Pushkin Street, Gogol Street, Lermontov Street - The Destruction of Galicia and literature

S. Ansky's tone in The Destruction of Galicia reminds me more than a bit of Chekhov. I suspect a direct connection to Chekhov's Sakhalin Island book, a report on a Siberian prison, but I haven't read it, so who knows. I am sure Ansky had I. L. Peretz's Impressions of a Journey through the Tomaszow Region in the Year 1890 (1891) on his mind. That one is nominally the report on a statistical survey of the countryside; it is extremely Chekhovian, even derivative, one could say. Peretz himself is actually a character in Ansky's book, in the earlier parts set in and near Warsaw.

What do I mean by tone? That Ansky's voice is professional, subdued, sometimes even a bit detached. His job is to stay calm, so that's what he does. He may express his frustration, anger, or sorrow, but he is writing with some distance. Of course, the most important part of the story is not his own. Ansky is bearing witness to a catastrophe. We're all too familiar with that genre, now.

Literature infiltrates the book:

"We walked around in the ruins for quite a while and I noticed something odd: In every corner of the burnt street, on the walls and on the destroyed houses, there were newly affixed signs on which street names were written in Russian letters. The Russians had given all the streets new, highly literary names: Pushkin Street, Gogol Street, Lermontov Street, I think there was a Turgenev Street, too. Apparently the victors didn't understand how cynical it was to call the horribly disfigured, fire-gutted streets after the greatest representatives of Russian culture, nor did they think it insulting to the memory of the great writers. The street signs left me with the same feeling as did the icons which the Christians put in their windows during the pogroms." (The Dybbuk and Other Writings, p. 180)

Since Ansky had recently been collecting folktales, he was always on the lookout for new ones, what we for some reason have taken to calling "urban myths." In Galicia and Poland, there were two sets of stories. One set was anti-Semitic, used to justify Russian depredations. For example, the Cossacks were riding through town, and everything was peaceful, until a Jewish girl fired at them from a second-story window. So the pogrom was merely retaliation. Ansky heard this story again and again, always with the girl in a second-story window. A lot of the stories involved Jewish spies, and telephones. All the Jews are spies for the Germans, or all the Poles, or both, and they all have telephones hidden away somewhere, with direct lines to the enemy.

The second set of stories are the Jewish ones, responses to the anti-Semitic stories:

"One version simply told how a number of Jews were hanged as a result of the telephone libel; other Jews would have been hanged too, were it not for a priest, carrying a cross, who appeared before the judge and testified that it was the Poles who were guilty. The priest's evidence proved to be correct; all the Jews were immediately freed and the Poles were hanged instead - sixteen in all." (p. 174)

Or the Jews caught in the cellar, on the telephone with the Austrians, turn out to be Poles in disguise. These stories are always from one or two or three towns over, absolutely true, none of us saw it, but we all heard about it.

The Beatrice Weinrich edition of Yiddish Folktales includes a few stories about Czar Nicholas I (enemy of the Jews), Emperor Franz Josef (friend of the Jews), Napoleon (complicated), or one of the Rothschild bankers, all typical, old-timey folktales, but updated with new heroes and villains. In the old story, the beggar who rewards the generous and punishes the stingy turns out to be the prophet Elijah in disguise; in the up to date ones he's Franz Josef. Some of the stories Ansky collects are about Austrian or Russian generals, ones who were known to be particularly anti- or philo-Semitic, inserted into the old stories.

"The most popular folktale among Jews was about two soldiers who confronted each other on the battlefield. As one stabbed the other, he was shocked to hear the dying soldier cry out, 'Shma Yisroel, Hear, O Israel.'... I heard many different variants of this folktale in at least eight or ten different localities - St. Petersburg, Moscow, Minsk, Kiev, Warsaw, in short, every place where there were homeless Jews or soldiers. Most people thought that this was a factual account about real people, not a folktale. (pp. 175-6)

In the ellipses, Ansky mentions the story about the bride and groom who were murdered under the bridal canopy during the 1648 massacres, and buried together where they died - "in at least fifteen or sixteen shtetls I was taken to a grave near the synagogue where the bride and groom were supposed to have been buried." (175) This is Ansky's one hint in The Destruction of Galicia of what he was doing when he wasn't hauling money and medicine across a war zone.

He was writing a play, now the consensus choice for Greatest Yiddish Play. Tomorrow, I'll look at The Dybbuk.

War is a different matter - S. Ansky's The Destruction of Galicia

S. Ansky spent 1912 to 1914 travelling through the Jewish countryside in and near the Pale of Settlement, collecting Jewish stories, songs, traditions, and artifacts. The outbreak of war ended the expedition, but the next year he found himself back in the same area for a more basic reason: to bring relief aid to the Jews caught between the Russian and Austrian armies.

At the beginning of World War I, the Russians immediately overran Galicia, now part of Ukraine and Poland, at the time under the control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some elements of the Russian army, especially the Cossacks, deliberately destroyed every Jewish community they encountered. And this was before the fighting began, before the artillery shells began to fall. The Jewish towns in the region were unusually poor to begin with. After one of these pogroms, the survivors were left with nothing.

Later in the war, the army clamped down on these abuses in response to international pressure, and the Russians were eventually driven out of the area, although, in retreat, they were not much kinder to Russian Jews. The estimates of Jewish civilian deaths in the region range from 100,000 to 200,000, with half a million or more displaced people and refugees.

S. Ansky inserted himself right into the middle of this. Much of The Destruction of Galicia (1925), his memoir of the relief effort, involves trying to get transportation, racing from place to place with food and medical supplies. He also spends a lot of time arguing with officials, and attending meetings. This is modern, bureaucratized humanitarianism.

