Fame & Folly (26 page)
Authors: Cynthia Ozick
The analogy with Hadleyburg is not gratuitous. Here again the crux is language. In Hadleyburg there are nineteen worthies complicit in the turmoil of communal shame; in the Austrian parliament there are nineteen states. And just as the nineteen leading citizens of Hadleyburg furiously compete, so do the Austrian parliamentarians: “Broadly speaking, all the nations in the empire hate the government—but they all hate each other too, and with devoted and enthusiastic bitterness; no two of them can combine; the nation that rises must rise alone.” And if we can recognize in Hadleyburg the dissolving Austria-Hungary of the 1890’s, we can surely recognize the disintegrated components of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990’s. Hadleyburg may be emblematic of the imperial parliament in Vienna seventeen years before the outbreak of war in Sarajevo in 1914; even more inescapably, it presages the fin-de-siècle Sarajevo of our own moment.
Yet there is a difference—of reportage—between Mark Twain’s Vienna and contemporary Bosnia that turns out to be not quite what we would expect. The facsimile volume presents us with a pair of century-old photographs, one showing the exterior of the parliament, the other a violent interior scene. The parliament buildings appear to stretch over three or four city blocks, with all the majesty of a row of imperial palaces. The interior—“its panelled sweep relieved by fluted columns of distinguished grace and
dignity, which glow softly and frostily in the electric light”—offers a mob of unruly screamers, a good number of them clubbing their desks with wooden planks. The photographs are necessarily static and silent, and we might be induced to feel technologically superior in a news-gathering way to a generation that perforce had to do without CNN or Court TV (not omitting the impact of the Army-McCarthy hearings of the 1950’s); whereas we have television (and the prose of Peter Arnett). Vienna in 1897 had only Mark Twain; and imagination confirms which medium overpowers (or, as we are wont to put it, “outperforms”) which. What TV anchor, accompanied by what “brilliant camerawork,” can match this introspective portrait of the parliament’s Polish president?
He is a gray-haired, long, slender man, with a colorless long face, which, in repose, suggests a death-mask; but when not in repose is tossed and rippled by a turbulent smile which washes this way and that, and is not easy to keep up with—a pious smile, a beseeching and supplicating smile; and when it is at work the large mouth opens, and the flexible lips crumple, and unfold, and crumple again, and move around in a genial and persuasive and angelic way, and expose large glimpses of teeth; and that interrupts the sacredness of the smile and gives it momentarily a mixed worldly and political and satanic cast.
As for the rest of the assembly, they are “religious men, they are earnest, sincere, devoted, and they hate the Jews.”
Mark Twain’s dispatches reached New York without tampering. The imperial press was subject to a heavy and capricious censorship; so it is possible that the readers of
Harper’s
were more intimately informed of the degradation of an allegedly democratic parliament than the citizens of Austria or of its eighteen coequal provinces. The tactics of the Opposition—i.e., of the Germans who refuse to allow the Czechs their own tongue—begin reasonably enough, in parliamentary fashion, with a heroic one-man filibuster lasting twelve hours. At the speaker’s first words, however, decorum instantly and repeatedly gives way to yells, the beating of desks with long boards, and the clamor of threats and name-calling astonishingly gutter-bred. (The members of the assembly include princes, counts, barons, priests, lawyers, judges, physicians,
professors, merchants, bankers—and also “that distinguished religious expert, Dr. Lueger, Bürgermeister of Vienna.”) A number of these shouted declarations vibrate with a dread familiarity, as if a recording of the sounds of the Vienna of 1938 are somehow being hurled back into that earlier time, forty years before: “The Germans of Austria will neither surrender nor die!” “It’s a pity that such a man [one willing to grant language rights to the Czechs] should be a leader of the Germans; he disgraces the German name!” “And
these
shameless creatures are the leaders of the German People’s Party!” “You Jew, you!” “I would rather take my hat off to a Jew!” “Jew flunky! Here we have been fighting the Jews for ten years and now you are helping them to power again. How much do you get for it?” “You Judas!” “Schmeel Leeb Kohn! Schmeel Leeb Kohn!”
