Lamed Shapiro, born in 1878 in Rzhyshchiv, in Ukraine, who emigrated to the United States in 1906, where he died in 1948, published in that country two remarkable books: Le Royaume Juif (The Jewish Kingdom)1 in 1919, and New-Yorkaises (New York Women)2 in 1931. The first contains several stories written in reaction to the Kishinev pogrom of 1903; several stories in the second deal with the lives of Jews in New York. To set these two books side by side — and in particular by relying on the most significant story in each of them, “The Cross,” 1909, and “Doc,” 1930 — helps us better see the persistence of Lamed Shapiro’s preoccupations and of his gaze upon society, upon man, upon the Jews, and how they evolved. The author himself invites this comparison, moreover, by quoting “The Cross” within “Doc.” The protagonists of both stories have also each studied medicine. Likewise, the hero of “The Cross”3 and Sadie, Doc’s wife, both left the small town of their childhood at the age of twelve. Lamed Shapiro’s biography supplies a few elements for reading him, but not enough. One must also take into account that in the time separating the two books the world had changed — the tsarist empire had collapsed, the revolution had taken place, as had the First World War — but so too had the author, who had aged and worn himself out in his wanderings and his experiences. Even so, fiction is neither autobiography nor documentary.
The pogroms. The seven stories that make up the French publication of Le Royaume Juif describe the pogroms with a force and a violence that compel the reader to “see and to know,” up to the very limits of the bearable, without letting himself be deflected by aestheticism, emotion, fascination or voyeurism, or by indoctrination. Placed as close as possible to the event, yet not in the position of a spectator, the reader is thus able to keep his freedom of thought and his lucidity, while at the same time undergoing, in his turn, the violence of the event. In so doing, the book confronts us with the question of the limits of the human, those of barbarity enacted, of the unbearable. That is why it is, alas, always relevant.
The pogroms described are all alike — there is no hierarchy within horror — and their unfolding is dreadfully predictable, stereotyped. Lamed Shapiro shows the pogromists — brutish, perverse, greedy, violent, cruel — as much as the whole range of the Jews’ reactions, and the effects of this violence upon them and their children. They are victims, of course, absolutely, but not only that. They exist, with their qualities, their flaws, their limitations, often owing to their social and religious references. Nor are they guilty either — they could not prevent the pogroms — but they are responsible for their reactions. In the first story, “On Alert,” they show themselves in a fatalistic and frozen relation to History and its repetitions.
In “The Kiss,” excess violence shatters the boundary between outside and inside, between event and body, between public history and personal history. The initial fear quickly gives way to a reaction welling up from the deepest part of the being, and the victim destined for torment, beyond all will, all consciousness, sinks his teeth into the pogromist’s foot. The more the blows strip his body of any human appearance, the more his teeth acquire an autonomous power, becoming pure bite. The boundary that distinguishes their two bodies is annulled, as is the one that separates the living from the dead. The pogromist slowly agonizes beneath the dead man’s teeth.
In “Pour Out Thy Wrath” the pogrom destroys the family: the wife has been raped before her husband’s eyes, the child no longer recognizes his father, mad with hatred against her and with grief, nor his mother, who begs the child to kill her.
In “The Cross” a child watches his parents transform radically under the effect of violence. They become strangers to him, and he can no longer preserve his love for them, which turns into hatred. Later, as a young man, he witnesses the rape and the massacre of his mother. He cannot bear to see her eye, the only trace of the human left in her now-shapeless body, and he finishes her off, in an act in which compassion and hatred mingle indistinguishably. The excess of violence, suffered and enacted, shatters his sense of identity and coherence; the pogromist’s murderous will penetrates into him and, as if in a sacrificial task he cannot escape, he inflicts upon his sweetheart what the pogromist did to his mother. He is henceforth outside time, ageless, and outside any place and any belonging. He leaves for the United States, and a new cycle can then be set in motion, until he can be reborn, other, no longer in the grip of the past, having forgotten nothing of it, ready for the return and for the struggle4.
