During the first fifteen years following World War II, the Holocaust did not figure as a major theme in serious works of Israeli literary art. (The great exception lay in the epic poetry of Uri Zvi Greenberg.) This absence, however, is not as surprising as it might appear. The young writers belonging to the group often called the Palmakh Generation were thrust to the forefront on the strength of the voice they gave to the War of Independence and the establishment of the new state. It was, indeed, in the death and sacrifice that accompanied the struggle for new national life that they located their response to the destruction of European Jewry. But their silence also bespoke a deep sense of shame over the spectacle of Jews going to death “like sheep to the slaughter,” and, because of their socialist-Zionist training, a lack of connection to the Jews of the Diaspora.

This disengagement was later jarred by the Eichmann trial, and a number of writers belonging to the Palmakh Generation—Hayim Gouri, Hanoch Bartov, Yehuda Amichai, Yoram Kaniuk—went on to write interesting works which grappled with the Holocaust, or at least with the unsettling challenges it presented to their identities. In the 60’s and 70’s younger writers like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua submitted the mystique of Israeli heroism to a withering critique, but the Holocaust still remained peripheral to their writing. For a serious engagement of these issues one has to look to the work not of Israeli-born writers but of a small group of survivors: the fiction of Aharon Appelfeld and the poetry of Abba Kovner and Dan Pagis.

In light of this background, the recent appearance in English of David Grossman’s novel See Under: “Love”1 must be counted as something of an event. Grossman, whose Yellow Wind, a journalistic account of a journey through the West Bank on the eve of the Palestinian uprising, was published here last year, is thirty-five years old and Israeli-born; he is the author as well of two earlier novels and a number of children’s stories. He belongs to what might be called a third generation of Israeli writers, those who came of age after the Yom Kippur War in 1973. His new novel is the first important piece of writing on the Holocaust to be produced by this younger group, and quite apart from its extraordinary literary qualities, it may have things to tell us about a generation which grew up not only at a different remove from those events but also within a society very different from the one that shaped earlier writers.

See Under: “Love” commands attention on its own because of the very large ambitions which are most evident in the series of big ideas it seeks to float aloft. These ideas tend toward the metaphysical: can the effects of the Holocaust on survivors and their children be undone? Can love survive under conditions of adversity? Is it possible so to be transformed as to see the world through the intelligence of another? Can the past be altered by being retold? Is evil susceptible to the powers of art?

The last is the crux of Grossman’s undertaking. Throughout all of the stories-within-stories and multiple frames of reference in this complex and complicated work, one challenge is presented again and again, and it has to do with the attempt of the imagination—by which Grossman means the storytelling faculty of invention—to redeem the suffering of the past by, in a sense, rewriting it. The audacity of this challenge is patent, and one might be tempted to dismiss it out of hand were it not for Grossman’s genuine achievement and the many pleasures afforded in the reading. That in the end the attempt is impossible perhaps goes without saying

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See Under: “Love” is made up of four discrete sections which, though interconnected, tell separate stories. There is a puzzle quality here. The connections are not always obvious, and, in the often annoying manner of postmodernist fables, the reader is obliged to participate in the game by searching for elusive correlations. Grossman’s most daring move is to make the difference among the stories hinge on style. Each of the four sections is written (à la Joyce in Ulysses) in a radically different Hebrew style, ranging from the stilted locutions of the 19th-century Haskalah (“Enlightenment”) to the spare pseudo-precision of modern scientific description. At times the chosen style is of a piece with the story being told, at other times ironically at odds with it—the point being that style is not merely surface texture but a mode of perceiving the world.

Grossman’s manipulation of these varieties of discourse is brilliant, though it often leaves the reader groping for a stable point of literary and even moral reference behind, or within, the play of voices. In any case, the emphasis on style, and on features of style highly peculiar to the history of modern Hebrew, poses significant problems of translation. Happily, Betsy Rosenberg has met these problems with flair and a virtuoso range of effects; in order to suggest the texture of the original, she has also wisely chosen to leave in her text bits and pieces of Hebrew and Yiddish.

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The first section of See Under: “Love” is the most accessible, and in it the ratio of aspiration to achievement is the most satisfying. The section is named for Momik (a diminutive of Shlomo), the nine-year-old only child of two survivors, Gisella and Tuvia Neuman; the story, set in the mid-50’s, takes place over a period of five months in an immigrant neighborhood in Jerusalem. It is told from the perspective of Momik himself, a perspective captured not only in the lilt of childhood speech with its run-on sentences but also in the immigrant inflections of a child who speaks Yiddish at home and Hebrew at school.