Ansky travelled in uniform (the cover of the paperback of The Dybbuk and Other Writings features a photo of Ansky in a Red Cross hat) and was, how to say this, highly assimilated, so he often "passed" as a Russian officer. That was one of the ways he got things done in the war zone. Another result is that Russians would confide in him. Here's an excerpt of The Destruction of Galicia, which I hope shows the literary quality of the book, something I want to write more about tomorrow:

“Our boxcars of medical supplies were hooked to a train carrying high-explosive shells, and off we chugged. In my heated freight car I found a young officer with an intelligent face, and we got to talking. There was something a bit odd about his rigid, dreamy stare and his habit of slowly weighing each word before he spoke. I wondered whether he was quite all right.

‘You know,’ he said as we got better acquainted, ‘you know when I was young I led a shameful life. I drank, I debauched, I beat the young soldiers, and I did other wicked things. Then I came across Leo Tolstoy’s What Do I Believe In. I read it and I was reborn. I became a completely different person. I even stopped eating meat.’

‘And yet you go to war, and you kill people,’ I said.

He sat awhile with a downcast head. At last he murmured with deep conviction: ‘War is a different matter. This war will renew the world; it will cleanse mankind of its dirt. For such a goal one can make the supreme sacrifice.’

Our train stopped three or four miles short of Tarnow because the approach to the station was being shelled. The station itself and the surrounding buildings had long since burned down. I had to reach town on foot. My belongings and the medical supplies would be driven in by automobile.” (p. 85, The Enemy at His Pleasure)

Johann Neugroschel for some reason titles his translation The Enemy at His Pleasure, a line from an Anna Akhmatova poem. I don't know why. I can guess.

I should also note that Ansky personally witnesses a fair number of horrible events, and documents many others. I think The Destruction of Galicia is a great book, a classic of humanitarianism, but I know it's not for everyone.

The accomplishments of S. Ansky

The writer who called himself S. Ansky did three lasting things in his life. He “conceived and directed” the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition of 1912 to 1914, which was cut short by World War I; he organized a pioneering humanitarian relief effort for Galician and Russian Jews caught in the path of the Russian, German, and Austrian armies, and wrote a book about it; and he wrote a play, first produced as a posthumous memorial. Ansky was born in 1863, so when the Jewish Ethnographic Expedition began, he was 49 years old; he died eight years later.

His life before that is fascinating, actually, not because of Ansky’s accomplishments, but because he is a sort of perfect type of the Jewish radical of his time. His early activities include: running a commune for boys who had fled religious schools (Ansky did this at the age of 17!); infiltrating a Hasidic shtetl; doing “educational work” with Russian miners. He drifts (or flees) from St. Petersburg to Warsaw, to Geneva and Paris, along with every other Russian radical and bohemian revolutionary. He writes some short fiction in Yiddish and Russian. He wasn’t S. Ansky yet. He was Solomon Rappaport, and Semyon Akimovich, and Z. Sinanni, and Pseudonym.

Ansky said that it was an encounter in 1901 with a volume of I. L. Peretz’s collected writings that caused him to finally pin down his identity, to suddenly – he was that kind of personality, everything happened suddenly - become passionately interested in Yiddish again. This led to an interest in Jewish folklore, as an authentic expression of the proletariat, which led to the Ethnographic Expedition, which led to the Galician relief effort, and his single play, which turned out to be the greatest play in Yiddish literature.

He died in Warsaw in 1920, having fled the Bolsheviks (Ansky, good for him, supported Kerensky). The play, The Dybbuk, was first performed posthumously, in Ansky’s honor. His magnificent account of his humanitarian work, The Destruction of Galicia, was also published just after his death.

All of this is basically from the introduction of The Dybbuk and Other Writings (1992), edited by David Roskies. The introduction, the account of Ansky’s life, is almost as interesting as Ansky’s works. The rest of the book contains The Dybbuk, seven stories from throughout his life, the early ones translated from Yiddish that was itself translated from Russian, and then a well-chosen forty-page excerpt from The Destruction of Galicia. All in around 250 pages. The idea of “summing up” a writer in a book is, mostly, ridiculous, but this book kind of does it.

More S. Ansky all week – maybe two days on The Destruction of Galicia and two days on The Dybbuk.

Caffè-latte! I call to the waiter, - and Non c’ è latte, this is the answer he makes me - Arthur Hugh Clough's Rome

“Rome disappoints me still; but I shrink and adapt myself to it.
…
Ye gods! What do I want with this rubbish of ages departed,
Things that Nature abhors, the experiments that she failed in?
What do I find in the Forum? An archway and two or three pillars.
Well, but St. Peter’s? Alas, Bernini has filled it with sculpture!” (I, 35 & 41-44)

Alas! Claude, hero of Clough’s Amour de Voyages (1849), is a restless youngster. He’s a tourist in Rome, and not happy about it, but the passage above, nominally a letter to his friend Eustace, suggests that the problem might just possibly not be the fault of Rome, exactly.

Fortunately, for Claude and the reader, two things soon happen that interest even him. First, Claude is forced to spend time, much against his well, with other English tourists, and is surprised to find himself falling in love, although he thinks it can’t possibly be serious. He’s a bit like Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, the distant man who cannot quite believe that he has met a woman who is actually interesting. One wonders what kind of company these fellers had been keeping before, but that’s beside the point.

Second, this is 1849, so Claude and the other tourists wake one morning to discover that the city, under the control of Garibaldi’s Republic, is besieged by the French army (Murray is Claude’s Lonely Planet):

“Yes, we are fighting at last, it appears. This morning as usual,
Murray, as usual, in hand, I enter the Caffè Nuovo;
Seating myself with a sense as it were of a change in the weather,
Not understanding, however, but thinking mostly of Murray,
And, for today is their day, of the Campidoglio Marbles,
Caffè-latte! I call to the waiter, - and Non c’ è latte,
This is the answer he makes me, and this the sign of a battle.” (II. 95-100)

I detect a hint of a future generation of useless men abroad, those of Henry James and Ford Madox Ford, or Turgenev's fretful young intellectuals. Claude begins to find things – the Roman Republic, Mary– interesting, but he has great trouble doing anything, which eventually leads where one would expect. As goes the Roman Republic, so goes the romance of Claude and Mary.

