The Ringelblum Archive and the Warsaw ghetto

During the Second World War, all Warsaw's Jews were imprisoned in the ghetto. Some poems written during this time were preserved, despite the Nazis' strenuous attempts to eradicate all Jews and Jewish culture. The poems were buried in milk cans together with other writings, not all of them poems. These writings by multiple authors form what is now known as the Ringelblum Archive, Ringelblum being the name of the far-sighted man who insisted on documenting for posterity what was happening to Warsaw's Jews and their cultural artefacts, and who also found a way of securing the archive for future generations. Of which I am a member. 

After the Nazis had emptied the ghetto of its Jews, they erased it. No buildings remained. When the war ended, one or two survivors returning from the camps rescued this milk can and one other from the places where they'd been buried. A third one was lost, presumably discarded, because the Chinese embassy was built where it was hidden. I believe the contents of the two milk cans are now kept in the Holocaust Museum in Washington.

The poems from the Ringelblum Archive have been translated from Yiddish and can be found online here on the website thesongremains.org. The wife of Binem Heller, a powerful poet, can be seen here on Youtube declaiming one of his heart-rending poems in Yiddish, Mein Schwester Chaye (My sister Chaye, with English subtitles). He compiled a collection of Yiddish poems by Jewish Polish poets which was published in 1951. It includes the poem below by Yisroel Shtern, who died in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1942.       

 A phrase about man in an old holy book 

by Yisroel Shtern

Though Springtime, there was rain and snow,
and above the columns of night
grief clambered like a cat and terrorized all the roads.
I sat alone, leafing through an old holy book.

Then a phrase transcending generations shimmered
through my home like a crown, a proud phrase though old,
but I did not move towards this dream
with a silver platter, with bread and with salt.

And the phrase did not flash like lightning during my sleep,
and in the morning it did not sit by my head
with daggers of judgment and punishment aimed at my eyes;
it didn’t gnaw like sulfur permeating my days.

I arose Spring-like with the day’s dance,
wrote joy with my stick in the warm sand.
Woe did not drip into my breakfast repast
when a bloodied Jew came sliding along the wall

Leaden and blind like a cloud, unable to locate his house;
when laughter curls itself into the hairs of the brutes;
when my street hightails it swiftly and small as a mouse.
And in the park trees stand like hunters’ guns…

Neither the morning nor the afternoon was ashamed.
And the sun towered golden in town.
And neither in the sun, nor in the tree, nor in me did burn
the old-holy-book-phrase: “Man is formed from God”…

 

In memory of Dr. Sarah Moskovitz and her work with child survivors of the Holocaust.

 

Emily Perkins' Lioness vs Coetzee's The Pole

I read Emily Perkins' latest, The Lioness, a month ago - a repeat of the experience of reading her previous work, The Forrests, which left no trace in my mind. She bores me, despite being extremely respected in New Zealand. Whatever it is which others appreciate passes me by.

On the other hand, reading Coetzee's The Pole and other stories (2023, The Text Publishing Company): a wonderful experience. 

Coetzee writes in the 3rd person singular, like a fictional author - we are there with him as both the woman and the man appear: "All year they've been knocking at the door, wanting to be let in or else dismissed. Now at last, has their time come?" (This reminds me of Saramago's writing.) 

It's a love story which we observe from the author's point of view for almost the entire novella (it's not very long), as we seek to understand the nature of the relationship. The woman's name is Beatriz, like Dante's inamorata. She's Spanish (Coetzee studied Spanish and often visited Spain in the 1960s.) Thinking about the Pole in question, whose much less evocative name is Witold, Beatriz evaluates his behaviour as a Latin woman within a Latin context. 

Like the Pole, I'm culturally North European. I once knew an Argentinian woman here in NZ who was preoccupied by the difference between New Zealand and Argentina, where it is common for married men to "acquire" a mistress, and married women a lover..."It's normal - everyone knows about it." We didn't discuss the prevalence of adultery here - was it common and hidden? or less common? Or was my friend's family an exception while she thought it the rule? I met her mother who was visiting from Argentina. On hearing my husband was British, she said, "Oh, what's he like in bed? Do tell, what are the British like in bed?" A Northerner, my shock and dismay at this intrusiveness were so great I couldn't dissimulate and the topic was dropped immediately. But the question remained - was adultery common and open in Argentina and other Latin countries - more so than among supposedly straight-laced people such as the British, the Dutch or the Germans? (Was this difference perhaps connected to the prevailing faith - Catholic versus Protestant? Divorce being impossible for a Catholic?) 