Like many survivors, the Neumans say very little about their ordeal during the war. Momik knows that his life is different in a thousand ways from that of other children—he is not encouraged to have friends, he is not allowed to go on an overnight class trip, his father never says more than a few words to him—and he further knows that all these differences are the consequences of what happened Over There (as his parents call it). Yet because of his parents’ silence, precisely that which would explain his life is kept from him.

Being a boy of methodical intelligence and adventuresome spirit, Momik treats this blank as a mystery to be solved, or (as he quotes Sherlock Holmes), “what one man invents another can discover.” Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Emile and the Detectives are in fact just some of the boyhood reading through which Momik absorbs his terms for understanding the world. For Grossman, the fantasies expressed in juvenile adventure literature are not merely a passing point of reference; here and in the third and fourth sections of the novel they become the central vehicle for weightier explorations of the redemptive capacities of art.

The literature of childhood adventure is embodied here and later in the novel in the figure of Anshel Wasserman, Momik’s senile and demented great uncle. At the beginning of the century Wasserman had been famous as the author of an immensely popular series of adventure tales, written in Hebrew and translated into many European languages. Now, reduced by his experiences in the Nazi camps to mumbling the same few incomprehensible words, Wasserman has suddenly been deposited with the Neumans, and is put in Momik’s charge. It is Wasserman’s arrival that sets off Momik’s quest to solve the mystery of his parents’ life by keeping secret “spy notebooks” in which he records clues unwittingly dropped by grown-ups—including the words his father screams in sleep at night—about life Over There. The passages reproducing his decodings of this mystery derive their skewed pathos from the childish, almost comical innocence of Momik’s approach to the macabre:

. . . there was a war in that kingdom, and Papa was the Emperor and also the chief warrior, a commando fighter. One of his friends (his lieutenant?) was called Sondar. . . . They all lived in a big camp with a complicated name. . . . Also there were some trains around, but that part isn’t clear. . . . And there were also these big campaigns in Papa’s kingdom called Aktions, and sometimes (probably to make people feel proud) they would have really incredible parades, like we have on Independence Day. Left, right, left, right, Papa screams in his sleep. . . .

Like the heroes of all good mystery stories, Momik seeks not only to put together the pieces of the puzzle but also to save the hapless victims of evil: “Who else can save Mama and Papa from their fears and silences and krechtzes?” His rescue efforts revolve around the elliptical allusions his parents have often made to something called the Nazi Beast, which he imagines literally as an actual creature imprisoning his parents. He sets out “to find the Beast and tame it and make it good, and persuade it to change its ways and stop torturing people and get it to tell him what happened Over There and what it did to those people.” But beyond this self-appointed mission, which takes the practical form of keeping a menagerie of captive animals in his basement, there is the sad fact that the person Momik most needs to rescue is himself, and the inevitable failure of his campaign leads to something more than a loss of innocence. It is too much for him; he collapses, defeated by the Beast.

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The second section of See Under: “Love” is titled “Bruno,” for the Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, and is the most difficult. The real Schulz was shot by a Gestapo officer on the streets of the Jewish quarter in his native Drohobycz, Poland in November 1942. In Grossman’s telling, however, he does not die; escaping to Danzig, he jumps into the sea, and instead of drowning he is embraced by the ocean and becomes a fish, developing fins and gills and learning to roam the oceans swept along by the currents with great shoals of sea creatures.

All these events are related in that surrealistic or “magic-realist” mode familiar from the works of Guenter Grass and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and, of course, Bruno Schulz himself, in which the remarkable and the fantastic, described in minute naturalistic detail, are made to seem part of the ordinary scheme of things. The Hebrew style Grossman adopts for this section evokes the lushly figurative diction of Avraham Shlonsky and Natan Alterman, the preeminent modernist poets of the Jewish community of Palestine between the two world wars, whose verse, characterized by musicality and a penchant for neologism, draws deeply upon French and Russian symbolism. Here, however, the novel’s stylistic experimentalism is overextended; what may be evocative in conception turns out to be tedious in practice.

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Not all is watery depths, fortunately. We meet Momik, now in his late twenties, as a published poet of “thin-lipped,” ironic Hebrew verse. He has put aside his poetry in order to try to write, with little success, the story of Anshel Wasserman’s experiences during the Holocaust, for he has been assailed by “visions of the old man locked inside the story for so long, a ghostly ship turned away at every por’ “while he, Momik, remains “his only hope of liberation, of salvaging his story.” It is not only Wasserman he is trying to rescue but, again, himself as well. Momik’s life as an adult has not been a success. He has not been able to drive away the ghosts his parents brought from Europe; he can neither trust nor love nor extend empathy. After his long-barren wife Ruth gives birth to a son, he helplessly watches his anger begin to poison his offspring as well.