I don’t want to overemphasize the romance, although that’s quite good, and would have made a fine plot in the hands of Jane Austen or E. M. Forster. Amours de Voyage consists mostly of Claude philosophizing and ironizing, and whining and moping, and wandering around Rome, all in his overbaked Oxford style. What he has to say, what he thinks, is interesting. What he does, that's Claude's problem.

Wonderful poet, Arthur Hugh Clough. Not quite like anyone else.

Rubbishy seems the word that would exactly suit it - Arthur Hugh Clough's hexameters

A while back I was reading Longfellow's Evangeline, and it left me wondering about the point of writing English poetry in dactylic hexameter. Longfellow's hexameter was basically a sort of rhythmic prose. The long, six foot lines and the irregular lengths of the feet seemed to violate some essential feature of English prosody, although I wasn't sure what.

It turns out that a while further back, a young Arthur Hugh Clough was reading Evangeline and wondered the same thing. He decided to do something about it, and wrote two long, narrative hexameter poems, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848), and Amours de Voyage (1849). Both are about young men on vacation, and their troubles with women. Both are excellent, especially Amours de Voyage, which I think I will return to tomorrow. Now I just want to look at the verse. Clough cracked the hexameter nut, so to speak, and he solved the problem in more than one way.

Not that he doesn't still end up with prose a lot. How's this:

"It was four of the clock, and the sports were coming to the ending,
Therefore the Oxford party went off to adorn for dinner." (I.10-11)

Maybe you get a hint here of one of Clough's tools, the mock heroic. The hexameter is the meter of Homer, so let's have some Homer, but a bit silly:

"Here were clansmen many in kilt and bonnet assembled,
Keepers a dozen at least; the Marquis's targeted gillies;
Pipers five or six, among them the young one, the drunkard...
But with snuff-boxes all, and all of them using the boxes." (I.51-53, 56)

This fits the setting and theme of the poem. A passel of Oxford undergraduates are spending the summer in Scotland. They prepare for exams with their tutor, mostly, so their heads are full of the original hexameter, the Greek and Roman classics. On this evening, they attend a dinner and dance hosted by local Highlanders. The Highlanders still have some connection with the traditions of actual men of action; the undergrads split their time bewteen books and sports.

Some of the poem is still pretty tangled, and some of it is pretty flat, but a touch less seriousness turns out to help a lot.

Clough tried again, and found a complete solution with Amours de Voyage. It is an epistolary poem, so in a sort of first person, which leads straight to the answer: create a character who naturally speaks or writes in dactylic hexameter. Name him Claude. And so:

"Rome disappoints me much; I hardly as yet understand, but
Rubbishy seems the word that most exactly would suit it.
All the foolish destructions, and all the siller savings,
All the incongruous things of past incompatible ages,
Seem to be treasured up here to make fools of present and future.
Would to Heaven the old Goths had made a cleaner sweep of it!" (I.19-24)

We have a young graduate now, not an undergraduate, at worst a pretentious, serious man, but with a sense of humor and an ability to see the ridiculous side of his own character. Claude's writing is not natural, really, but it's his voice, what a person like him would actually write. He's over-educated and restless; it's too late to be natural (or is it - that's a theme of this poem).

What a surprise, then, after twelve letters or fragments of letters from "Claude to Eustace," to see that the heading of I.XIII is "Georgina Trevellyn to Louisa."* Who? Here's how she writes:

"Dearest Louisa, -Inquire, if you please, about Mr. Claude -.
He has been once at R., and remembers meeting the H.'s.
Harriet L., perhaps, may be able to tell you about him.
It is an awkward youth, but still with very good manners;
Not without prospects, we hear; and, George says, highly connected." (I.252-6)

This is also dactylic hexameter, but sounds so different than Claude (more monosyllabic, less Latinate) and entirely natural, as long as we're in or near a Jane Austen novel.

So now I don't know how Clough did it. Right, the voice of the characters has to be suited to the meter. I'll note that Amours de Voyage is probably 90% Claude. Georgina's letters must have been devillishly hard to write.

Tomorrow, a bit of what Amours de Voyage is actually about.

* Update: Oops, Georgina first shows up in Letter I.III, not I.XIII. And the important character turns out to be her sister Mary, whose letters appear later. As a half-hearted defense, Clough does make this deliberately confusing.

In which I marvel at the perfectly egg-shaped head of Arthur Hugh Clough - guest starring a blear-eyed pimp

Look at Arthur Hugh Clough there, on the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of his poems. His head, it is so perfectly egg-shaped. I cannot stop staring at it. I may have been called an egghead myself, possibly, but I don't think it was meant literally.

It is so, so round.

I want to talk about -

So smooth and round. Must. Look. Away. So shiny.

All right. The portrait is by "an unknown artist." Do you think Mr. A. U. Artist was trained to first draw an egg and then fill in the facial features? I do.

What did Clough write about? Skepticism, mostly. Skepticism about religion, skepticism about sex, especially the male sex drive, skepticism about his purpose in the world. Love presented some sort of imperfect solution to these problems, as did poetry.

I quoted a bit of "Epi-Strauss-ism" back here ("Matthew and Mark and Luke and holy John \ Evanished all and gone!"), a poem of doubt caused by up-to-date German Biblical criticism. In that poem, Clough doubts his doubting. "Easter Day: Naples, 1849" is more strongly worded:

"Through the great sinful streets of Naples as I past,
With fiercer heat than flamed above my head
My heart was hot within me; till at last
My brain was lightened, when my tongue had said

     Christ is not risen!

