Odyssey of a Jew
Somewhere Else.
by Robert Kotlowitz.
Charterhouse. 373 pp. $7.95.
Robert Kotlowitz’s first novel tells a story which in its every aspect is commonplace. The description of Lomza, the Polish shtetl at the turn of the century where the novel begins and to which its title alludes, is common-place; and Mendel’s journey from Lomza to London, the odyssey of a young Jew in search of a larger, more cosmopolitan, and hospitable society, is equally common-place. But Kotlowitz, through his aesthetic distance from the material and a rare mastery of the novelist’s craft, transforms common facts and events into a novel uncommon both for its elegance and for its honesty.
The extent of Kotlowitz’s achievement is all the more remarkable in light of other recent attempts to evoke Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust and the near-universal failure of such attempts to come to terms with shtetl life in its essence. More than any other force, the shtetl created and determined the modality of all subsequent Jewish culture in the Diaspora. Significantly, however, efforts to capture it in fiction have either tended to emphasize the grotesque and the demonic side of its religious life, as in the novels of I. B. Singer, or have succumbed to a pervasive sentimentalism marked all too often by ignorance and unimaginativeness.
By contrast, Kotlowitz strikingly succeeds in recreating shtetl life precisely because, in his utterly unsentimental way, he takes the shtetl for what it was—neither the best nor the worst of all possible worlds. The first third of Somewhere Else, devoted to a history of Mendel’s family through three generations, is a saga of deterioration which begins with Napoleon’s army marching through Lomza’s marketplace and offering its bewildered inhabitants their first glimpse of Western enlightenment, hence of their own insularity and provincialism. But Lomza, and its innumerable counterparts throughout the Pale of Jewish settlement, ignored the message. Like Eliezer, Mendel’s great-grandfather, who in his own youth was briefly but ineffectually stirred to follow the French army and who, at the advanced age of one hundred and four, burns to death one cold Friday night as he studies a compendium of Jewish law, the shtetl committed history’s most unforgivable sin: it lived too long.
Yet even at the height of its development, when the shtetl provided a spawning-ground of talent for the celebrated yeshivot of Lithuania and, in Poland, for the Hasidic movement, its culture as a whole best expressed not the Jew’s prodigality of faith—as many a sentimentalist would have it—but his unlimited powers of persistence. The shtetl proved so durable an institution because its social forms—like the traditional Jewish law whose observance and rituals pervaded and molded every aspect of daily routine—were geared primarily not to the saint or the scholar (though these remained the ideals to which every Jew aspired) but to the average Jew, neither sinner nor saint, who was too occupied with the question of his survival in this world to devote much time to problems concerned with the next.
Like the greatest characters of Yiddish literature, among whom Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye is only the most obvious example, Mendel is exactly this sort of “average” Jew—the beinoni who on the Day of Judgment in the next world, and as well in this one, hangs forever between redemption and doom. Never very successful, nor terribly unsuccessful, Mendel neither suffers catastrophic tragedy nor succumbs to overwhelming despair. Gifted with a promising musical voice, he is first sent off to Warsaw to study the cantorial arts, but, homesick and bewildered, he flees back to Lomza after confessing to the principal that he no longer believes in God. A year later he leaves home again, this time for London, the classic innocent eager to be initiated into the mysteries and temptations of modern culture. As England slips into World War I, Mendel’s life also begins to fall apart. In quick succession he loses first his position as cantor at a small synagogue; his job as a messenger for his uncle’s diamond business; his cousin and best friend who goes off to America; and on the very night that King George declares war, his virginity to an archetypical Gentile girl. For a short time, Mendel tries his luck singing at upper-class after-dinner parties, but finally follows the common sense which unerringly informs him that it is time to move on again. He enlists in the Jewish Legion and marches off, “very nervous,” to Palestine.
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But no matter how far Mendel journeys from Lomza, he never manages to escape the shtetl and the sense of his past. His odyssey through Europe and London is, in fact, only a search for another Lomza, a new community to replace the one he has lost: Gentile or Jewish, he thinks it makes little difference. But Mendel remains too much the Polish Jew, too poor and too foreign in his accent and manners, ever to become a proper Englisher, while at the same time, having left behind in Lomza his formal commitment to religious law, he will never again be Jewish enough for the Jews. Though he leaves Lomza determined, in a different place and at a different time, to become a different man, no matter how many times he changes his name—finally to Maurice Moritz (its own double!)—he never succeeds in changing himself.
What follows is the old comedy of assimilation: the more the Jew attempts to adapt, the more he reveals his Jewishness. It is Dorothy Sullivan, the Gentile girl who seduces Mendel and from whom Mendel has hidden his ancestry, who tells him she has known all along that he is a Hebrew—as if “he had just crawled out of the wilderness after forty years.” Mendel, in fact, only plays at assimilation because assimilation itself is only play. Since he knows that he can never actually go the last step and commit apostasy, his movement between past and present, between Lomza and London, resembles less a dialectic than a limbo, and one which toward the end of the novel takes place increasingly inside his own head. Only when Mendel comes to accept his inability, and his unwillingness, to change himself, does he also begin to apprehend the final irony of his odyssey: there is no essential difference between life in Lomza and life in London.
Mendel’s acknowledgment of what he calls his “unseriousness” is itself, however, a reaffirmation of the Jew’s unique ability to persist, his unwillingness to change himself in favor of the shifting tides of history. In the course of the narrative, this reaffirmation coincides significantly with Mendel’s own rejection of Marxism, just then emerging as the fashionable ideology for assimilated young Jews, among whom are many of Mendel’s friends. Observing their “seriousness,” and their mounting obsession with revolution, Mendel recalls the death of his own father, the Rabbi of Lomza, a man so righteous that having become obsessed with the idea of justice and “the dim possibility at last of making his way to sainthood,” he literally burns himself up. At book’s end, when his Communist friends violently disrupt a Zionist meeting which Mendel has attended out of curiosity, he finally understands what all such ideologies and their solutions add up to for Jews: “A dirty business. Jewish bullies bullying Jews. . . . Like Polish hoodlums on the streets of Lomza after dark. . . . They didn’t have the slightest idea of how the world should go”.
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“What else is there to say about these Polish Jews?” Kotlowitz asks early in Somewhere Else:
They thought they would go on forever in their small town. . . . They plunged arrow-straight for destiny, and rushed toward the future as though it were their due. They believed that the earth belonged to them—or enough of it for happiness—and went about their business as though they were ordinary people.
The irony of this passage, an irony which shrouds the entire novel, lies in its total ellipsis of the Holocaust. It would have been impossible for these ordinary Jews to anticipate the one experience designed to teach them forever that they were not ordinary. For the shtetl, no matter how far advanced in its own dissolution, was destroyed not by the forces of modernity in whose name Mendel and his generation abandoned it, but by a resurgence of barbarism. And yet, given the assumptions which governed Mendel’s odyssey from Eastern Europe to the West, the very writing and publication of a book like Kotlowitz’s would have seemed an equally unforeseeable, not to say unlikely, event. As a triumphant acknowledgment of the sublime ordinariness and persistence of Jewish life, Somewhere Else is nothing less than its author’s celebration of his own, and our, roots.
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