Under This Blazing Light by Amos Oz Read Free Book Online

together such a simple sentence ...), or else the poet is playing hide-and-seek, concealing his message under piles of difficult words, but we are going to uncover it, pale and trembling, and pin it down for ever in ten words.
    Now that I have vented my anger about ‘the message’, I owe you a reply. Berdyczewski cannot be classified either as a nihilist or as a desperate writer. On the contrary, he has a certain vein of vitality. In his world there are two possible kinds of experience: there are powerful primary experiences, and there are faint, miserable, threadbare secondary experiences. Primary experiences are always associated with the removal of restraint and the release of pent-up urges: love, hatred, jealousy, friendship, destruction, burning ambition, defiance of fate. On the other hand, there are secondary experiences: making an impression, succeeding socially, knowing how to ‘get on in life’, and so forth.
    Most people have an easier life perhaps because they only have secondary experiences. Yet in Berdyczewski’s stories there is a constant fascination in the rushing into the heart of the primary experiences of life - even though the price is often life itself. On the one hand, the masses, stuck in a rut, kindly sheep or greedy hedonists who regard the world as a single great udder one has to elbow one’s way to so as to imbibe the maximum of success, possessions, favours, shallow thrills. And on the other hand, a possibility of a different relationship to the world, like the relationship of the moth to the flame, even at the cost of scorching one’s wings, of being burnt, so long as what happens is real life and not just a faint copy.
    (Based on a discussion with members of the Kibbutz Metsova literary groups)
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‘A ridiculous miracle hanging over our heads’

    (A talk about Joseph Hayyim Brenner)

    Brenner was ostensibly a miserable Jew straight from the squalor of the ghetto. One of those bent and broken characters who, having lost God in their youth and set out in search of something else, never reached any promised land: a woman, or love, or ‘national revival’, or ‘success’, or any kind of happy ending. On the contrary, they sank from bad to worse until they died pointlessly just as they had lived pointlessly. Brenner was apparently one of those Jewish outcasts of a former generation, whom the land - every land - vomited up.
    What is even worse, Brenner and his heroes had ostensibly stepped straight out of the crudest sort of antisemitic caricature: always the ghetto man, always feverish and loud, always complicated, wrestling with all sorts of physical desires with sweaty remorse, not steeped in sin and yet steeped in miserable self-recriminations, always careless, confused and clumsy and tormented by self-hatred, repulsively inquisitive, extremely ignoble, and all in all - the man of the ghetto who wanders from ghetto to ghetto and finds no redress and no way out. That is apparently all there is to Brenner or to all his heroes. Such an archetypal ghetto Jew. Such a mass of dry bones. A bundle of Jewish sorrows full of sighs and unaesthetic pains.
    (Since I have mentioned Jewish sorrows I ought to add in parentheses that, despite everything, we have had and we still have some liberated Hebrew writers, who are not terribly interested in our sorrows. Who says that we all have to write about Jewish sorrows? We’ve had enough of that. We can also write about this. And about that. One can write about the pleasures of love or about the meaning of the human condition in general or about the scenery per se. But after all - how can one? So much for the parenthesis, and now back to Brenner.)
    As if it were not enough that Brenner was, ostensibly, such an archetypal ghetto Jew, he was even ostensibly an antisemite. How he hated the father of Yirmiyahu Feierman, how he hated the ‘Jewish heritage’ (which he always mentions in inverted commas), he was not ashamed to scoff at the Zionists’