Time to leave? On reading Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (2023)

Prophet Song won the Man Booker Prize in 2023, a moving novel which describes what happens when a democracy is overtaken by fascism.

 The book's opening lines - there are no paragraphs - read like a poem. The versification is mine: 

 

    The night has come and she has not heard the knocking, 

    standing at the window looking out onto the garden.

    How the dark gathers 

    without sound 

    the cherry trees. 

    

How the dark gathers without sound the cherry trees. 

A feeling I recognise. 

A friend in New Zealand wonders whether they would know "when it is time to leave". That question is also a chapter heading in Howard Jacobson's latest book, Howl. Nowadays Jews are uncomfortable everywhere. At Temple, the volunteer security guards have been given bullet-proof vests and offered lessons in krav maga (unarmed combat).  

Lynch who is Irish wrote the novel in reaction to events in Syria. I wasn't aware of the growing stranglehold which preceded Assad's violence. That was before Trump's second presidency, before ICE was inflicted on Americans, before those who invaded the Capitol on January 6th were deemed victims rather than perpetrators. 

In The Prophet, Paul Lynch depicts events through the eyes of a mother. After the initial intimation of threat, the extent of the crisis becomes evident when the father is taken away, to somewhere unknown. Lynch describes police interviews, the effect of that disappearance and that of the following ones, and the difficult choices remaining to the mother struggling to balance the children's welfare and that of her elderly, half-senile father. 

Syria may be the country which inspired the novel, but Lynch describes a believable process which could happen anywhere, any time.

Russian resistance literature: every human being is worthy of attention

 A friend lent me this lovely book by George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2021). Its sub-title is: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life. I've bought my own copy.

At Syracuse University, George Saunders teaches just six young and very gifted writers a class "in the 19th-century Russian short story in translation" - a precise description. For the duration of the book, we belong to this class, a great pleasure, also an honour. We examine seven short stories and he discusses them with us. 

He writes: "Over the next three years [I try to] help them achieve what I call their "iconic space" - the place from which they will write the stories only they could write, using what makes them uniquely themselves - their strengths, weaknesses, obsessions, peculiarities, the whole deal... Some of the best moments of my life have been spent teaching that Russian class." Towering Russian authors: Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Gogol. 

"The stories are [...] for the most part, quiet, domestic, and apolitical [...] but this is resistance literature, written by progressive reformers in a repressive culture, under constant threat of censorship, in a time when a writer's politics could lead to exile, imprisonment, and execution. The resistance in the stories is quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind."

Somewhere, George Saunders mentions that he practices Buddhist meditation. 

 

"Every human being is worthy of attention."

 

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.