In “In the Dead Town,” a little girl who lives with her grandfather, the keeper of a cemetery, is in permanent and exclusive communication with the souls of the dead. She has completely forgotten the pogrom that killed her parents before her very eyes. One day this massive repression lifts and, for the first time since the traumatic event, she cries out “Mama.” At the same moment, she recognizes in the “toy-men” the real men, like the murderers of her parents.
In “The Jewish Kingdom,” the rabbi’s son, observing God’s powerlessness in the face of the pogrom, loses his faith, and from then on becomes a stranger in his father’s eyes. He leaves the community, delivers antisemitic speeches, out of a hatred not of the executioners but of the victims — his parents and their community, who have betrayed the boundless trust he had placed in them. But the surge of antisemitic hatred destroys all humanity. The community’s ritual slaughterer, horrified by the violence he had needed to defend his life against the brutes, hurls himself in turn into the void into which he cast them. The rabbi’s son will be killed in a pogrom.
Shalamov’s exacting remark applies to this book: “It is in our power and our duty to write a story that has the evidentiary force of a document. It is enough for the author to explore his material by paying with his whole person, not only with his mind, not only with his heart, but with every pore, every fiber of his being.”5 Lamed Shapiro, in this book and in his life, shows that the pogrom does not merely destroy, does not merely kill, but transforms beings, drives them to the limits of the human, makes them strangers to themselves and to others. Robert Antelme, barely escaped from Dachau, wrote on June 21, 1945: “All my friends overwhelm me, with a satisfaction full of kindness, with my resemblance to myself, and it seems to me that I am living The Picture of Dorian Gray in reverse. The extraordinary adventure has befallen me of being able to prefer myself other… I am still left at times with too keen a feeling of horror, but no doubt all that will soon be neutralized. Then perhaps I will accept the resemblance to myself because I will know that it is not.”6 Lamed Shapiro does not merely describe the pogrom; he forces the reader to feel a portion of its violence, however slight, failing which the knowledge transmitted would be abstract and of very little use. He also asks himself about what becomes of the survivors: what do they make of such a trauma in their life choices, in their acts, in their sense of identity, in their gaze upon the world and upon man, and what do they transmit of it? How do their children recognize and assume the rupture that the pogroms provoked in their family, social, and cultural continuity, but also in the very being of their parents or grandparents? Do they choose rupture — to flee into the greatest distance, the greatest difference — or vengeance, self-hatred and hatred of man, fidelity to their history and their origin?
The significant elements of “The Cross” and of “Doc”
The relation to the other.
In New York there exists a Jewish community, but the social differences within it are stark. Some dream of escaping misery and humiliation; others give up on it; some strive to integrate into the American way of life, through dress, through their relation to money, through their trade or their leisure; others remain, out of fidelity or — exhausted, broken — out of helplessness within their status and their community of origin. Borrowing has become a generalized practice, but one with varied meanings. Joe, Doc’s brother-in-law, regularly asks him, without success, for a few hundred dollars. This money would allow him to escape the sordid sweatshop where he is overexploited. These requests also express his jealousy of Doc’s success. In so doing, he embodies the traditional figure of the schnorrer, but one who has lost his energy, his inventiveness, his fancy and his humor. For his old friend Isy, the ritual request, at every meeting, for five dollars appears more like a greeting, the preservation of a traditional way of life, the demonstration that the old bonds still exist. For the young, the requests, ritual too, and satisfied, concern small sums, leave no feeling of debt, are part of the new way of life. They recreate a superficial solidarity, organized around the circulation of money and no longer, as before, around religious practices in an environment of dangerous antisemitism. In so doing, they seek to set themselves apart as much from the Jews who have remained in misery as from those at the bottom of the social ladder, the Blacks. But very rare are those for whom the gift and the gratuitous gesture keep their full value, like Dolores, the prostitute of another story, or who wish to remain free of all debt, like the hero of “The Cross.”
