Blind Date With a Jewish Book Incites a Second Date!

byline: Cecile Minkoff

            On a Monday night in early November, the Department of Jewish Thought at SUNY Buffalo hosted an enthusiastic group of undergraduate and graduate students, members of the community, and faculty to present its first iteration of “Blind Date With a Jewish Book.”  This program was conceived as a series of presentations by department affiliated faculty on a “Jewish” book that is unknown or unfamiliar to the wider public.  It is called a blind date because neither the presenter nor the book chosen for discussion is announced in advance - you are asked to come with a mind open to the possibility that you might add another title to your list of “books to read.”

            Vasily Grossman was born in 1905 into an emancipated Jewish family.  He initially studied chemical engineering before turning to writing in the 1930s.  At the outbreak of WWII he became a war correspondent.  As such he covered the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, Kursk, and Berlin.  His eyewitness accounts of the liberation of Treblinka were among the earliest reporting of what later became known as the Holocaust.  As a young man he enthusiastically supported the hopes of the Russian Revolution.  He managed to hold on to his delusions even though he criticized collectivization and the man-made famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s.  His disillusionment came after WWII with Stalin’s openly antisemitic campaign and the suppression of The Black Book, a project of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to document the Holocaust, in which Grossman actively participated.

            Grossman completed Life & Fate in 1959.  As was done at that time in Soviet Russia, he submitted it to the censors.  The book was considered so dangerous that the KGB raided his apartment and confiscated all copies of the manuscript, even going so far as to remove the ribbon from his typewriter.  A copy of the manuscript in the hands of friends was smuggled out of Russia, and the book was published in Switzerland only in 1980.  Vassily Grossman died in 1964.  His book wasn’t published in Russia until 1989.

           Richard Cohen opened his remarks with the adage, “when a book is good, it’s not long enough; when it is bad, it’s too long.”  For Cohen, Life & Fate is clearly not long enough.  For as everyone knows who has ever been sucked in by a novel, great literature is transcendent:  it breaks boundaries and expands horizons.  The reader is taken outside of himself and experiences other consciences, other worlds.  “If you want to know what it is like to live in a totalitarian state,” said Cohen, “then read this book.”

            Grossman’s book is a panoramic epic that follows five story lines and multiple characters, through which the reader is taken across the breadth of Russia from the Siberian gulags to the battle of Stalingrad, and beyond the western border, as first the Germans advanced into Russia, and again as Russia pushed back and advanced into Germany, eventually discovering the horror of the  Nazi concentration camps.  Grossman, who has been compared to Tolstoy, takes multiple points of view, alternating between the very personal, individual experience and the loftier perspective of the historian or philosopher.  But this is not simply a story of war.  It is a repudiation of the charade of the Stalinist regime pursuing policies of political terror while masquerading as the embodiment of Revolutionary idealism and Marxist orthodoxy.   An excerpt from the introduction to the NYRB Classics edition of Life and Fate demonstrates:

On the eve of his arrest Krymov realizes that it was not only fear that led him to hold his tongue when innocent comrades were arrested: it was “the revolutionary cause itself that freed people from morality in the name of morality” (p. 528). After his arrest, Krymov’s thoughts take on the power of poetry:

“The hide was being flayed off the still living body of the Revolution so that a new age could slip into it; as for the red, bloody meat, the steaming innards—they were being thrown onto the scrapheap. The new age needed only the hide of the Revolution—and this was being flayed off people who were still alive. Those who then slipped into it spoke the language of the Revolution and mimicked its gestures, but their brains, lungs, livers and eyes were utterly different. “(p. 841)

            So what, you might ask, is specifically Jewish about this book.  Cohen brought to light two major themes of the book.  One is the abiding evil of anti-semitism, how it manifests, who is attracted to it, and the way anti-semites manage to believe that the Jews are all powerful (e.g. Protocols of the Elders of Zion), and yet so powerless that they can be attacked without fear.  The second is the stark contrast that it draws between soulless ideology and individual acts of kindness.  Again, from the introduction to the NYRB Classics edition:

Grossman expresses his beliefs most directly in a thesis about “senseless kindness” supposedly written by Ikonnikov, a former Tolstoyan who has recently witnessed the massacre of 20,000 Jews. This thesis includes thoughts we would do well to remember every time we hear promises of a new world order:

“whenever we see the dawn of an eternal good . . . whenever we see this dawn, the blood of old people and children is always shed. . . . Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness.” (p. 406, 410)

Only individuals, it seems, can keep this kernel alive, and it can be spoken of only in a language that has not been appropriated by state ideologies.

            Besides speaking about the book itself, Richard Cohen candidly shared his personal experience of grappling with it.  Although it came to him highly recommended by his teacher, Emmanuel Levinas, Cohen picked it up multiple times only to set it aside until about six years ago.  Since then, he’s read it more than once, and the copy he brought with him was heavily bookmarked.  Cohen was delightfully open about how entranced he was with the way the book challenged some of his preconceived notions about Soviet Russia, as well as with the unfolding story.

            The presentation was followed by a lively discussion touching on antisemitism, totalitarianism, Soviet history, and the importance of great literature.

            Please join us next semester for our second in the series of Blind Date with a Jewish Book, dates to be announced soon.