Less is More: Uri Shulevitz’s The Treasure

This week I intended to recommend The Rooster Prince, retold by Sydell Waxman and illustrated by Giora Carmi. It is based on a Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav parable ideal for a retelling as a children’s picture book: a young person is the main character, he does very silly things (sits under a table naked and eats scraps of food), and learns a valuable lesson about how to live in the world. I was so excited when I found two copies in the Temple Israel library. Glancing at it, I was prepared to love it, and, in fact, included it in my first Chronicle article, along with Rodger Kamenetz’s book, reviewed here last week. But rereading the book, my concerns grew. Too much is added; it’s a bit ungapatchka. The wise man of the original tale, who arrives knowing how to cure the prince, in this version becomes a Jewish boy abducted by the Tzar’s soldiers. The boy stumbles upon the solution haphazardly; there is no plan of gradual improvement. The pictures are busy and colorful; the text has many font types, angles, and sizes. Unlike most picture books, I recommend this more for young children, and less for adults.

Uri Shulevitz has taken another Rabbi Nachman tale and made a small, quiet gem of a book. The Treasure has lush pictures, very little dialog and few words. Like most retellings, there are changes, but not enough to distort the original intent. A man, Isaac, travels to find the treasure he has repeatedly dreamed of, only to be told by a guard at his destination that he (the guard) has dreamed that the treasure is in Isaac’s home. Shulevitz has Isaac give the guard a reward for his help and build a house of prayer. The journey home is the mirror image of the journey there. Isaac returns as he started—empty-handed, but now he has the knowledge he needs to find the treasure within his home/heart/self/soul. Rabbi Nachman explains that one must travel to find a tzaddik to  uncover what is already in oneself.

There are at least two other versions of this story worth noting. One is from centuries before Nachman lived and is about John Chapman of England, who had a similar dream and repaired part of a church. The other is a much busier story by Marilyn Hirsh, Rabbi Isaac and Captain Jiri, filled with confused guardian angels, rabbinic students and soldiers. The rabbi and the captain not only share the treasure, but also become mentors for the other’s followers.

All of this raises two questions:

1. When is a story so altered that it is longer the original story. How much can a story survive changes. Does a story belong to the teller or the audience?
2. How do you change a story to make it good/interesting/suitable for children? Do you have the make a main character a child? Do you have to get rid of the violent bits? or make them more violent? Do you change shades of gray into black and white?
3. How do you make a story into a Jewish children’s story? Does it have to take place in an Eastern European shtetl in the 19th century? Does it have to take place during Hanukkah?

I have lots more to say about The Treasure and similar stories and children’s literature. But I’d really want to hear what you have to say.

*** I’m also looking for guest recommenders. Just write a few sentences about a book in the Temple Israel library and send them to me at rmyers@tiwestport.org or as a comment here. ***

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.