In “The Cross,” the characters question themselves about relation and about the other, in doubt and ambivalence. In New York, a disenchanted indifference dominates: what good is it to ask oneself anything? Relations there are slack, lightly invested, whether it be a matter of barroom acquaintance, of friendship, or of love. But the deep cause of this mediocrity, of this cramped life, is perhaps the excess of suffering and misfortune that they themselves or their families underwent, and the stubborn will simply to live, and to protect themselves as much as possible from the return of murderous ordeals.
Comradeship and love.
In “The Cross,” neither love nor friendship can exist in this time of barbarity. The hero kills the woman he loved, his revolutionary comrade, with the same violence the pogromist used that very day against his mother. But the force of this violence is equal to that of the love he bore her. His mother’s death opens an abyss of distress, which leads to a radical questioning of his earlier life choices and his plans, from which he draws the consequences, however painful and risky they may be. In New York, in boredom and monotony, married life appears at first as a sexual, social, and economic necessity, a habit. The death of Doc’s wife makes him sad, but life goes on, in its daily banality. It takes a practiced eye to spot the fracture and the distress that show themselves in the brief attempt to communicate with the dead woman.
Misunderstandings, radical and everyday.
In the intense and dangerous context of the pogroms, individuals can evolve quickly, act in radical rupture with what they were and what they had been doing until then, become strangers to others, sometimes to themselves. Thus, after having fought in a struggle to the death against the pogromists, having been forced to witness the barbaric torture inflicted upon his mother, after having killed her to cut short her suffering, the hero of “The Cross” throws himself into the pogrom, fighting alternately against the Jews and against the pogromists. In New York, Lamed Shapiro shows no significant differences between individuals. All of them remain mediocre, in a universe, social or interior, without ideal and without force. The transformations are moderate, without rupture.
What is man made of?
When Doc complains of abdominal pains, the surgeon says (p. 140): “Let’s open him up and take a look.” This curiosity recalls that of Beylke, the little daughter of the cemetery keeper, who wondered what internal mechanism made the toy-men move. Likewise, Doc, in his disturbance, is described as a clock out of order and made of an unhealthy substance, the “sickly human nature” (p. 176).
Lamed Shapiro evokes the muses of the young New York intellectuals, without attachments, and notes that they are very different from the comrades of before — courageous and determined, and so rigidly shut up in their political project that they had become insensitive to the suffering of others — or from the anarchist of the communist colonies, the living communities. Likewise, Sadie appears quite cramped, timorous and fragile, in comparison with the mother of the hero of “The Cross,” as hard on him as on herself, who after the death of her husband shut herself up in a silence that only the extreme torture she underwent finally broke down, when she let slip: “Oh! My son.”
Violence is omnipresent in The Cross, as in the whole of Le Royaume Juif. The barbaric and criminal violence of the pogrom constitutes its heart, its starting point, its object. In New York, violence exists, of course, and it would have been surprising had Lamed Shapiro not been sensitive to it and not made it a major element of his book. It is of course the violence of capitalist exploitation and of miserable and merciless living and working conditions: the unsanitariness of dwellings, or the workplace accidents that wear down and ruin one’s health. But while the violence of individuals keeps the trace of that of Le Royaume Juif, it has become simulacrum. From the very first day, Joe threatens Doc, should he not give him the pecuniary advantages to which his position as “brother-in-law” entitles him: “I can be a bad boy.” Over time, the threat will never be carried out, and this phrase will certainly continue to be uttered, but as a formula of greeting. By contrast, another simulacrum appears disturbing, but it does not concern the Jews: at Coney Island, a fairground booth game offers the chance to try to shoot a rifle at a black man’s head. Everything here, moreover, is false, simulacrum. Thus, the revolutionary Socialists speak a neo-Russian; whereas the language of the real Russians appears incomprehensible. Likewise, when Doc, Sadie, and Joe go to Coney Island: “we went to hell,” they say, a degraded recollection of the pogroms. There they make “the crossing of the desert” on two dromedaries, Aron and Moses. The latter still shows a faint impulse of revolt — he refuses to set Doc down after the little paid ride and stops only under the repeated blows of the owner — something that men no longer do. The violence of the surgeon, who proposes to open up Doc’s belly, for his own good, recalls in a minor key that of the pogromists. But Doc is not fooled, and refuses to “let himself be carved up.” Yet in New York, in the last resort, it is not, as in Russia, the pogromists or the antisemitic tsarist army who triumph, but the antiseptic voice of the American “demon,” the voice made audible by the radio, the last voice Doc will hear, at the moment of dying, and which covers over the noise of the real truck that comes at daybreak to deliver the milk cans.
