Karlin The Genizah

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 979-8-9866178-3-1
Verlag: Publerati
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 296 Seiten

Reihe: The Genizah

Definition: Genizah is a storage area in a Jewish synagogue or cemetery designated for the temporary storage of worn-out Hebrew-language books and papers on religious topics prior to proper cemetery burial. In the novel The Genizah, Wayne Karlin enters its pages as a character in his own novel, reimagining his family's lives-and fate-if they had not come to America but stayed in his mother's village in Poland where the rest of her extended family were murdered by the Nazis in 1941. Karlin commemorates and mourns that unutterable loss by making it present, in the spirit of the words from the Passover Seder, which asks those at the table to recount the story of oppression as if they had lived it. It is a phrase that calls upon the people at the table to feel, not just to know, what happened, as good fiction calls us to do. How can anyone who had not been through the Holocaust share even a little part of such experiences? How can anyone who has not felt some of that horror reverberate in their own bones try to understand the terrible massacres of our own days, sparked by hatred of the Other, in Syria, in Myanmar, in Israel, in Gaza, in Charleston, and in Pittsburgh-in so many other places, they overwhelm our ability to empathize. Karlin's answer to that question is to personalize the impersonal, to imagine what could have happened if his grandparents, and mother, and her brothers and sisters and his father and his family, had not torn themselves away from a place they and their ancestors had lived for hundreds of years, in a town and on a continent where they had always been unwelcome guests.

Wayne Karlin has published eight novels: A Wolf by the Ears, Marble Mountain, The Wished-For Country, Prisoners (all with Curbstone Press); Lost Armies, The Extras, Us (all with Henry Holt); Crossover (Harcourt), and a short story collection: Memorial Days (Texas Tech University Press, 2023), as well as three works of non-fiction: Rumors and Stones, War Movies (Curbstone Press), and Wandering Souls: Journeys with the Dead and the Living in Viet Nam (Nation Books). His books have also been published in England, and in translation in Denmark, Sweden, Italy, and Vietnam. Karlin has received five State of Maryland Individual Artist Awards in Fiction, two Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1994 and 2004), the Paterson Prize in Fiction for 1999 for Prisoners, the Vietnam Veterans of American Excellence in Arts Award in 2005, and the Juniper Prize for Fiction for 2019 for A Wolf by the Ears.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Karlin, Wayne