The way out comes via Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles, given to him as a parting gift by a woman, a kind of all-in-one Holocaust groupie and muse, with whom Momik has had an affair. The experience of reading Schulz is a revelation. The constriction of Momik’s imagination is overcome by Schulz’s passion for language, the “veritable stampede of panting, perspiring words.” He becomes obsessed with Schulz, seeking not merely to write like him but to become him. He wants, in short, to submerge himself in Schulz, and it is this desire that provides the link to the oceanic passages here.

Going off to Poland to swim in the waters off contemporary Gdansk—which, he is certain, embraced and enveloped Schulz forty years earlier—Momik receives there reassuring news of Bruno through long conversations with the sea, personified as a knowing, world-weary vamp of marvelous and constantly changing polymorphous possibilities. What happens to Momik in the bosom of the ocean—it involves a vision of Bruno’s messianic Age of Genius—cannot, as one might imagine, be easily summarized. Enough to say that the ocean serves as a mythic representation of the unconscious, a realm in which transformations are possible and one can push through to become another.

The prize Momik wins for his descent into the unconscious is the capacity to tell the story of his great-uncle Anshel Wasserman as well as the story told by Wasserman to a concentration-camp commandant by the name of Neigel. This tale-within-a-tale occupies the remainder of the novel (the “Wasserman” and “Kazik” sections), and it is more straightforward than what has come before—but no less fantastic.

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Wasserman’s wife and daughter have been shot upon arrival at the camp, but Wasserman is not allowed to die; by some decree of fate, he cannot die. It comes to the attention of the camp commander that Wasserman is the author of tales which he, Neigel, had hugely enjoyed as a child; he therefore installs Wasserman as his “house Jew” (much as was Bruno Schulz in Drohobycz) with Scheherezade-like orders to amuse him when the day’s work is done. Wasserman consents, but, in a reversal of the Scheherezade motif, on condition that Neigel shoot him at the end of each evening’s telling.

Even in this section of the book, Grossman does not permit Momik to break out of his solipsism. As the story is conceived, Momik is actually physically present in the camp—no one but Wasserman can see him, presumably—standing over Wasserman’s shoulder and frequently being addressed by him. Not for a moment are we allowed to forget that it is Momik who has brought Wasserman back to life—in every sense, reinvented him—and given him a chance to live his life over again.

The figure of Wasserman moves the theme of juvenile literature to the center of See Under: “Love.” Although his children’s stories were penned in the 20th century, their ethos and style hark back to an earlier era, and Wasserman himself writes in the antique modern Hebrew of the Enlightenment—this is the style of the entire section. Furthermore, like the literature of the Haskalah, his stories are deliberately universal and didactic in their concerns. They narrate the adventures of the Children of the Heart, a band of young people from different backgrounds and lands who join together to fight for right all over the globe and, through their trusty time machine, in earlier eras as well, rescuing a runaway American slave, assisting a scientist in his battle against cholera, lending support to Robin Hood, and so forth.

The twist comes with Wasserman’s resurrection as a storyteller. What the Nazi commandant wants from him is more of the same: benevolent, childlike tales that will divert his overwrought mind. What Wasserman gives him instead is something very different. He again conjures up the Children of the Heart, but now, instead of the brave adolescents Neigel knew and loved as a child, they are forty years older, not broken exactly but ragged and disillusioned. He places them, furthermore, not in the eternal land of youth but squarely within the world the Nazis have made in Eastern Europe. Neigel complains bitterly: he is being cheated. But Wasserman invokes against him the sacred principle of the inviolability of art; a story, he avers, cannot depart from its own truth. Given his elaborate second chance, Wasserman succeeds in rising above juvenile fantasies and in placing his gift for invention within the constraints of historical actuality.

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The final section of See Under: “Love,” no less exorbitantly inventive than those preceding, is titled “The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life.” Kazik is a newborn baby, discovered by the aging Children of the Heart in the abandoned Warsaw zoo. The baby is found to suffer from a rare disease which causes it to experience the entire human life cycle within the course of twenty-four hours. This miniaturized life provides the unique occasion for Momik, posing now as the voice of a complete editorial staff, “to compile an encyclopedia embracing most of the events in the life of a single individual, as well as his distinctive psychosomatic functions, orientation to his surroundings, desire, dreams, etc.” The encyclopedia is of course organized alphabetically, with numerous cross references, the title of the novel being one of them.

