Under This Blazing Light Read Online Free PDF

story, works witchcraft and conjures up ghosts and spirits.
    Maybe we ought to give up, do our best, and wait a couple of hundred years for a literature to emerge here that will be comparable to the Hebrew literature of the turn of the century, the great generations of Mendele, Berdyczewski, Bialik, Gnessin, Agnon, and the rest of them?
    There is story about Avraham Krinitsy, the mayor of Ramat Gan. One day he went to watch the nursery-school children of his town planting trees for Tu Bishvat. All the children were standing there clutching their saplings, the mayor was standing in front of them on a dais holding his own sapling, and he had to say something. It is not easy for a politician to say anything to an audience of toddlers. Suddenly, in his consternation, he burst out with the following sentence delivered in a heavy Russian accent: ‘Moy dzear children: you are the trees, and we are the manure!’
    And this may be the right rhythm for the growth of literature in any tribe. We should not expect a new Bialik or Agnon or Dostoevsky to spring up tomorrow or the day after in one of our new towns or suburbs or housing developments. Agnon grew up in Buczacz, Gunther Grass in Danzig, Thomas Mann came from Liibeck, and Faulkner grew up in Oxford, Mississippi, in the American Deep South. So, let’s wait a couple of hundred years and see what happens.
    There is another way that I have been thinking about quite a lot recently. It may be possible to try to catch the time and place, the displaced refugees, as they are, with all their elusiveness and emaciation, with the midday light itself. To write like a camera that takes in too much light, so that the outlines are blurred, the eyes are screwed up, the film is scorched, like photographing straight into the summer sun.
    Perhaps I ought to shut up at last. Gradually. Surely the tribe needs its witchdoctor in times of disaster or terror or nightmare, or the opposite, in times of great joy and ecstasy. At other times, only a few need all this. I don’t know. I shan’t define ‘the state of the tribe at the present time’. I shall keep my thoughts to myself.
    But if our tribe is having a brief respite between suffering and ecstasy, what need of sorcery and stories? Let it have musicians, entertainers - and let it rest in peace.
    (First published in 1972)

----

----
‘Man is the sum total of all the sin and fire pent up in his bones’

    (Introduction to a discussion on Berdyczewski)
    I can talk about Berdyczewski the way one talks about a distant relation, ‘distant’ in the sense of an uncle whom I never met because he died eighteen years before I was born. I read his stories with curiosity, respect and awe, and as I read a kind of ‘genetic’ pulse within me bears witness to the distant relationship. (Incidentally, ‘distant relation’ is Berdyczewski’s own expression: he employed it to sign many of his essays.)
    Berdyczewski as a writer was distant, apparently at least, from the mainstream of Hebrew literature in his day. He did not follow the beaten track. He even lived a long way from the centres, the ‘capital cities’ of Hebrew letters in his generation. He did not live in Odessa or Warsaw, he did not even come to Palestine, he drifted to Berlin and Breslau, where Hebrew writing was an even more solitary business than elsewhere. He communicated with other writers, with editors and publishers, mainly by letter. His letters are often bitter and anguished.
    But Berdyczewski was not a solitary writer in the geographical sense alone. All over Europe the great novelists were busy exposing the depths of the human psyche. All the various schools of Hebrew writers too were discovering the complexities of psychology, of the individuals, types, societies. Berdyczewski did not think much of psychology. This was considered by many to be an unpardonable sin: how can there be such a thing as a writer who does not take the trouble to endow his characters with ‘depth’ and