Against whom should one turn one’s revolt and one’s struggle? In “The Cross,” the young man turns it first against his mother, in the ambivalence of love and hatred, then, in the greatest distress, against all — pogromists and Jews — as if the latter were responsible for the pogrom or, as Lamed Shapiro wrote, because barbarity is in everyone7, executioners and victims, and no one is innocent; against the beloved young woman and, in the end, against himself, on the brink of suicide. In New York, the question does not arise, so much does passive suffering dominate. Yet violence is indeed there, and everyone knows it: (NY, p. 182): “Every natural death is a violent death, a murder,” Doc cries out.
Death, the mystery. In “The Cross,” death is associated with barbarity but also with the most intense moment of the relation to the other and to oneself. In “Doc,” it is the one moment of intimacy in a lifetime, but shared with the angel of death. In his last instant, it is the end of the song “you will be the queen of the world and my eternal companion” that Doc hears on the radio.
Limits and Boundaries
In “The Jewish Kingdom,” no limit is respected and barbaric violence breaks them all, those of the house as much as those of the body, or those that separate the living from the dead, parents from children, childhood from old age. In “Doc,” the characters have crossed, like every immigrant, many boundaries and strive, or dream, to continue their journey — to reach the neighboring district, or to be able at last to leave the infernal sweatshop or the cellar bookshop — toward a better social position and the respect associated with it, in default of happiness. But in the meantime they live in miserable dwellings, where all intimacy, all private space, is impossible. But what intimacy, what characteristic belonging to oneself alone, would there be to defend? Unlike Beylke, the cemetery keeper’s little daughter, Doc cannot manage to enter into communication with his beloved dead: the boundary separating the living from the dead is henceforth impassable. The characters of Le Royaume Juif, confronted with exceptional violence, truly went out of themselves, became figures of legend. Those of New-Yorkaises remain shut up in their mediocrity. But is this not precisely the lasting effect of the old, insurmountable trauma — are they not, in reality as in the book, the characters of Le Royaume Juif or their descendants?
No one truly leaves his restricted space, and if Doc treats himself to a great voyage — a recollection of the lustral one in which the young man of “The Cross” crossed the United States — he does so by streetcar.
In New York, it seems that in the generalized disenchantment, all difference fades — Doc has negroid lips — and only social success differentiates individuals, groups, the present from the past, the true from the false, what has existed from what has not existed. Izi, Doc’s friend, declares to him: “Everything is sand and scatters like sand… as if it had never existed.” Doc asserts that “after all, humans, animals — what difference does it make?”, and Lamed Shapiro makes the opposites meet: “spring still floated over the city, pouring into Benny’s heart a poison with the savor of life, with the savor of death.” The United States seems very far from Russia. Yet Lamed Shapiro describes the crowd thronging Coney Island in terms close to those with which he described, in Le Royaume Juif, the movements of panic and struggle of the pogrom. The radical difference there lies not so much between the murderer and the victim as between the one who wants and is able to kill and the one for whom such an act, even performed to defend his life against the one who wants to kill him, is absolutely unbearable — the one for whom, from then on, life loses all meaning and all value. In New York, everything seems possible, not because transgression is permitted but because there are no longer any commandments, and the Torah, become a luxurious and unreadable bibliophile’s object, has been replaced by the thousands of books that Joe piles up in his cellar bookshop, whose value he does not know, which he cannot read, and which, going blind, he can no longer see.