   Christ is not risen, no,
   He lies and moulders low;
     Christ is not risen." (ll. 1-8)

This is a long poem, so I'll include just a bit more, an inversion of Christ's own words:

"Ye men of Galilee!
Why stand ye looking up to heaven, where Him ye ne’er may see,
Neither ascending hence, nor hither returning again?
Ye ignorant and idle fishermen!
Hence to your huts and boats and inland native shore,
And catch not men, but fish;
Whate’er things ye might wish,
Him neither here nor there ye e’er shall meet with more.
Ye poor deluded youths, go home,
Mend the old net ye left to roam,
Tie the split oar, patch the torn sail;
It was indeed 'an idle tale',
     He was not risen." (ll. 113-125)

I find this quite powerful; I also find Christ's command to be "fishers of men" quite powerful. I have little idea what Clough actually believes. In this poem, the declaration of disbelief relieves some kind (what kind?) of torment. But then I turn to a companion poem, "Easter Day II":

"So while the blear-eyed pimp beside me walked,
And talked,
For instance, of the beautiful danseuse
And 'Eccellenza sure must see, if he would choose'
Or of the lady in the green silk there,
Who passes by and bows with minx's air,
Or of the little thing not quite fifteen,
Sicilian-born who surely should be seen -
So while the blear-eyed pimp beside me walked
And talked, and I too with fit answer talked,
So in the sinful streets, abstracted and alone,
I with my secret self held communing of mine own." (ll. 1-12)

The "blear-eyed pimp"! "not quite fifteen"! Perhaps a clue to the source of the earlier poem's "fierce heat" can be found here. The poem ends:

"Sit if ye will, sit down upon the ground,
Yet not to weep and wail, but calmly look around.
  Whate'er befell,
  Earth is not hell;
  Now too as when it first began,
  Life yet is Life and Man is Man.
For all that breathes beneath the heavens' high cope,
Joy with grief mixes, with despondence hope.
Hope conquers cowardice, joy grief,
Or at the least, faith unbelief.
  Though dead not dead;
  Though gone not fled;
  Though lost not vanished.
  In the great Gospel and true Creed
  He is yet risen indeed,
    Christ is yet risen." (ll. 34-51)

There seems to be some actual wisdom here. And what poetry! I love the whole "blear-eyed pimp" stanza - the imitations of his speech, the repetitons, the fractured meter. In the line "So in the sinful streets, abstracted and alone," the sequence of sounds ("So in" to "sin," "streets" to "abstracted") can hardly be bettered. All this from a supposedly minor poet, apparently best known for being a friend of Matthew Arnold.

Something I should have mentioned earlier: Clough is pronounced Cluff. Doesn't seem right. Hyu Cluff.

Tomorrow: Arthur Hugh Clough's use of the hexameter. See you next week! Ha ha!

In which I gush over Phaidon art books

The heavy white volumes Phaidon publishes in their Art and Ideas series are, physically, among my favorite books. The pages are stiff, thick, and unusually white, as if they were enamelled. The font (Bitstream Amerigo) is solid and plump, and the standard type is a sort of half boldface, while quotations are in regular type. Pagination and chapter titles are along the right and left edges of the page, not on top. The images are numbered and clearly labeled; captions always include date, dimensions, and location. Margins and line spacing are generous. A very appealing design.

The images - they are the real attraction. I would add "obviously," but art monographs are usually stingier than I want. Not this series - the Phaidon Chagall has 228 images in 330 pages, mostly the artist's paintings, but with some photographs and works by other artists mixed in:

I clipped off the right edge when I scanned the page, but you get the idea. The photo is of Marc Chagall with the legendary Yiddish actor Shlomo Mikhoels, who is also in the painting, doing the splits while playing his fiddle for the appreciative green cow. He was such a great threat to the Soviet state that Stalin, in 1948, personally ordered his murder. I've wandered from my point.

Looking at the catalog page, I see that I have now read 12 of the 32 volumes published so far. I'll rank them, most interesting to least.

Early Christian and Byzantine Art, John Lowden, page after page of marvels
Neoclassicism, David Irwin
David, Simon Lee
Rembrandt, Mariët Westerman

Jacques-Louis David is actually one of my least favorite painters, but this account of his work and life, tangled up with the French Revolution, is close to thrilling. His paintings, technical facility aside, are all context, so this is the way to see them. Rembrandt's life, by contrast, is almost event-free; the book is rather a gentle investigation of a supremely creative mind.

Romanticism, David Blayney Brown
Goya, Sarah Symmons
Egyptian Art, Jaromir Malek
Friedrich, William Vaughan
Turner, Barry Venning
Chagall, Monica Bohm-Duchen
Islamic Art, Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair
Hogarth, Mark Hallett

The problems with the last two are essentially conceptual. Islamic Art is strained by its need for coverage, while Hogarth treats Hogarth's work more as sociological and historical evidence than as art. In both cases, the approach is understandable, but these books aren't as much fun as some of the others. You would be justified in not believing how much fun Neoclassicism or Early Christian and Byzanine Art is, I understand, but I insist, they're great stuff.

As collections of images, though, they're all amazing. One sample from Islamic Art:

Note the attractive use of white space around the 8th century ewer.
There may well be better-written or better-argued books on every one of these subjects, but I've never found such an impressive combination of images and text. And then there are the pages, and the font, and so on. They don't make such good public transit books - a bit too heavy.

This was plenty gushy. Phaidon should send me some free books. Just post them to the address at the bottom of the site. Hmm, it doesn't seem to be there. Off to the right somewhere? No? I seem to have misplaced my address. Well, if it were the case that Wuthering Expectations had an address, Phaidon should send books to it.

