Yom Ha’atzmaut readings

Yom Haatzmaut, Israel Independence Day, is this week. To celebrate, eat a felafel, buy something from Israel and read a book about it. If you search for “Israel” in our online catalog, not surprisingly, you max out the number of results at 200.  One book that caught my interest is Israel 50. It is a large colorful book done in a newspaper format that covers the first 50 years of the modern state of Israel. We also have  Chronicles: News of the Past, a two-volume collection of “newspapers” purportedly from a few thousand years ago, that makes the history of ancient Israel come alive—at least to generations who got their news from newspapers.

And we have many more books with more in-depth information and insights on a multitude of topics: go to our online catalog for an extensive reading list of books on Israel. Check them out!

The Secret Seder

The Secret Seder by Doreen Rappaport, illustrated by Caldecott Medal winner, Emily Arnold McCully, tells the story of a Jewish boy who attends a Seder with his father while his family pretend to be Catholic during World War II. This picture book is meant for children; although neighbors are taken away by the Nazis and the boy’s grandparents have disappeared, no character dies. But it is clear that the family’s lives are in danger and that Jews throughout Europe are being murdered. This night if different from all other nights; in other times, Jews were oppressed, but now we are being destroyed. Gathering for a Jewish ceremony is an act of defiance and, hence, of freedom; but this is not an upbeat, optimistic story. Difficult questions are asked and, as in the Haggadah, they are not answered. (Which is fine—asking is more important than answering.) This book is not a “God is good and how can we be good in this good world” Jewish children’s book. It is about how to maintain your integrity in dire straits. (The Hebrew word, Mitzrayim, usually translated as Egypt, also means straits.)

When I picked up The Secret Seder and read it, I thought about how my husband’s brother’s wife’s father, like the father in this book, hid in the mountains during World War II. He even wrote a book about it. When I finished the story and read the afterword (I also read forewords and even title page versos) I saw the name, Mednicki. I remembered that my sister-in-law’s father, Bernard Mednick, used that name. And I thought, “ooh, ooh! I know the father in this story!”

I gave the book to my sister-in-law, even though I assumed she was already familiar with the book. But, no! Even her brother, the boy in the story, had never heard of The Secret Seder. Through a colleague, he contacted the author, Doreen Rappaport, who was delighted to find him. She had long since given up hope of making contact.[1] While the boy in the story and my relative by marriage both attended Seders, the details in The Secret Seder were invented by Ms. Rappaport, who was compelled to tell this story but had no access to any actual participants.

The meeting of the author and her main character was written about in the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent. [2] No mention of me was made. Without me they probably would not have met. Clearly I am the most important part of this story. This has made me think about how history is recorded. Not everything is included. When it is included, it is not always accurate. In the Exponent article, my sister-in-law read The Secret Seder and saw mention of her father’s book; her brother then emailed the author. Deleting me and a music teacher with email makes the article shorter without loss of relevant details for the points made. But a different story could be written based on a fuller accounting.

Love at first footnote — Burnt books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka by Rodger Kamenetz

Rebbe Nachman's chair

Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka by Rodger Kamenetz contains lots of fascinating bits about Kafka and the Hasidic rabbi, Nachman of Bratslav, and their surprising similarities. He shows that not only did Rabbi Nachman probably influence Kafka, since Martin Buber had translated Nachman’s stories and made them accessible to a wider Jewish world, but also that one might argue that Kafka influenced Rabbi Nachman—if not directly, then at least in the minds of present day readers of Rabbi Nachman, who live in a Kafkaesque world. Roger Kamenetz has some wonderful insights and interesting anecdotes, but the book does seem a little disjointed. This is not a biography nor a literary analysis and yet Kamenetz must retell the lives and stories of his two subjects enough for us to understand what he is talking about. Both men burned some of their work, died young, and worried about God and evil. I was glad to see that Kamenetz feels that the wise man who joined the turkey prince under the table understands what to do because he himself has been there. The book is carefully foot- and end-noted and has a detailed chronology and a good bibliography.

Some of my favorite quotes from the book:

But no shattering is permanent, because the process of redemption is also ongoing. This applies in our personal lives, as Rabbi Nachman tells us beautifully: “If you believe that you can damage, then believe that you can repair.” [p. 18-19]

Rabbi Nachman’s Hasidim had reason to doubt the reality of God’s justice, and must have grappled privately with the heretical thought that “there is neither judgment nor judge.” [p. 23]

Kafka died just before Heisenberg’s famous work was published, but as an assimilated Jew Kafka already lived an emotional and social uncertaintly principle. That is why his parables exhibit wave-particle duality, Jewish if looked at one way, German if another. Harold Bloom calls this literary indeterminacy “evasion,” but that doesn’t mean that interpretation is hopeless. There’s a probability curve of meanings: once the reader makes a choice, the other meanings collapse. [p. 178]

I especially like  Kamenetz’s using theories from physics in this quote to explain literature. Although, I don’t think that other meanings collapse forever, just for the current choice; i.e., the reader is free to make a different choice at another time. Readers also are entitled to live uncertain, variable lives that change their choices as they observe the world and are observed by it. (No, I don’t really know what I meant by that last bit, I just like the parallelism of it.)

More favorite quotes:

To believe that evil and injustice are inherent to God’s universe [as the priest in Kafka's The Trial implies] goes against our deepest sense of justice and goodness. It requires a certain humility to grasp this concept. For instance, one would have to give up completely the idea of judging God. [p. 193]

That conversation everyone quotes between Kafka and Brod, where Brod asks if he is a Gnostic and Kafka says no, he doesn’t think the world is pure evil and created by a malevolent being, the demiurge. Maybe it’s not so drastic, Kafka says: maybe Creation is just a bad mood of God. “He had a bad day.” So is there hope asks Brod, who is more sentimental than his friend.
Yes there’s hope, Kafka says, “Plenty of hope—for God—no end of hope—only not for us.” [p. 209]

The wise man in “The Turkey Prince” knew how to go under the table and even go naked, because he had been to such an extreme place himself. [p. 232]

True to form, [Kafka] replied, “Theoretically I am always inclined to favor proposals such as those made by Herr Scholem, which demand the utmost and by so doing achieve nothing.” [p. 250]

A more intriguing proposition is that Franz Kafka actually influenced Rabbi Nachman. This is, in a very exact sense, preposterous.1 [p. 8]
Footnote 1. Etymologically pre- “before,” post- “after,” “preposterous” means that which comes after pretending to come before. [p. 317]

I fell in love with the book at the first footnote. The intense passion did not last, but the book and I remain good friends.