Three Books in a Bad Season

My father died on June 12th, 2004. He was buried two days later, and that afternoon at my mother's house I started saying a form of the traditional mourner's prayer, Kaddish. Though I'm an ambivalent Jew at best, I would continue saying this for eleven Hebrew months, until May 4th, 2005. Every night I set my alarm clock for 7:15, and every morning that I was at home in New York I walked thirteen lonely blocks down Broadway to a shul at 100th Street and West End Avenue. Obscurely compelled by filial devotion rather than religious faith, of which I have none, or a desire for consola tion, which I disdain, I sat in the back of the room, waiting together with the other mourners for the proper moment to rise and publicly announce our loss.

Services were conducted swiftly and with the minimum of ceremony since people had to go to work on weekdays, but the minutes passed like hours, and over a season the minutes added up to many hours that seemed much longer. Occasionally I glanced at the words in the prayer book, alter nately bored and disgruntled by the endless paeans to deity. And then, as the obliterating grief of June became the sad routine of July and August, I looked elsewhere.

Morning minyan at Ansehe Chesed is held in a small room called the chapel that doubles as the shul library. It holds a substantial but random collection of volumes donated over the years. There are sections on theology and history and one of fiction. In the latter, next to one of my own books, I saw Breakdown and Bereavement by Josef (my father's name) Haim Brenner.

If the title had been on another shelf, I would have scorned it as a cheesy self-help manual, but Brenner, an emigrant to Palestine early in the twentieth century, was the founder of Israeli literature. I knew of him, but I'd never read him. In the middle of services, I plucked the book from the shelf.

Whether it was the author or his title that drew me, I started reading. Brenner's prose, at least in translation, is plodding, though one has to give the man credit: he's cobbling a literary language out of a religious language that had not been a spoken language for millennia. Still, his cardboard characters—many of whose names sound alike, Hefetz and Hanoch and Hamilin and Haim and Menahem—represent rather than embody points of view. Only the dusty pre-modern setting of Israel, without skyscrapers, without highways, without an army, without an occupation, was fascinating, and I almost failed to notice when the time came to hop up and recite Kaddish, after which services ended.

I put Breakdown back on the shelf and the next day picked it up where I left off. Without aiming to, I had established my own ritual that would continue throughout the duration of my mourning: enter the shul, don tallis and tefillen, take prayer book off the stack by the door, and go to the shelves for a daily portion of Brenner's didactic musings on emancipation, Zionism, and the profound inability of flawed and anxious human beings to realize their ideals. The regulars at morning minyan came to expect this behavior, and generally left me a clear path to the fiction area. They were a curious bunch. Besides a core of perennial worshippers, Ansehe Chesed tends to have about five mourners at any given time. Some come daily throughout their eleven months and some less often, while others show up on the Yahrtzeit or anniversary of a death. We come for ourselves and our lost loved ones and each other, since ten people are required for a minyan. I came for all these reasons, but I also came for the books.

Critically speaking, Brenner is more interesting historically, as a precur sor of Amos Oz and Meir Shalev, than artistically. Only the intense ironies of the social situations he describes ring today. One young woman, having a hard time making do in Jerusalem, thinks to herself, "If she didn't get into the Institute she would either go to Jaffa or to Cairo." And then there's the terrible destiny out of Brenner's biography: he was killed in a pogrom in Jaffa in 1921.

Two to five pages a day is not an optimum way to read a novel—characters are forgotten, scenes get muddled in the mind, especially if one's mind is stunned by sorrow—but the pace suited me. "Slowtime," as a friend called it, provided the opposite sensation to the usual rush of vicarious experience that comes from reading a novel straight from beginning to end. Reading piecemeal, however, eased me back from morbid obsession to a truce with the quotidian.

Outside of shul, on vacation for the summer, I dwelled constantly on the idea that my father's death grew ever more distant and my own death invisibly approached. If both those realities were intolerable, I needed the ongoingness of a fictional universe, occurring forever on paper. In some way that I'm not inclined to analyze further, Breakdown and Bereavement assuaged my own bereavement and perhaps averted my own breakdown during that miserable year. As others find sustenance in prayer, I found it in fiction, so the day I finished Breakdown, sometime in the fall, I knew that I needed another book, immediately.