In which I tear myself from the study of mummifed cats to look at Marc Chagall images

I had a wonderful, really excellent, absolutely top notch week on the Yiddish writer S. Ansky planned. But a comment from Neil of the dangerous* Adventures in the Print Trade derailed me, so I'll have to postpone that. Perhaps I will finish S. Ansky week before I devote my life to the study of mummified cats and their importation to England. At some point, I plan to become the world's first full-time mummified cat blogger. But that's in the future.

Wandering around in the secondary work on Yiddish literature, the name of Marc Chagall kept coming up, for obvious enough reasons. At some point, it occurred to me that I didn't really know much about Chagall. Didn't like him much, either, for what that's worth. At a later point, it occurred to me that I could read a book about him. That's my solution to everything.

Ignorant and slothful, I turned where I always do, to the Phaidon "Arts and Ideas" series, Chagall by Monica Bohm-Duchen. There are certainly plenty of other Chagall biographies. Physically, the Phaidon books are marvels, some of my favorites, so I always go there first, and usually last. The Bohm-Duchen book is fine; I certainly learned a lot.

I had no idea that Chagall had such a strong literary connection. The image up and to the left, is Literature itself, somehow, an allegorical image for a theater (there is also Music and Dance). I've adopted this as my Amateur Reader icon, even though it becomes so small that no one can tell what it is.

Beisdes befriending every other French poet and writing poetry himself, Chagall made illustrations for Dead Souls, the Hebrew Bible, the Fables of La Fontaine, the memoir of I. L. Peretz - and I'm forgetting some. The only ones that I've looked at with any real attention are the Bible prints, because they're easily available, in a Dover reprint of the French magazine that originally published them. In 1956 and again in 1960, you could just go to the newstand, I guess, and buy a magazine containing nothing but original Chagall prints. And, financially, you should have. On the right, we see Job in despair. Don't worry, Job, God will give you new cattle. As for your sons, ahem, well, you'll get sons, too, just as good as the other ones.

In theory, I should be the most interested in Chagall's illustrations for Dead Souls, since I admire that novel so much. But I'm missing something. I mean, see left. That's certainly Chagall - is it Gogol? These images all strike me the same way. However interesting they may be, I find it hard to see how they serve the text. Maybe the personality of the artist is too strong for the task. Or maybe if I read an illustrated version of the novel, all would be clear.

Now, over on the right, Chichikov packing his trunk - that's certainly in the right spirit. Chichikov really is that round, and the view of our non-hero is appropriate. Chagall knew the book well, at least.

All right, it's late, so I should stop. And the mummified cats are calling, calling, calling.

* Why dangerous? Because everything he puts on the website is for sale here. If the dollar were a little stronger...

As I wish my enemies an early death, so I am from the bottom of my heart, Your truly faithful wife, Sheyne-Sheyndl

I'm as bad as Menakhem-Mendl, her husband - I got carried away by work and have neglected Sheyne-Sheyndl.

Sheyne-Sheyndl always starts her letters the same way:

"To my dear, learned, & illustrious husband Menakhem-Mendl, may your light shine!

First, we're all well, thank God. I hope to hear no worse from you."

But then, then - some samples:

"Second, you write like a madman.

Second, I'm writing you, my sweetheart, to wish a cruel death to all my enemies.

Second, just look at what you've done, you fool!

Second, my dear husband, I pronounce you a certified lunatic. You might as well run naked through the streets!

Second, my mother says you can't make a fur hat from a pig's tail. I'm referring to your charming sister-in-law Yentl."

Actually, Sheyne-Sheyndl's letters always contain sayings from her mother. Here are a few of these gems:

"If it acts like a donkey and brays like a donkey, it must be a donkey.

One man eats garlic and another smells of it.

What's a rabbi doing raising pigs?"

In one letter, the mother seems to short circuit, just spilling out one saying after another. "She said a few other things too, my mother did. In fact, she left Kreindl speechless."

Maybe I should show how Sheyne-Sheyndl's letters end:

"I tell you, my husband, I've put up with as much as I can. Either you get yourself home in a jiffy and act like a human being - or else! As I wish my enemies an early death, so I am from the bottom of my heart,

Your truly faithful wife,
Sheyne-Sheyndl"

The last two chapters of The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl are each single letters by Menakhem-Mendl. They're fine, funny stories on their own, but the lack of the exchange of letters with Sheyne-Sheyndl is a great loss. So many of these comic Yiddish stories have a tragic undercurrent, and here's one of them. "May I never read another letter of yours again!" she says in her last letter. Maybe we just aren't getting Sheyne-Sheyndl's side, but maybe she's given up on her restless, useless husband.

And of course, Sheyne-Sheyndl's letters may contain a few hints about why Menakhem-Mendl doesn't want to go home, which is also sad. I think Sheyne-Sheyndl sounds like great fun, but I don't have to live with her.

Translations by Hillel Halkin.

A botched transition to Sholem Aleichem's Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl

I spent some time with a bit of Mark Twain yesterday. Sholem Aleichem is sometimes called the Jewish Mark Twain. Cuz they're both funny.

Now see, this transition has moved me from a book about scientists to Mark Twain to Sholem Aleichem. For a transition to be good, though, it should go somewhere or have meaning, unlike this one. A little writing tip for you. Free of charge.

I want to say something about The Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl (1892-1901, more or less), a book that, it turns out, has what we call "relevance". Menakhem-Mendl wants to strike it rich, and will try anything legal. His wife Sheyne-Sheyndl just wants him to come home. She's right, of course. Along the way, over six separate stories and a mere one hundred pages, Menakhem-Mendl tries his hand at trading in English pounds, railroad stocks, sugar, timber, oil wells, real estate, and probably more; he also takes a shot at matchmaking, selling insurance, and journalism. I'm not sure that a writer today would have such a different list of schemes - replace the railroads with tech stocks, and put the matchmaking business online.

Here's how the third story starts. Actually, it's how all of the stories start, almost exactly:

"To my wise, esteemed, & virtuous wife, Sheyne-Sheyndl, may you have a long life!

