Erotic/Neurotic? - Jewish writing and identity

Judaism, Fall, 1999 by Joshua Sobol

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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