My eyes roved down the shelves. Below Brenner were Abraham Cahan, David Grossman and Dara Horn, Bernard Malamud, a couple of Roths, and then two initialed Singers. At the time, newspapers and magazines were filled with celebrations of the centennial of I. B. Singer's birth. I admire Singer, especially his early mystical stories about demons and the wonderfully dark and raw Shadows on the Hudson, but his latter stories of sex in the Yiddish-speaking postwar city leave me cold. His brother, I. J., however, was another matter. Years earlier I'd read Yoshe Kalb, a burning exploration of faith and sin, and there was his supposed masterpiece, The Brothers Ashkenazi.

Though published in 1936, Singer's Brothers is better considered a nineteenth-century novel. It follows the eponymous twins, Simha Meir, a brilliant manipulator who exploits his learning to advance in business, and the cheerful, good-natured Jacob (my father's middle name) Bunem, though, ultimately, a broader portrait of urban Jewish life emerges in the novel. New technology and access to capital is changing the city of Lodz from a backwater into an industrial powerhouse, complete with revolution ary fervor among the workers. Unlike Brenner's torpid narrative, Singer's panorama is compulsively readable, and sometimes I was tempted to linger in the comfortable chapel after services to see what was going to happen next. Of course, I could have taken the book home with me, but I preferred my daily encounter with the Ashkenazis just prior to recitation of Kaddish, like the reader of a serial magazine eagerly awaiting the next installment.

Oh what bad news the chapters contained! Never mind the external fac tors: World War and Revolution and the Russian conquest of Poland (also chronicled in Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry). Singer's world is cracking under the internal stresses of modernity. Religion is losing its authority. And then, the poignant knowledge a contemporary reader brings to the story: just as Brenner's life was cut short by distinctly Jewish tragedy, so the universe of the Ashkenazis was to be incinerated a few years later in the Holocaust, which Singer himself escaped when he moved to New York, though he died in 1944 of a heart attack at age fifty.

By now it was late winter and I was an old-timer in the ways of Kad dish. Some of the other mourners like Alan Mintz, a scholar of Hebrew literature whose mother had died the previous October, departed morn ing minyan as their Kaddishes concluded. Some like J. F. Shaw, a doctor whose mother died in August, joined the idiosyncratic community. Ruth, a sweet, white-haired woman, was a month from finishing Kaddish for her father when her mother died, so she remained. Barring any similar personal catastrophe, my Kaddish was coming to an end and I had enough time for one more book. Again, I scanned the shelves. Having read one proto-Israeli novel from the Hebrew and one grand Eastern European novel from the Yiddish, the remaining point of the triangle of twentieth century Jewish life was obviously to be found in an American book—no translation necessary. Again, I took the opportunity to read somethin that I'd overlooked by a familiar author. Back up the shelves to the left of Brenner. There was Saul Bellow's first novel.

Dangling Man is an existential novel presented through diary entries. The protagonist, Joseph (did I unconsciously seek out these echoes of my father or were they seeking me?), is awaiting a call to military service dur ing World War II. In the meantime, he attends a boozy party and mulls over the meaning(lessness) of life. Innumerable lines, from "You don't have to know anything to be dead," to "human might is too small to pit against the unsolvables," spoke to my condition. Yet if Bellow's mature work is, as Stanley Crouch once said, "philosophy made dramatic," Dangling Man has the philosophy without the drama. Nor does it display the jazzy vernacular of Bellow's later books that transformed all subsequent literature of any ethnicity and earned him, like I. J. Singer's less-talented younger brother, the Nobel Prize.

I must have read a score of other books during this past year, some for leisure, some for review, as well as a mountain of student manuscripts, but it was the long-term slowtime reading of Brenner, Singer, and Bellow that sticks with me.

Bellow himself died soon after I started reading him, and I thought about how he'd lived to attain personal and professional fulfillment and how the other two writers' lives and careers were truncated. What would have happened if the span of their transits had been reversed? My guess is that Brenner would not have become the Dostoevskian writer he aspired to be, that I. J. Singer might have eclipsed LB., and that I'd not be reading Dangling Man if Bellow had been hit by a streetcar in Chicago in 1950. Death and time, that's what Kaddish speaks to.