This section, preoccupied with definition and classification, is written in stiff and hyper-rational social-sciencese, which plays in counterpoint to the horrible irrationality of the fate that awaits Kazik. The key here is suggested in words used earlier about Bruno Schulz: “For him the Holocaust was a laboratory gone mad, accelerating and intensifying human processes a hundredfold.” Kazik represents the freak intensity of human experience under conditions of the greatest extremity. Although the Children of the Heart do their best to educate Kazik under these conditions and to guide him as he rapidly progresses through his life, their efforts come to naught. Kazik requests to see the world beyond the zoo; what he is shown are the electrified barbed-wire fences of Neigel’s concentration camp. Horrified, he commits suicide two hours short of his allotted twenty-four.

Yet Kazik’s fate triggers Neigel’s own suicide, and this death represents a triumph of the storyteller’s art. By locating his nightly tales in the present reality, and by involving Neigel in the telling, Wasserman has managed to lure the commandant into an emotional identification with the victims of persecution. The death of Kazik in a world he has helped to create—Neigel has by now ceased to distinguish between story and life—is too much for him. Not that he has been morally regenerated, but the story has unmanned him, made him hateful to himself, and the taking of his own life becomes the only way out. So See Under: “Love” is brought to a close.

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Though the lengthy description I have offered may seem to tell too much, it fails to touch on dozens of this novel’s motifs and characters. For example, all of the deranged survivors Wasserman meets on the public benches of his neighborhood in the “Momik” section are in the “Kazik” section amplified into full-fledged characters with individual life histories. One wonders, indeed, whether the whole conception of an encyclopedia may have come into being as a brilliant “solution” for these many tangential narratives, which could thereby simply be filed as entries without being integrated into a narrative fabric. Here and in many other instances, at any rate, one yearns for a sober editorial hand.

But the problems of See Under: “Love” go deeper than what could have been solved by judicious pruning and disciplined restraint. Grossman is endowed with literary genius, but the particular models he has chosen to follow are precisely of the sort that fan the flames of his native extravagance rather than lending it structure and purpose.

The novel imitates two key features of the “postmodernist” sensibility in contemporary fiction: self-conscious literary borrowing and the solipsistic preoccupation with literary artifice. As to the first, it must be said that Grossman’s decision to narrate each of the four sections in a different Hebrew style succeeds completely; in its own context, each style is consistently sustained and thematically supported. Yet within this canny architectonic design, Grossman has opened the door to a swarm of other influences. Reading through the novel is like making one’s way down the halls of a museum: look, here’s a Grass, there’s a Garcia Marquez! And, for the Hebrew reader, there is Sholem Aleichem, Mendele Mocher Seforim, Yoram Kaniuk, and many others. The possibility of total derivativeness is parodied in Wasserman’s pulp adventure tales, with their indebtedness to Karl May, Jack London, James Fenimore Cooper, et al.

Nice distinctions might be made here among literary concepts of allusion, homage, and imitation, but they are swept aside by the riveting, monumental figure of Bruno Schulz. Schulz has exerted a pull on other writers, especially Cynthia Ozick in The Messiah of Stockholm, and it would take a reader with intimate knowledge of Schulz’s Polish-language stories to say just how Grossman has appropriated him. But the dominant impression is that, to adapt the oceanic metaphor of the “Bruno” section, Grossman has been sucked under by this material. If Momik, as the novel’s narrator, seems to understand thematically the difference between being influenced by someone and becoming that person, for Grossman the novelist this boundary at times disappears altogether.

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Which brings us to Grossman’s preoccupation with the mechanics of storytelling. After the relatively “straight” description of Momik’s boyhood, the focus of the novel shifts to the question of how one writes about the Holocaust. We are given an account of Momik’s case of writer’s block, then of his search for inspiration from Bruno Schulz; finally there is the re-invention of Wasserman as a writer and, to cap it all, the completed encyclopedia. In the story of Wasserman and the Nazi commandant Grossman puts together his most involved arrangement of Chinese boxes. It is Momik who has conjured up Wasserman, who in turn tells the story to Neigel, who, for his part, is not only morally overcome by the story—thus changing historical reality retroactively by means of fiction—but steals Wasserman’s story and retells it to his wife as his own. All the while Momik, the conjuror, is present inside the frame, and is addressed by Wasserman in direct discourse. The result is a constant cutting back and forth between narrative contexts as the devices by which the story is told are deliberately exposed to view.