But let us not misrepresent by overselection. Tainting their opponents with “Jew” may be the most scurrilous offense these princes, counts, barons, priests, judges, etc., can settle on, but it is not the most imaginative. There are also the following: “Brothel-knight!” “East German offal-tub!” “Infamous louse-brat!” “Cowardly blatherskite!”—along with such lesser epithets as “Polish dog,” “miserable cur,” and
“Die Grossmutter auf dem Misthaufen erzeugt worden”
(which Mark Twain declines to translate from the original).
In short: a parliamentary riot that is soon to turn into street riots. The fourth and last dispatch records the arrival of the militia:
And now we see what history will be talking of five centuries hence: a uniformed and helmeted battalion of bronzed and stalwart men marching in double file down the floor of the House—a free parliament profaned by an invasion of brute force!… They ascended the steps of the tribune, laid their hands upon the inviolable persons of the representatives of a nation, and dragged and tugged and hauled them down the steps and out at the door.
“The memory of it,” Mark Twain concludes—and by now all satire is drained away—“will outlast all the thrones that exist today. In the whole history of free parliaments the like of it had been
seen but three times before. It takes its imposing place among the world’s unforgettable things.”
He is both wrong and right. Wrong, because the December 1897 parliamentary upheaval in Vienna is of course entirely forgotten, except by historian-specialists and readers of Mark Twain’s least-known prose. And right, because it is an indelible precursor that not merely portends the profoundly unforgettable Viennese mob-events of 1938, but thrusts them into our teeth with all their bitter twentieth-century flavor. Here is no déjà vu, but its prophesying opposite. Or, to say it otherwise: a twenty-year-old rioter enjoying Mark Twain’s Vienna easily becomes a sixty-year-old Nazi enjoying
Anschluss
Vienna.
In the immediate wake of the introduction of the militia, the government
came down with a crash; there was a popular outbreak or two in Vienna; there were three or four days of furious rioting in Prague, followed by the establishing there of martial law; the Jews [who were by and large German-speaking] and Germans were harried and plundered, and their houses destroyed; in other Bohemian towns there was rioting—in some cases the Germans being the rioters, in others the Czechs—and in all cases the Jew had to roast, no matter which side he was on.
A
LL THIS
was in progress while Europe continued to boil over Dreyfus. Living on top of the fire, so to speak, Mark Twain could hardly overlook the roasting Jews. Consequently, a few months after his parliamentary reports, he published in
Harper’s
, in March of 1898, a kind of sequel to “Stirring Times in Vienna”—a meditation entitled “Concerning the Jews.” Part polemic, part reprimand, part self-contradictory panegyric, the essay was honorably motivated but ultimately obtuse and harmful. The London
Jewish Chronicle
, for example, commented at the time: “Of all such advocates, we can but say ‘Heaven save us from our friends.’ ” (In the United States in the 1930’s, pro-Nazi groups and other antisemites seized on portions of the essay to suggest an all-American signature for the promulgation of hate.)
Mark Twain was not unaware that Sholem Aleichem, the classic Yiddish writer, was affectionately called “the Jewish Mark Twain.” This was because Sholem Aleichem, like his American counterpart, was a bittersweet humorist and a transcendent humanist; and also because he reflected his village Jews, sunk in deepest poverty, as intimately and faithfully as Mark Twain recorded the homespun villages of his American South. Both men were better known by their pen names than by their actual names; both stood for liberty of the oppressed; both were eagerly read by the plain people—the “folk”; and both were nearly unprecedented as popular literary heroes. Sholem Aleichem certainly read Mark Twain (possibly in German translation), but it is hardly likely that Mark Twain read Sholem Aleichem. Even the smallest inkling of Sholem Aleichem’s social content would have stood in the way of the central canard of “Concerning the Jews.” And to contradict that canard, and to determine the real and typical condition of the shtetl-bound mass of European Jews, Mark Twain had only to look over his shoulder at those Jewish populations nearest to hand in Austro-Hungarian Galicia. Instead he looked to the old hostile myths.
To be sure, “Concerning the Jews” is remembered (perhaps mainly by those who have never read it) as charmingly philosemitic. A single witty—and famous—sentence supports that view: “All that I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.” And we can believe Mark Twain—we
do
believe him—when he avers that he makes “no uncourteous reference” to Jews in his books “because the disposition is lacking.” Up to a point the disposition
is
lacking; there is plenty of evidence for it. A curious science-fiction sketch called “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904”—written about the same time as “Concerning the Jews,” and striking for its “invention” of the “telectrophonoscope,” or television—turns out to be a lampoon of “French Justice” as exemplified in the punishment of the innocent Dreyfus; and if a savage satire can be felt to be delectable, this one is.