The writing is sparse and direct, the characters endearing. I read it again, more than once. Lovely.

Vulnerability, by David Whyte (2016)

 David Whyte is peremptory here, his voice that of an expert who knows best.

"Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without, vulnerability is not a choice, vulnerability is the underlying, ever present and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature, the attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential, tidal and conversational foundations of our identity.

To have a temporary, isolated sense of power over all events and circumstances, is a lovely illusionary [should it be 'illusory' ?] privilege and perhaps the prime and most beautifully constructed conceit of being human and especially of being youthfully human, but it is a privilege that must be surrendered with that same youth, with ill health, with accident, with the loss of loved ones who do not share our untouchable powers; powers eventually and most emphatically given up, as we approach our last breath.

The only choice we have as we mature is how we inhabit our vulnerability, how we become larger and more courageous and more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance, our choice is to inhabit vulnerability as generous citizens of loss, robustly and fully, or conversely, as misers and complainers, reluctant and fearful, always at the gates of existence, but never bravely and completely attempting to enter, never wanting to risk ourselves, never walking fully through the door."

---

Hokusai's Great Wave

These days, I keep a small reproduction of Hokusai's Great Wave off the Coast of Kanagawa (1831, Edo period, Japan) where I can see it, on my desk or on the bedside table. Originally a greeting card, it's becoming somewhat battered. I'll look for a new reproduction. That should not be hard to find.

 

 

 

The huge wave is about to crash upon three long slender boats, in which tiny people paddle furiously. (The third boat is almost invisible). Despite the danger, it seems likely they'll remain afloat. 

 

Mount Fuji is near the centre of the image, though remote from the storm: it is still, quiet, peaceful, like a person in deep meditation while wind and rain rage outside. 

 

Hokusai's 36 woodcuts of Mount Fuji are his best-known works, created when he was 70 years old and struggling with money problems caused by his family.

(Reproduction acknowledgement: Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wave_off_Kanagawa#/media/File:Tsunami_by_hokusai_19th_century.jpg) 

​

 

Muriel Spark's The Mandelbaum Gate (1965)

The structure of this book is surprisingly uneven: six chapters in Part 1, the first four introducing new characters. Freddy, Barbara, the Cartwrights who are English expats, Abdul, a Palestinian Muslim.  Part 2 is titled Passionate pilgrims, all one piece, albeit longer. 

Janet (from my book group) said how wonderful it was; she laughed as she spoke. I thought she must really have enjoyed it. I looked for my own copy at home, but it must have belonged to my parents. I will have read it as a teenager, not understanding much. 

 

The Mandelbaum Gate is full of humour and insight. It is 1961, and the main character, Barbara Vaughan, a recently converted Roman Catholic with an Anglican/Jewish background, is visiting Israel. The city of Jerusalem is divided between Israel and Jordan, the only connection between the two halves the narrow passage through the Mandelbaum Gate. The division in the city reflects other divisions: between Barbara’s loyalties, the Jewish versus the Anglican, between her family and the Catholic Church. There's also a division in time, a before and an after, in the life of Freddy Hamilton, a 50 year-old bland British Foreign Office employee who survived his childhood by smiling in the face of a tyrannical mother. He continues to smile charmingly rather than act, living in fear of other people's passions. His meeting with Barbara changes him in a radical way and he enjoys a brief interlude of pure happiness before his life becomes complicated by what is another theme of the book, a failure to pay attention to what is happening to people one is close to.

That theme has to do with noticing. Barbara’s cousin Miles and his wife fail to notice that she is conducting a torrid love affair under their roof with an archaeologist she met at a local dig. The people at the dig, the people in the pub, they all knew, they could see what was happening. Miles and his wife were prevented from noticing by their preconceived ideas about Barbara, for whom she was a spinster, a virginal school-teacher. Besides, they considered the man she loved a social inferior, though he was a widely respected expert in his field. Barbara feels ignored, unloved. In general, Barbara's Anglican family likes to turn difficulties into anecdotes for the amusement of their friends and family. 

Freddy dismisses issues as ‘quite absurd’ whenever they might require reflection, as when Barbara mentions that her Church may forbid her to marry a divorcee. His comments are frequently offensive: he lazily expresses an antisemitic trope before realizing Barbara is part-Jewish. His life is unexamined.