The deep purpose of these games, one supposes, is to make a statement about the ineluctable interdependence of reality and illusion, event and story. Grossman’s maneuvers, however, end by producing the opposite effect. Instead of becoming interwined, the realms of art and life seem to proceed along separate and ever diverging tracks. In See Under: “Love” the realm of “life,” in the sense of reality represented fictively without magical transformation, is unrelievedly bleak: the deformed emotions of Momik’s parents, the murder of Bruno Schulz in the streets of Drohobycz, the shooting of Wasserman’s wife and daughter, Wasserman’s own hard labor in the latrines and crematoria. This unbearable sadness is summed up in an aside Momik utters about his Aunt Idka, who came to his wedding wearing a Band-Aid over the number on her arm. “All evening I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her arm. I felt as if under that clean little Band-Aid lay a deep abyss that was sucking us all in: the hall, the guests, the happy occasion, me.”

Yet although this cosmetic bandage is occasionally removed in See Under: “Love” to reveal the horror beneath, most of the novel takes place in the realm of art and storytelling, a much happier place by far. Thus, not only is Bruno Schulz brought back to life, and Wasserman too given a second chance, but, in an ultimate compliment to the power of art, an SS officer is conquered by the enchantments of story.

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What is most startling about See Under: “Love” is the moral vision implicit in this divergence, most strikingly embodied in the tales Wasserman tells to snare his prey. Wasserman’s own moral code is a direct transcription of the naive universal values which his children’s tales were designed to inculcate. All men are brothers. Band together to work for the useful and the good. Be faithful and courageous in the face of evil. Amazingly, Wasserman’s vision stands here unmolested and unreconstructed, as if to say that this is the truth of art, everywhere and always.

Through the figure of Momik, Grossman had an opportunity to project a subtler and deeper understanding of the links between his dissociated realms of art and life. We could have been shown, for instance, how Momik’s life is affected by his success in telling Wasserman’s story and in compiling his encyclopedia. What would it mean to return to the business of everyday life after writing about such horror? But Grossman, apparently unwilling to renounce the consolations of story, passes the opportunity by.

The limitations of this vision stem from a fantasy of rescue which Grossman seems not to want to relinquish. Integral to the juvenile literature invoked so extensively in the novel is the notion that the weak and defenseless can be saved by the courage and secret intelligence of others. For Grossman the magic ring is not action but language. As a child, Momik works to deliver his parents from the clutches of the Nazi Beast through the words in his spy notebooks. As an adult, he seeks salvation from terminal embitterment by submersion in Bruno Schulz, himself saved from death as a reward for his luminous prose. Wasserman is rescued from mediocrity as a literary hack and given the chance to practice true art; and it is that art which saves Neigel from his bestiality. While in the early, “Momik” section such fantasies of rescue are deployed to great ironic and pathetic effect, later the novel seems drawn to a disturbingly close identification with the figure of Wasserman, who, despite his marvelous vividness as a character, remains fixed in the adolescent world of his literary creations.

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Does Grossman’s work mark a new, third-generation response to the Holocaust in Israeli literature? It is, of course, too soon to say. But two issues that emerge from See Under: “Love” are worth bearing in mind in this connection. The first is the book’s relationship to the Jewish past. Historically, the Jewish literature of response to catastrophe has consciously invoked the models of the Bible and midrashic legend and exegesis, even if in modern times the relationship has been one of parody and rebellion. In See Under: “Love,” this literary tradition simply does not figure. Grossman’s imagination is engaged by certain universal questions raised by Jewish suffering, and his literary models are correspondingly alien to the Jewish canon.

A second, more delicate issue touches on what might be termed the uses of the Holocaust. What this novel has to teach us about the Holocaust itself, in any of its dimensions, is in the end quite limited. The description of Momik’s childhood is an exception: a brilliant and genuine contribution to our understanding of the effects of the catastrophe on children of survivors. But after this initial point See Under: “Love” moves off in another direction, becoming absorbed in the drama of the writer’s soul, the virtuoso manipulation of narrative, the redemptive potentialities of art. The novel’s ostensible subject is reduced to a backdrop on which the adventures of the artistic ego are projected.

The Holocaust presents a singular temptation to the artist: on the one hand, its bleakness as a subject acts as a discipline, giving little scope for grandiosity or revery; on the other hand, to the undisciplined or narcissistic imagination, that very bleakness may spur fantasy and ostentation without end. Grossman’s daring novel may, indeed, thus betoken a disturbingly wider impatience with the intractability of the Holocaust as a subject—and by extension (as his more recent, “soft” political writings would suggest) with the tragic element in human conflict altogether.

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1 Translated by Betsy Rosenberg. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 455 pp., $19.95.

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