a woman who is proud of her fall.”
Babel hears this story as a journalist attached to a unit of Red Cavalry on a brutal campaign through Jewish Poland. A town (“my plundered Jews”; Babel was Jewish) lies smoldering. A local artist who wants to paint his portrait, for money of course, tells it. So he is being flattered. But he is “converted”—not to Christianity, but to the truth of the tale, truth that encompasses both monotheistic faith systems. Far from home himself, and wondering what the future atrocities of military campaigning he must write of, he walks home with a “homeless,” “loitering” moon for company, “keeping warm within me unfulfillable dreams and out-of-tune songs.” The world is full of madness, and of an incomprehensible beauty. Jesus is in there somewhere, the ultimate outsider, along with Russia’s poverty-ridden Jews.
Sholem Asch, “Christ in the Ghetto,” in _From Many Countries_
Asch’s The Nazarene (1939) was the most renown novel about the Jews and Jesus. The author was tredmendously popular with Jewish audiences; the Jewish Daily Forward had serialized many of his novels, using the best known translator and public figure Maurice Samuel to translate from the Yiddish. But The Forward would not publish The Nazarene. Many Jews were furious at what seemed apostasy.
“Christ in the Ghetto” is set in Poland during the Nazi tyranny. A group of devout Jews is herded into a bombed-out church and told they may desecrate the altar and the statue of Jesus. They refuse. The Nazis, hoping to incite a riot that will lead to destruction of the Jewish ghetto, force some of the Jews to don Catholic priestly vestments over their prayer shawls. They do not notice that the effigy of Christ over the altar has come to life. It’s hand points to its side, and its wounds freshly bleed (the image is eerily similar to that used by Roth in his unpublished novel Transfiguration, written in prison c. 1938). Christ moves out into the street to stare at the rioting mob. At this point He resembles a rabbi whom the Gestapo has shot dead because he refused to lift a hand against the church fixtures. The resemblance includes the prayer shawl. Jesus has taken on the look in the eyes of the Rabbi: “neither anger nor bitterness, but heart rending pity for all of Mankind who had fallen so low.” Christ puts on the dead rabbi’s clothes. “From his eyes, as from open wounds, there fell round tears of pity and sorrow.
This melodramatic fable reveals the unity of the Jews and Christians, which with humility, suffering, and refusal to indulge in aggression, can defeat Hitler. Asch repeats the image of light: “the gaze of the Rabbi of Nazareth was like a living flame from the Garden of Eden”; “the light of pity”; “the resources of light and love.” The reference is to shekinah, the light of god, to be revived when humanity is redeemed.
Philip Roth, “The Conversion of the Jews,” in Goodbye Columbus (1959)
Oscar, a prime noodnik, should have been studying for his Bar Mitzvah, not threatening to jump from the synagogue roof. But he could not get honest answer from Rabbi re God being able to do an immaculate conception. threatens to jump from window. Rabbi was teaching Judiasm over Xianity, and acting as authority, steering the boy from the question he asked to the authoritarian pedagogy of the Jewish interpretation of Jesus—he was a historical figure, not the son of God. He tried to reason with the boy, thinking he is an apostate. But Oscar sees that the interpretation does not answer his question.
When Oscar hears his parents discussing an airplane crash, and counting thew number of Jews killed, he says he wished all 58 people on an airline that crashed were Jews. The Rabbi tells him he needs discipline; he will talk to his mother. Threatening to jump, Oscar has used blackmail, presuming on his status. He has been manipulative. It works. His Rabbi does not want to have the kid die, although at first he threatened the exclusion of the apostate (Oscar) from the community. Oscar, unlike Sam Roth as the boy Mishillim, was not a spoiled egotist, but he was manipulative and relied on a threat of removing himself from the community by suicide. The Rabbi and Oscar’s parents now choose life over ideology. Oscar makes them all say they believe in Jesus Christ before he jumps “into the center of the yellow [fireman’s] net that glowed in the evening’s edge like an overgrown halo.”
Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956)
What is the remedy for the universal self-interest that strangles what is supposed to be democracy? It is exemplified by the humble wise man in Malamud’s The Assistant, the image of light in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, the wandering Jew in Scholem Asch’s The Nazarene, and the failed actor in Bellow’s Seize the Day. This response is the intuition of salvation conferred by a religiosity that depends on Jesus and the Jewish roots of his mysticism. Malamud said he “tried to see the Jew as universal man.” Alan Ginsberg, in the tear-filled process of writing of his mother’s madness and death in Kaddish, had a similar mystic, possibly Hasidic, insight, realizing “a great majesty and tenderness to life, a kind of instantaneous universal joy at creation.”
In Seize the Day, Tommy Wilhelm is close enough to the end of his rope to see sympathy with other people as the saving torture it is. His estranged wife and his father turn their backs on his weepy, morally indignant pleading. His father (Dr. Adler; Tommy had adopted a stage name) uses odd imagery. He will not let his son become his “cross. I’ll see you dead, Wilky, by Christ, before I let you do that to me.” He thus justifies his self-insulation from pity. Leave that for Jesus.
Tommy, a schlemiel out of Singer yarn, gets hooked up with Tamkin, a luftmensch (pointed shoulders, “claw-like” finger nails, pigeon toes, “deceiver’s brown eyes”), a noonday demon like those who take over Singer’s stories, or the golems, dybbuks, and soul-eating Liliths of Ozick’s tales (see “The Pagan Rabbi”), and those of a later writer, Steve Stern. Tamkin, kibitzing, tells Tommy everyone has two souls, a “pretender soul” who guides a poor schmuck into the thickets of worldly comfort, and the “true” one, originating in the Hasidic concept of the “true world.” In Tommy, the pretender soul is prostrate in defeat. His true soul, therefore, is all exposed. As Bellow put it in Herzog, Tommy faces “submission to the fate of being human.” He cries for a man he does not know, for his disdainful father, his estranged wife, his children no longer living with him, and for Tamkin even. This Jewish nudnick has become an avatar of Christ.
I wonder if this novella (1956) did not inspire J D Salinger a few years later, when Zooey tells Franny that the average torpid, unwell person listening to their quiz-kid radio show is "the fat lady" and "Christ himself."