The disposition is lacking in other, less political, directions. Jewish
charitableness, Jewish generosity, Jewish responsibility are all acknowledged—for the moment. The facts, Mark Twain declares,
are all on the credit side of the proposition that the Jew is a good and orderly citizen. Summed up, they certify that he is quiet, peaceable, industrious, unaddicted to high crime and brutal dispositions; that his family life is commendable; that he is not a burden upon public charities; that he is not a beggar; that in benevolence he is above the reach of competition. These are the very quintessential of good citizenship.
And all this is followed by another accolade: the Jew is honest. The proof of it is that the “basis of successful business is honesty; a business cannot thrive where the parties to it cannot trust each other.” Who will not affirm this generality? Now add to the assertion of Jewish honesty this quip about the “Jewish brain,” from a letter to an American friend, written from Vienna in 1897: “The difference between the brain of the average Christian and that of the average Jew … is about the difference between a tadpole’s and an Archbishop’s.” We may laugh at this, but let liberal laughter be on its guard: the Jew, the essay continues, “has a reputation for various small forms of cheating … and for arranging cunning contracts which leave him an exit but lock the other man in, and for smart evasions which find him safe and comfortable just within the strict letter of the law, when court and jury know very well that he has violated the spirit of it.” From none of this does Mark Twain dissent. So much for his honest Jewish businessman. And so much for praise of the “Jewish brain,” which takes us straightway to “cunning contracts” and “smart evasions” and the old, old supersessionist proposition that Judaism attends to the “letter,” and not to the “spirit.”
Still, the overriding engine of this essay is situated in a much larger proposition. “In all countries,” Mark Twain tells us, “from the dawn of history, the Jew has been persistently and implacably hated, and with frequency persecuted.” From the dawn of history? And if so, why? Not because the Jew has been millennially blamed for the Crucifixion; “the reasons for it are older than that event,” and reside entirely in the Jew’s putative economic prowess; theology
doesn’t apply; at least the Gospels and Pauline and Augustinian traditions don’t apply. Skip the Crucifixion, then; penetrate even more deeply behind the veil, into those still earlier mists of pre-history, and let the fault land on Joseph in Egypt—Joseph the provider, “who took a nation’s money all away, to the last penny.”
There
is your model for “the Jew”! “I am convinced,” Mark Twain insists, “that the persecution of the Jew is not due in any large degree to religious prejudice.” And here is his judgment of the root of the matter:
No, the Jew is a money-getter; and in getting his money he is a very serious obstruction to less capable neighbors who are on the same quest.… In estimating worldly values the Jew is not shallow, but deep. With precocious wisdom he found out in the morning of time that some men worship rank, some worship heroes, some worship power, some worship God, and that over these ideals they dispute and cannot unite—but that they all worship money; so he made it the end and aim of his life to get it. He was at it in Egypt thirty-six centuries ago; he was at it in Rome …; he has been at it ever since. The cost to him has been heavy; his success has made the whole human race his enemy—but it has paid, for it has brought him envy, and that is the only thing which men will sell both soul and body for.
Reading this, who can help thinking that all of it could go down quite nicely in the Austrian parliament of late 1897, not to mention the Viennese street? There is enough irony here to make even the devil weep. The truth is that Mark Twain was writing of Jews as “money-getters” at a time when the mass emigration of poor Jews by the hundreds of thousands had already begun to cram the steerage compartments of transoceanic ships—Jews in flight from economic hopelessness; and when the meanest penury was the lot of most Jews; and when Jewish letters and Jewish lore and Jewish wit took “poor” to be synonymous with “Jew.” And here comes Mark Twain, announcing that the Jew’s “commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.” He might have taken in the anguished testimony of Sholem Aleichem’s Jews; or the deprivations of Galician Jews down the road, so to speak, from Vienna; or the travail of Russian Jews
penned into the Pale of Settlement. Or, in his native land, he might have taken in the real status of all those small storekeepers whose names he notes on their shop-signs (Edelstein, Blumenthal, Rosenzweig), while observing that “commercial importance” means railroads, banks, mining, insurance, steel, shipping, real estate, etc., etc.—industries where he would have been hard put to find a single Jew.