Time
In Le Royaume Juif, traumatic violence overturns time, produces telescoping and dilation (“a year passes, then ten, a hundred”), an acceleration toward death and collective catastrophe or, on the contrary, contributes to the resolution of the shackles of the past and to the opening of a new period, turned toward hope and the future. Time is punctuated by the major events that are the pogroms or the ruptures with respect to family or religion. In New York, nothing happens (“You buy a ticket to Mars, and you come back to the same place”) apart from a few superficial transformations and events, at first sight, and Doc remains a child all his life. Time passes nonetheless, the bananas rot before they have ripened, bodies show their aging, the Russian revolution, and the hopes the Jews had placed in it, seem very far off. The Jews Americanize themselves, or strive to do so, change their names (Doc’s cleaning woman is now called Robin — the nightingale — in place, perhaps, of Rabin). The hope of building a new Vilna there is dead and Yiddish heads toward its decline. Here, no assumed rupture, but the deterioration of bonds, of memory, of thought, without any worthy project, for nothing more is expected of the future. Life choices, as different as they may be, appear, with the passing of time, to be equivalent, in disenchantment and the feeling of failure. This observation does not prevent the young intellectuals, who claim to make a clean slate of the past — but the past has been destroyed, has become inaccessible — or who dare not assume their heritage, from proclaiming that the world begins with them. For all of them, the past seems distant and the origin forgotten, the future appears blurred and the ambitions mediocre. Doc has no children, it is beyond his strength, he says, and we know nothing of his parents or his grandparents. Isy, to be sure, has a wife and children, but he knows them very little. Parents do not recognize themselves in their children, and vice versa. In “The Cross,” the relations between parents and children are marked by the violence of the context as much as by family specificities. The young man lost his father in early childhood, and the mourning into which his mother shut herself caused a rupture in the relationship between them, to which the pogrom will put an end.
Does preserving the trace of the event, of the past, always matter? The young man of “The Cross,” coming out of his faint, discovers on his forehead a cross that the pogromist has carved with a knife. His first impulse is to remove it, along with the skin that bears it. He finally decides to keep it and not to hide this trace of the event, which marks his radical strangeness and his exteriority to society. In New York, very little of the past remains, as if it had never existed, like the emigrants who never again gave any news of themselves, “the vanished men.” Forgetting is accepted: “Who can remember everyone?” Isy asserts. Yet Lamed Shapiro counterbalances this pessimistic view of the forgetting of the past by showing the discreet signs of its traces in the present, between his two books. Thus, at Coney Island, visitors can see “an African savage” with an eye in the middle of his forehead, a recollection of “The Cross.” The hero of that story, forced to see his mother tortured, wants to become blind. This will be Joe’s fate.
The split between words and reality
The distress is the same, in each country, in each era. In New York, Doc asks himself “what does it mean: ‘one lives,’ ‘over there,’ ‘here’?” But its origin is perhaps the barbarity of the pogroms. The hero of “The Cross,” facing his tortured mother, strives to drain all meaning from the unbearable reality, to break it down into innumerable elements so simple that he has no more reason to be devastated by them: “What is a hair? And two? And a tuft? Of course, when one breaks bones they crack. But when one breaks sticks, dry wood too, that is a natural phenomenon. What are two old teats. Flesh, tissue. It is made up of certain elements, ask a chemist.” Likewise, in his little revolutionary group: “we called the pogroms counter-revolution.” But in New York too, at the moment he dies, Doc hears on the radio a Russian song that evokes the peasant women carrying the milk cans, and which covers over the noise of the milk truck delivering its bottles. And, in the end, it is the mechanical voice of the announcer, the “American demon,” that alone will occupy the sound field.