Firstly, rest assured that I am, praise God, in the best of health. God grant that we hear from each other only good and pleasing news, amen.

Secondly, I'm through with investing. You can have it! It's no occupation for a Jew. It's made me old and gray before my time. I could write a book on all I've been through. Yehupetz is in ruins. The market has gone bust. There isn't a ray of hope. The carnage, I'm sorry to say, is worse than it was in Odessa. Everyone is in the soup. Everyone is bankrupt, and so am I. Filing for bankruptcy is the latest fashion."

Menakhem-Mendl is back on his feet, though. Now he's a commodities trader:

"A more painless way to make a kopeck has yet to be devised. Just yesterday I earned 50 rubles - so help the two of us if I know what it was for. I also sold 300 tons of sugar as easily as smoking a cigar. That is, the sugar wasn't mine, but I got into the act, which was good for 50 more."

This story is my favorite, the funniest. The gag is that Menakhem-Mendl actually changes professions with every new letter home:

"Second, you're absolutely right. The sugar business is not for me... I now have, with God's help, a more suitable line of work. In a word, I'm in finance...

Secondly, finance is strictly for beggars... In short, I've sent finance to the devil and now am in real estate...

Secondly, Yehupetz real estate is for the birds. I'm now in country property."

"Always a Loser," the last chapter is titled, and how else could the stories work? Menakhem-Mendl is not greedy, really, although he is utterly selfish. He's restless and vain, and wants to be a player, a big man, more than a rich man, much more. That's why he always finds himself on the wrong side of the bubble, and why he never stops trying one thing or another. He's a great character, even if he has about a third of the depth of Tevye the Dairyman.

I have neglected the other character in the book's title. Sheyne-Sheyndl deserves her own post. Now there's a character.

The zippy translation is Hillel Halkin's, in the New Yiddish Library edition.

I am willing to believe it. I can believe anything. - Sean Carroll abuses Mark Twain, or vice versa

All right, now I have a real complaint about Remarkable Creatures: its author abuses literature. I didn't actually discover this; mia moglie gets all of the credit.

Here's the epigraph to Remarkable Creatures, or part of it, since it's very long. That's right, this is all about the epigraph:

"What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea--to discover a great thought--an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plow had gone over before... These are the men who have really lived--who have actually comprehended what pleasure is--who have crowded long lifetimes of ecstasy into a single moment."

Plenty more like it in those ellipses. It's the beginning of Chapter 26 of Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain. I ask you, does that sound like Mark Twain? I mean, "many a brain-plow"? Mia moglie looked it over and sagaciously asked what comes after this rather gassy paean to discovery. It's this:

"What is there in Rome for me to see that others have not seen before me? What is there for me to touch that others have not touched? What is there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me before it pass to others? What can I discover?--Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. One charm of travel dies here."

All right, that sounds like Mark Twain. The high-pitched rhetoric is never more than a setup for the deflation. In this case, at least, Twain doesn't literally contradict the idea of the first passage - he just says that it's unavailable to most people, which may merely contradict a major theme of Carroll's book.

In fairness, two points. First, I actually don't care that Carroll's epigraph crushes the irony of the passage. In fact, I'm positively happy. Epigraphs destroy the old context and create a new one; that's how they work.

Second, who am I to complain, since I once believed that there were locomotives in Arab countries that burned mummies for fuel. In fairness to myself, I read this, stated as fact, in at least two places, although I don't remember where, and neither time did the author tell me that his source was Mark Twain, which might have tipped me off. We're still in Innocents Abroad, chapter 58:

"I shall not speak of the railway, for it is like any other railway--I shall only say that the fuel they use for the locomotive is composed of mummies three thousand years old, purchased by the ton or by the graveyard for that purpose, and that sometimes one hears the profane engineer call out pettishly, 'D--n these plebeians, they don't burn worth a cent--pass out a King;'--[Stated to me for a fact. I only tell it as I got it. I am willing to believe it. I can believe any thing.]"

Remarkable Creatures has an excellent bibliography

In a sense, I'm not quite the right reader for Remarkable Creatures. Not because I already have the history of science covered - ho ho, no - but because I am interested enough to read more. A lot of what Sean Carroll is doing - a lot - is summarizing other books that are worth reading. He does it adeptly (although the seams show, sometimes), so for many people his book will be porridge of the desired temperature and consistency.

I'm willing to push a little farther, both in terms of difficulty and length. To stick with Darwin, for example. Carroll's thirty page chapter on Darwin (less, really, including the illustrations and map) gives half of its length to the Beagle voyage, five years of Darwin's life. For Carroll's main theme, the urge to go out and discover something, this makes sense, and I have no argument with his account of the trip. Or only one argument, which is that The Voyage of the Beagle is very much worth reading on its own, entirely accessible, well written, and even funny. It's also five hundred pages, not thirty.

Darwin's Beagle is the only primary text of Carroll's that I have read, so one real benefit to me of his book is the bibliography. I already knew that I wanted to read Henry Walter Bates's account of his eleven years in the Amazon, mostly during the 1850s. But I had not expected Arthur Wallace's The Malay Archipelago (1890) to sound so good. Let's look that one up - how long is it? 544 pages, I see.

How about T. rex and the Crater of Doom (1997) by Walter Alvarez, about the discovery of the Yucatan asteroid impact and the extinction of the dinosaurs? 216 pages; all right, definitely reading that one. Carroll covers this ground in an action-packed eighteen pages. OK, how about Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish - 256 pages, almost a real book (seventeen pages in Carroll, and a must read for fans of Arctic exploration stories). In general, the old books - the ones that belong here on Wuthering Expectations - are long and longer, while more up-to-the-minute science books are rather more petite. Well, who knows when I'll read any of them, but I've made a list.