Barbara recognizes his tendency: "You blow neither hot nor cold." For Freddy, this is a pivotal moment, a transformation from one state to another, his own personal Mandelbaum Gate.

Nevertheless, he tragically ignores cries for help in letters he receives from home, which document the increasing hatred between his mother and her companion. 

 * * * 

Several delightful vignettes in the book bear the ring of truth: Barbara visits the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and in an hilarious aside, we're privy to the thoughts of the three Franciscans who jealously guard the section of the church allocated to Roman Catholics as they observe an English priest exceeding his allotted time with an unplanned sermon, a sermon replete with opinions the Franciscans deeply object to. The sermon itself is actually relevant to us readers who may not be RC.

We benefit from Muriel Spark's background in intelligence (from WWII): a story about the Israeli national water-carrier is inserted into the narrative. It is a fact that this water-carrier required giant pipes which worried the Jordanians a great deal, with some reason. Israeli intelligence knew a spy had been planted by the Jordanians and wanted to identify him. Someone asks Freddy what the Israelis would do if they caught this person. He answers: "Mislead him.” 

* * * 

Muriel Spark has an enviable ability to reproduce the fluent, understandable and imperfect English spoken by foreigners.

An old  aunt from Eastern Europe describes her pickled cucumbers “I have made yesterday cucumbers in pickle, twenty. Thirty-six last week in the jars I have with vinegar made, cucumbers.”

The speech of Israeli guides, one of whom is originally Czech, the other Polish, is typically Israeli - confrontational, almost aggressive.  Barbara explains to the guide how her father died: “The horse threw him. He landed in a ditch and died instantly.” The guide: “My father died also in a ditch. Shot by the SS.” Holocaust one-upmanship. He immediately moves on: “Why have you made yourself a Catholic to deny your Jewish blood?” His English does not stretch to the word 'converted'. The paranoia, the abhorrence of Christianity both ring true.

Freddy's hotel manager prefers to speak in the present tense: “Now I phone your office and tell them you are safe. Do you like some tea, coffee?” An abundance of pronouns renders his speech quite unclear: “”As I say to him, we can put you through to his room. He says, I been put through to his room…”

Abdul, an educated Arab, to Freddy: “Say a poem for me." 

Finally a quote from Benny, who is Freddy's mother's companion and suffers from religious mania: "I have tried to bring home the Word of Jesus to her heart but the Devil and his Minions have got her in their bloody claws…”

Some reviewers decried the multitude of complications in the story. Having lived in the Middle East myself and knowing Arabs, Jews and Christians, I think it's a pretty good portrayal of how things were then. I read the book three times in a row, discovering something new every time. Admittedly I was suffering from Covid and was isolated with nothing else to do. 

It's a great book.

New Zealand clouds in the movies

 

 My 3rd experience of Covid. Or maybe my 2nd? Not sure.

This time I have our bedroom to myself, a lovely view to a pure blue sky with clouds different from anywhere else. 

 

New Zealand clouds put on an unrivaled show, from floating innocence in a baby-blue sky, to towering creamy mega-shapes which assume an evolving crimson flush at sunset, changing to a dark concrete gray as the sun disappears, the colour changes to a dark concrete gray.

Lech Majewsky came to New Zealand to film the clouds for his medieval movie The Mill and the Cross. (Anchored in a painting by Bruegel the Elder, the story is actually located in Flanders). I recognised those clouds the moment I saw them, saying happily: "New Zealand clouds!" out loud into the cinema's darkness. It's an outstanding movie, for many reasons. I bought a copy to keep.

The other movie I truly love is Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia. No clouds.

More war

In Napier, where P is attending a conference. We're staying in a pleasant-enough motel, with a clear view of the wide empty bay, tame hills lining the horizon.The sun has slipped behind them, leaving a flush of gold. Above, an irregular layer of dark clouds covers the sky like a lid. 

War in Israel, again. With Iran. Iranians are not Arabs, friendliness is a genuine possibility with them, less of a struggle. Witness Salma Abu Gosh.  Poisonous hatred. I shall write about her soon, maybe here.

Tonight we'll have dinner with a friend who lives nearby. Maybe we'll talk about the war, maybe not. I sometimes forget about it, briefly, and feel guilty, for not having thought of people, keeping them alive in my mind, a talismanic protection. I wrote my sister a brief email just now. Maybe she'll answer tonight.