In conclusion
There are, to be sure, differences between the two books, in their themes, their narratives, their characters, their preoccupations and their style, but also numerous points in common and an evident continuity. Lamed Shapiro remains the same, and his gaze upon the world and upon men, upon the permanence of violence and of misfortune, has not fundamentally changed. In it he bears witness to his fidelity to the destiny of the Jews of Europe. “The Cross” and “Doc” are documents as much as fictions. In them mingle the objective and the subjective gaze upon reality, as well as his insistent questioning of his own life: have I been right to emigrate? must I feel shame and guilt for my present life and its mediocrity, for having abandoned over there the struggle, the living and the dead? Have emigration and the change of era brought about a rupture between past and present, and if so is that rupture irreversible, and the past henceforth inaccessible? What are its components, and its consequences? It is often well after it has formed that rupture shows its presence and its depth, on the occasion of an event, a discussion, an encounter, a misunderstanding, and that the illusion of belonging to the same community, of sharing the same references, the same markers of identity, with others as much as with oneself, is torn apart. But where and when did the rupture between the present and the past, between the one and the others, between the self and itself, take place? The trauma — of the pogrom, of immigration, of miserable living conditions — does not explain everything. Family ruptures — crises or bereavements — ideological, political, also play their part, and it is important to distinguish them and to assess their respective roles.
The characters of “The Cross” are victims or exemplary heroes. Those of “Doc” are, like the author, the survivors of the pogroms and of the yiddishland, and their descendants. We can see in them as much the radical difference as the permanence of their history and of their identity, more or less consciously assumed. The questions posed by Lamed Shapiro in “Doc” concern all those, individuals or groups, who have gone through major traumatic ordeals, as well as their descendants: the various ways of situating oneself in relation to the past, the present, and the future, the conscious and unconscious reasons for their life choices, what they transmit and will transmit to their children, what those children will make of it.
P.S. This text concerns continuity and rupture and the long-term effects of the traumatic event. It is part of an old and unfinished reflection. I take the liberty of referring the reader, should these questions interest him, to the following articles and books: “Dans l’après-coup de l’événement” (“In the Aftermath of the Event”), Plurielles no. 9 (2004); “Passé et présent, idéal et réalité” (“Past and Present, Ideal and Reality”), Plurielles no. 10 (2005); “Trois jours et un enfant, d’Abraham B. Yehoshoua” (“Three Days and a Child, by Abraham B. Yehoshua”), Plurielles no. 10 (2005); “Entre tradition et subversion, la contradiction du Roi des schnorrers” (“Between Tradition and Subversion, the Contradiction of The King of Schnorrers”), Plurielles no. 10 (id.); “Partir, penser, rêver” (“To Leave, to Think, to Dream”), Plurielles no. 12 (2007); “Variations sur la frontière, avec Iouri Olecha et Georges Orwell” (“Variations on the Border, with Yuri Olesha and George Orwell”), Plurielles no. 14 (2009); “Etre fils, être père dans la Shoah et après” (“Being a Son, Being a Father in the Shoah and After”), Plurielles no. 15 (2010); Héritiers de l’exil et de la Shoah (Heirs of Exile and of the Shoah) (in collaboration with Hélène Oppenheim-Gluckman), Eres 2006; “Lamed Shapiro. Le Royaume juif,” in Littérature et expérience limite (Literature and Limit-Experience), Paris, Ed. Campagne-Première, 2007.
Notes
Lamed Shapiro, Le Royaume juif, Paris, Le Seuil, 1987, reprinted in Rachel Ertel, Royaumes juifs. Trésors de la littérature yiddish, vol. 2, Paris, Robert Laffont, coll. “Bouquins,” 2009. [Shapiro’s pogrom stories are collected in English as The Cross and Other Jewish Stories, New Haven, Yale University Press.]↩︎
Lamed Shapiro, New-Yorkaises, Paris, Julliard, 1993.↩︎
He is never named by Lamed Shapiro.↩︎
“And I, a newborn […] a generation of iron will build what we have let be destroyed.”↩︎
Varlam Shalamov, Tout ou rien (All or Nothing), Lagrasse, Verdier, 1993, p. 31.↩︎
Dyonis Mascolo, Autour d’un effort de mémoire. Sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (Around an Effort of Memory: On a Letter from Robert Antelme), Maurice Nadeau, 1987, p. 95.↩︎
“Hitler… as in a distorting mirror, sent back to me a monstrous figure, my own,” quoted in the preface to Le Royaume juif.↩︎