Two books on the list are by Sean Carroll, so I guess that's some praise. Carroll is not actually a science historian, but rather a leader in a field called evolutionary developmental biology. Endless Forms Most Beautiful (2005) and The Making of the Fittest (2006) will apparently tell me what that means.

Asteroid strikes, jungle expeditions, prehistoric fish, and so on - Sean Carroll's Remarkable Creatures

This will almost be a proper book review.

Sean Carroll's Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origin of Species is a pop science book about naturalists and their expeditions. Each chapter, beginning with Alexander von Humboldt's Amazonian journey of 1799-1804, describes a scientific adventure that led to a major discovery. The earliest expeditions - Humboldt, Darwin on the Beagle, Arthur Wallace on the Malay Archipelago, Henry Bates in the Amazon, Eugène Dubois digging up the "Java Man" - really are like traditional adventures, long, slightly crazy voyages to barely known lands by naturalists who have no idea what they will find, while later chapters are inevitably stitched together from the work of a multitude of researchers, although one or two scientists always keep center stage.

Still, each narrative really is an adventure story, even if a lot more of the work moves into the laboratory. The Roy Chapman Andrews-led 1922 Monogolian Expedition is pretty exciting, with nomadic bandits, tents full of vipers, and the discovery of the first dinosaur egg fossils. But the steps that led Luis and Walter Alvarez to the proof that an asteroid strike ended the Mesozoic era and wiped out (most of) the dinosaurs is at least as thrilling, although it would be harder to turn into a movie.

Carroll's style is conversational and pleasant. The quality of his writing is comparable to that of a good National Geographic article. Each piece is logically structured - I was never confused - and the book as a whole successfully presents an overarching argument.

Remarkable Creatures fits in well between two other recent books. The Great Naturalists (2007) begins with early modern naturalists and ends just after Darwin, just as biology professionalizes. Carroll can't compete with the amazing illustrations in The Great Naturalists, but he's a better storyteller than most of the many contributors to that book, and of course the loss of those stunning paintings is part of the story of how the science changed. And he demonstrates that the era of great expeditions has changed, but not ended. Carroll's last chapter, on the history of the study of Neanderthals, is like a shorter version of Nicholas Wade's equally exciting Before the Dawn, which blends various strands of up-to-date research on human prehistory into a coherent story about the global spread of Homo sapiens.

Many conventional book reviews include some piece of pro forma negative criticism, to show that the reviewer is a serious person, I guess. Let's see. Carroll is inconsistent with the use of first and last names. In the chapter on the Leakey family, for example, it's easy to see why first names are necessary (Louis, Mary, Richard). But why is Darwin "Charles" while Charles Walcott (discoverer of the Burgess Shale fossil deposits, among many other achievements) is "Walcott"? Hmm, why?

I have a more serious - well, not a criticism, exactly - idiosyncratic comment, let's say, that I will save for tomorrow.

Carroll's book is almost propagandistic, for Darwin and natural selection, I suppose, but also - but mostly - for scientific fieldwork, for getting out of the lab and into the world. I understand that Carroll has put together a not-quite-the-same version of the book, Into the Jungle, where the propaganda is directed at high school and university biology students. I found the propaganda to be extremely effective. Really, what could be more satisfying than identifying a previously unknown species, or finding a new fossil. Carroll's book gives stay-at-homes like me an easy way to share some of that excitement. A little too easy! No, that's for tomorrow.

A poem for the first day of spring - We had a drinking party to admire the peonies

Drinking with Friends Amongst the Blooming Peonies

We had a drinking party
To admire the peonies.
I drank cup after cup till
I was drunk. Then to my shame
I heard the flowers whisper,
“What are we doing, blooming
For these old alcoholics?”

Liu Yu Hsi (772-842)

Tr. Kenneth Rexroth, Love and the Turning Year: 100 More Poems from the Chinese

A poem for the last day of winter - Do you know what time it is?

Winter Night

It is late in the Winter night.
I am absorbed in a book
And forget to go to bed.
My wife takes my lamp and says,
“Do you know what time it is?”

Yuan Mei (1716-1797)

Tr. Kenneth Rexroth, Love and the Turning Year: 100 More Poems from the Chinese

A South Seas book collection - like bologna, and Stilton

An antiquarian shows the island travellers his book collection:

"Upon gaining the vault, forth flew a score or two of bats, extinguishing the flambeau, and leaving us in darkness, like Belzoni deserted by his Arabs in the heart of a pyramid. The torch at last relumed, we entered a tomb-like excavation, at every step raising clouds of dust; and at last stood before long rows of musty, mummyish parcels, so dingy-red, and so rolled upon sticks, that they looked like stiff sausages of Bologna; but smelt like some fine old Stilton or Cheshire."

Mardi, Ch. 123

Much of what is wrong with Mardi is on display here ("relumed"), but I don't care. I want to look at those mummyish, sausagey, aromatic scrolls.

Some titles:

King Kroko, and the Fisher Girl
Sonnet on the Last Breath of an Ephemera
Grunts and Groans, by a Mad Boar
Pudding for the Pious
On the Best Gravy for Wild Boar's Meat
Three Recipes for Bottling New Arrack

Hmm, maybe I don't want to look at them. Maybe just those last two.

His books might confuse him - a 17th century cautionary tale about book stinginess

A pious Jew died, leaving many wonderful books, which the heirs sold to strangers. And when the other pious Jews saw this, they were pained that the children should be selling off their father's books.

Now in the same town there was a great sage, and he said to the pious people: "Don't feel so bad that the books are coming into strange hands. Let me tell you why this is happening and how he sinned. That man never wanted to lend a book to anyone. For he said he was an old man and his books might confuse him and he couldn't see very well. 'Others might ruin my books. So I won't lend my books to anyone.' But a man should not act like that. And since he never lent his books to anyone, they are now coming into strange hands."

from The Mayse Book (1602), by Jacob ben Abraham of Mezritch, translated by Joachim Neugroschel, No Star Too Beautiful: An Anthology of Yiddish Stories from 1382 to the Present.