Leseproben

The Genizah Near dawn, I came across three elderly Hasids sitting on a bench filigreed with initials, hearts, and crosses. Standing near a caged, scraggly sapling on the other side of the street were seven equally ancient Chinese men. The three Jews rose in unison from their perch and began to pray, their bodies ticking back and forth like black metronomes. At the same moment, the Chinese started to conjure tai chi patterns, the movements of their hands and feet weaving slowly, as if the air had thickened to the consistency of water, a counterpoint to the frantic bobbing of the Jews. At that moment, as if called by this strange minyan, the sun rose. When I turned the corner onto Henry Street, the light strengthened and I stood and watched the street transform as if the old men’s dance had awakened not just the day, but a past that had been contained as fossilized seeds in the objects of the present. Burly men wearing black gabardine and screaming prices in Yiddish suddenly materialized in front of stalls overflowing with vegetables. What yesterday was a bodega was now a kosher butcher shop, the soft Latin letters of the Spanish on the window barbed into Hebrew, a black-bearded butcher scrapping together the blades of carving knives. The sprayed graffiti had unraveled from the walls and the ravaged hull of a burned-out car had dissolved into a horse-drawn cart. Old-clothes men poured out of a doorway, singing their wares. The same doorway birthed a ragged mob of children wearing yarmulkes or floppy, brimmed hats; they ran into the street and immediately began playing stick-ball games; though “began,” I thought, was the wrong word: they configured into what seemed a game they had already been playing for hours or years. I stopped and tried to immerse into the fantasy. From here, once, I probably could have seen the Towers; their absence aided the illusion being created, or re-created, though I imagined it could simply be done through camera angles. I had forgotten the filming was to begin today, even though the production company had posted notices all week. The movie was one of a recent spate of independent films about the lives of the ultra-orthodox in which a Hasid, sometimes male but more often a woman, was seduced and/or liberated from the sustaining close-knit culture and/or suffocating repression of the tradition. I let myself see the technicians dragging cameras and klieg lights out from a door on the other side of the building and a row of white trucks. A man with a bullhorn yelled at the extras. In the alley, two women were draping other extras in black, Hasidic caftans, clapping fur-rimmed streimels on their heads, attaching false payot, sidelocks. I walked past the crew and up the steps to the abandoned yeshiva that the couple with whom I was staying had converted to an art studio. The word “converted” was exactly right. Le mot juste. But that French phrase itself suddenly seemed nonsensical; the faith in transformative language it called for, a religion that once had wrapped me, now as remote from my heart as the morning prayers of the Hasids. It no longer sustains, I had said to Avner and Rae when they asked me if I was writing anything new, working on a new book. I was here at their invitation, though I suspected they had offered it out of politeness and had been surprised and somewhat disturbed that I had immediately accepted. I understood their offer to be a gesture. But I had needed to get away and their own odd but lasting relationship, as well as the strange place they were playing it out, had seemed to offer a kind of refuge: Avner, an Israeli sculptor I’d once profiled for the Herald Tribune, had been a member of Peace Now who left the country rather than serve in the occupied territories; Rae, a one-time bond trader, the daughter of a Presbyterian army chaplain, was now a conceptual artist. What they had lost, what no longer sustained them, had drawn them together and now had drawn me into their orbit as well, in the way, I wanted to think, that exiles find each other and coalesce into their own nation. It was the way I had thought of my wife, our marriage. I had met O when I was working in Israel; she was an ambassador’s daughter from an Asian country working on her Masters in Psychology, her family privileged, as her life would have been if she had gone back home. Privileged and circumspect and mapped out. She was drawn to the security, the beauty and familiarity of her culture; she hated its rigidity, its corrupt luxuries and odious oppressions more. We were initially attracted by both the differences and the similarities in our backgrounds, a gathered nation of exiles as much as Avner and Rae, our beginning marked by wonderfully clandestine meetings in the dim, smoky cafés of Jerusalem and Belgrade, those wonderfully conspiratorial cities; until, if I want to keep up this analogy, we established borders and a flag and moved from the time of fire at dawn to the time of children and the soft risks of gardens, our attention turned to security and the national debt, all the risks of the founding years evolved into nostalgic anecdotes. We were a country, as any long marriage is; when I lost her, I lost the only other person who could truly, ever, know that country’s history. I suddenly realized that the man with the bullhorn was yelling at me through the instrument, like the voice of God. I was an intrusion in the scene, the wrong word. Le mot unjuste. I opened the iron door to the yeshiva with three keys, following a ritual of locks I’d had to learn like my own morning prayer. When I first arrived here a few days ago, Avner had prepared a large bowl of rough-textured hummus, heated pita in the yeshiva’s old iron stove, and let the smells of hot bread, lemon, and sesame oil drive back the musty emptiness of the building. We stuffed ourselves and got drunk on Arak, and then sang songs from Avner’s childhood, the guttural tones of the Hebrew edged with an ironic and bitter tone of loss that frightened Rae. I march with a song in my heart and a tree in my hand. We’ve come to build and to be built. Avner spun prayers into senseless parodies. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand lose its condominium. The air inside was cool and smelled of damp stone and mold and a faint, stale, miasma of rot that seemed to have permeated the walls. The walls on both sides of the cavernous entrance hall were crusted with broken-handled cups, ashy bottles, articles and photos torn jagged from newspapers, the dead, cracked eye of a television screen, velour pillows with their stuffing foaming from gashes, a greasy mattress hung like the skin of an animal. Bricolage. The exact word. Rae believed that each viewer of her art should create his own meaning, or lack thereof, from the chaotic elements she had fastened to the walls. I had never been able to think of what she did as art. The concept reminded me of a photographer who once told me—he was quoting someone else, I don’t remember whom—that the best photographs were those in which the photographer didn’t try to frame a portion of reality in the viewfinder. Any consciousness eroded the authenticity of the picture. Made it a lie. Why bother to take photographs at all? I had asked the photographer. Art imposed control. I had once believed that also. In fact, a photograph I had taken, apparently scissored from a magazine and pasted into the bricolage by Rae, struck me at eye level as I walked past the wall. A girl, hysterical, carried on a stretcher by two Israeli soldiers. I usually did not use my own photographs with articles I wrote, but I didn’t have a staff photographer with me that day. Three Palestinian guerillas had seized a classroom full of students at a Northern Galilee high school. When the IDF snipers had tried to take out the Arabs, they’d killed one, but only wounded the other two, who immediately set off the explosives they had wired around the classroom and turned their AK-47s on the hostages. I had rushed forward with the other reporters, past a line of wailing parents, had seen the wounded and dead children carried out of the school house door, as if in some obscene graduation straight to death. I had seen worse. I’d seen worse in Vietnam. In fact, I had seen worse in Gaza, in an apartment building destroyed by Israeli bombs: the Israel-Palestine conflict always ready to provide crude examples of the symmetry of hate if not a symmetry of power. But this one stayed. As if the deaths were more personal, tied to me by blood. The accidental linkage of blood, in all senses of that word. That mot juste. I had seen worse. I had seen worse as I watched my wife of over forty years fade, her known features formed in my conscience over those years, girl to woman, reversed, blurring and bleaching to non-existence, only to re-form to me now in the face of the terrified girl in my photograph. That was what was truly linked now, no matter where I turned. The true bricolage. Creation from a seemingly diverse range of available things that somehow connected. My lost wife to that girl on the stretcher, carried as it were, out and away from the schoolhouse door. I had written about the killing in Galilee as I always did, as if putting it into print, as if the fenced tension of letters and words would render it contained and prevented. As if the pain of the girl I had framed and captured in my viewfinder and in my article had been safely dissipated into history by the art of my witness. It had not...