Translation

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 2004 by Grushka, Reesa

Once-Rosenzweig had never told anyone-about a year after his father's death, someone had visited him on the mountain. Rosenzweig had seen somebody walking on a wide ridge below the camp, and thought it must be one of the company delivering mail, or some important news. But it had been very early-the sun had not come up yet and the sky was washed pale, the last stars guttering. He hadn't been concerned about enemy intruders, but he'd been curious to know which of the men from the base had chosen so difficult a route for a morning's solitude. The ridge, made up of large teeth and shingles, was a strenuous but not impossible climb. Rosenzweig had adjusted his binoculars, but when he found the ridge inside their magnified circle, the figure had disappeared, he thought, beneath an overhang. After waiting a quarter of an hour and seeing nobody emerge on the path beyond the far ledge of the rock, the idea had crept slowly and certainly into Rosenzweig's mind that it had been his father walking there, like Hamlet's, without a word. He had no proof, but proof is the antithesis of certainty. The figure had walked back into his imagination, its hands behind its back, just as his father used to walk, its weight bent precariously forward, but kept from toppling by the steady gravity of its feet, heels planted firmly down before the toes fell in their turn. For weeks of mornings he had sat in wait for its return, but the walker never showed himself again.

Thinking of that long-ago specter made Rosenzweig uneasy, so he played a game with the light in his room, seeing it, not seeing it. It was a morning of cold brilliance. Outside, he knew, the streets, the branches of trees and slopes of roofs, the calves of slender legs over dark shoes would all be bright and silver, a silver more lovely than spring's because these would be the last of an island of bright, snow-radiant days in a sea of grey. He wanted to write a letter to Martin about his dream of birds, what he'd come to understand, but there was so much he'd need to explain first, things they had never talked about together. That he was not a man who suffered, for instance, but suffering in the shape of a man -and not a very convincing shape, either. Slouched if he was not braced, drooling if he was not wiped, pressed flat between the back of a high, wide rolling chair and the neat lapels of a suit, strapped, buckled, clenched. His very pain had colour-a violet that edged towards crimson, and at these times he tried to think with clarity, tried to untint his mind and become perfectly lucid. But he was no longer a philosopher, not since those early years at Freiburg and Leipzig before the war. He'd never wanted to be one, anyhow.

The turning point, after which he knew he could not go back to the university, to philosophy's neat dehydrated systems, had come for him in 1913, when he'd attended a Yom Kippur service in Berlin. He had never fasted before, or attended an orthodox synagogue, and he saw for the first time that on Yom Kippur the words of the service became food for the worshippers. It was a day of hallucinatory prayer, beating of the breast, naming of sins: the sin which we have committed before Thee under compulsion or of our own will; and the sin we have committed before Thee by hardening our hearts; by the evil inclination; by denying and lying; by stretching forth the neck in pride; by ensnaring our neighbor; by envy; by causeless hatred; by breach of trust; with confusion of mind; and on and on. The lists of names had spun from each other and flashed back like waves in a steady, closing tide. There was-not relief, but-a mental humming, the lightheaded vibration of his voice and all the voices about him in the instruments of his skull and fasted organs. The heat of bodies pressed close to one another and the cycling of the liturgy created a unanimous swaying within which were dozens of individual swayings, like motes of dust moving one at a time in their own directions, but in accord with the shroud of motes around them. The strain of fasting, a hollow dull pain, had transformed itself into anticipation. In the rising and sitting again, he lost himself in a sea of selves; he was part of the shape taken by a community willing to be a single body, accepting one fate and one aspiration. The break and wail of the cantor in the minor keys of deserts and heat, and nights of torches, had reached back, far back to the sacrificial ceremonies, to the original scapegoat, to the remorseless sky, to the burning of elements when people were touched and scarred by them, and cried out to them with real despair.