Herman Melville shows how to eat a cuttlefish with gusto.

A little setup: most of Herman Melville's Mardi is a journey from island to island, each with a different king, different society, different whatnot. It's satire, or something. Most of the kings are treated as divinities, but not the gourmand Borabolla, because he is too fat:

"Now, to the fact of his not being rated a demi-god, was perhaps ascribable the circumstance, that Borabolla comported himself with less dignity, than was the wont of their Mardian majesties. And truth to say, to have seen him regaling himself with one of his favorite cuttle-fish, its long snaky arms and feelers instinctively twining round his head as he ate; few intelligent observers would have opined that the individual before them was the sovereign lord of Mondoldo."

My only point, such as it is, is that I don't think this is the correct way to eat a cuttlefish. Is it? And it's being eaten alive, right - "instinctively twining"? So maybe that's the first problem. Anybody else picking up just a hint of H. P. Lovecraft here?

Last week was chaotic for me; this week will probably be the same. So all week on Wuthering Expectations: pointless chaos. Actually, I don't know if I have the energy for chaos. So strike "chaos," but keep "pointless."

The quotation can be found in Chapter XCV. That's right, chapter 95, of 195 total.

You saying how America was a lend of business? Det's how it's suppose to be. - Sholem Aleichem in New York

Sholem Aleichem left Russia in 1905, after witnessing a pogrom from the second story of a hotel. From then on, until his death in 1916, he was a wanderer, to New York and back to Europe, writing and performing his monologues. He and his family ended up in New York City; Sholem Aleichem is buried in Queens.

His relationship with the new world was complicated. New York (and Argentina, and Canada) were refuges for persecuted Jews, and presented great economic opportunities. But in Sholem Aleichem's New York stories, the materialism seems to overpower Jewish culture. He had always satirized greed, but his New York monologues are angrier.

The beginning of "A Business with a Greenhorn: How Mr. Tummler, a Business Broker, 'Loined' a Greenhorn Who Got Merry Wid a Goil for Business. Retold Here in His Own Words":

"You saying how America was a lend of business? Never mine! Det's how it's suppose to be. But a fella getting merry wid a goil for business? Det, you'll poddon me, is mean end doity. Now, I ain't preaching no morality here, but I am telling you it's a fect; when nine-end-ninety procent of grinnhorns in dis country is getting merry for business, it is making me med! End if I am meeting op wid such a kind of grinnhorn, belive me he don't get off dry. You live it to me!"

Then Mr. Tummler tells us, in a few pages, and one burst of words, how he sells a young couple a laundry business, drives them out to re-purchase it at a discount, and then sells it to them again, in the process consuming their savings and destroying their marriage. Perfectly horrible.

Why would he tell this to Sholem Aleichem, or whoever the listener is? Because, like he says above, he is entirely justified. "Because it ain't enough he got his hends on soch a poifect peach to make whoopee wid plus make hay wid her tousend dollar in kesh, but he wants she should woik so he can sit rond wid his pels all day playing pinochle, end son on - because, mister, I know my pipple!"

It's a sort of revenge on the baser instincts of humanity by the basest of them all. In this story, New York is dangerous and brutal, and it is other Jews that are the danger.

The dialect of these passages is an attempt by the translator to render the Yinglish of the original. There's another reason for Sholem Aleichem's anger. America may save Yiddish in some ways (later, terribly, more than anyone could have guessed), but it might also destroy the language.

I'm quoting from Classic Yiddish Stories of S. Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I. L. Peretz (2004), ed. Ken Frieden, tr. Ted Gorelick. Nineteen to the Dozen: Monologues and Bits and Bobs of Other Things has the same story as well as a funnier, somewhat less brutal New York monologue, "Mister Grinn Gotta Job. As Told by Himself and Here Set Down in His Own Words ."

The machines make noise; they make noise - some Yiddish socialist agitprop

So greed is bad, I think we all more or less agree about that. What's a fellow to do about it? Be less greedy, I suppose.

Or reform society from the ground up. Every Yiddish writer I have considered here - to my knowledge, actually, every one I have read - was a socialist of some sort, and many were some variety of Communist. The degree of radicalism varied a lot, but in the face of brutal poverty, an oppressive Russian state, a materialistic America, and so on, all of the writers ended up on one side. Or, to be more precise, all of the literary writers.* There seems to have been a lot more disagreement about Zionism than about the redistribution of property.

H. Leivick's play Shop (1926) is first-rate agitprop by one of the Communist writers. Jewish garment workers in a Lower East Side factory go on strike, and win. The good people more or less get their way, the bad people do not. At the end of Act II, the workers sing the "Internationale."

What keeps the propaganda interesting is exemplified in the songs in Act I: two flighty young things come to work singing "Yes, sir, that's my baby \ No, sir, don't mean maybe," while an older woman sings a traditional Yiddish sewing song. The play's politics are idealized, but the characters and setting have some reality of their own, and are allowed to argue back a little.

Shop works in a lot of dancing, too; it would probably be a lot more enjoyable to see than to read. At first, it's all social dance - workers on break play music and form couples. The play ends, though, this way:

"The pattern of the dance is transformed into something which welds the people with the machines. Severe and inhuman from the start, it changes increasingly into a storm. Hands outstretched and faces like fire. At its greatest heat, as the dance reaches ecstasy, screams and whistles are suddenly heard from the street."

Purely modernist, there. This is after the workers have won the strike, too; a joyous moment turns into something more complicated, or skeptical. Here's the very end:

"The shop is alone. The machines make noise; they make noise."

* This is vaguely related, apparently, to why I haven't come across any early female Yiddish writers. The few women who were fortunate enough to be educated and had the temperament to write did not want to waste their time with literature. Rosa Luxemburg and her kindred spirits were going to change the world.