READ to pg. 195, the end of Book One. There will be a test on BOOK ONE (mostly as a check that you have been reading--so if you have been reading, you're okay. If not, well...get on with it...)
For today, we'll see some more of the film and give you time to work on your short stories.
Book I, Terra Nullius
Book I, Terra Nullius Summary
Jakob returns to Greece, missing Alex, and disoriented by tourists and traffic. Everything has changed in Athens, Zakynthos, where the old house is fittingly in ruins, and Idhra, where in the Roussos family home he writes this account. As Jakob looks through Athos's library, he recalls the broad education that he has received. He selects a small volume of Psalms to read himself to sleep and opens at random to a section about a worn-out, suffering man, torn hand and foot, but ultimately exalted by God.
Idhra opens Jakob's memory and he spends long nights writing and dealing with questions that have no answers. He notes that Jews live in an eternal present, always identifying with those who leave Egypt. They are responsible for time and must make moral decisions that have effect beyond this life. Jakob offers the parable of a famed rabbi who travels incognito in shabby clothing and is ridiculed by passengers. When they find out who he is, they beg forgiveness, but he refuses, even on the Day of Awe, because they have wronged the man on the train, not himself. The moral: nothing erases an immoral act. When the victim is dead, only silence remains. Recorded history can be resurrected. Destruction turns presence into absence. That rabbi will forever know humiliation but not be humiliated, as the painted clock at Treblinka station always reads 3 o'clock. Einstein talks of simultaneous events: a train arrives at a certain time because it coincides with the clock and someone notices this. The Holocaust has witnesses, and neither evil nor good acts can be erased. Being moral in those days consists of the tiniest acts but elevates the doers higher than the angels. Evil can be a single occurrence, but goodness requires repetition.
On Idhra Jakob finally feels comfortable writing English poetry. He feels at home in Greece, but also forever a stranger. He finishes writing Groundwork. Jakob thinks about the Nazis' efforts to dehumanize the Jews to make it easier psychologically for the troops to exterminate them. When they realize, however, that they are not dealing with "figuren" as propaganda holds, but with humans who refuse to be degraded and can only be killed, this triggers brutality and they choose to live by the lie and do their job. The few heroes who rescue others also have no choice: they do as truth requires. New Adam must rise from the place of greatest degradation.
Jakob imagines Bella in a crowded camp barracks, practicing her keyboard fingering silently. Her skins is degrading painfully. When the gas chamber door is opened there is always a tangled pyramid of bodies clambering for the last air. There are babies half-born. Screams are heard through the thick walls. Despair, however, transforms mercilessly into faith. Jakob knows that he must embrace faith, which will never be as perfect again. Like caged birds drawn to the magnetic pole when it is time to migrate, humans are moved by instinct, which seems to disappear with the body. Jakob's body cannot forget his loved ones, but he realizes that Bella, like all of the dead, wants to get close enough to push him back into the world.
"To remain with the dead is to abandon them." pg. 170
Book I, Terra Nullius Analysis
The sixth chapter is entitled "No Man's Land" in Latin, but shows Jakob finally coming to grips with himself. Having separated from Alex, but clearly hoping to reform to the point that she can take him back, he goes to Greece alone. He gives rapid impressions of the country that has just been restored to a constitutional democracy, which suggests that the events take part during 1970. He alludes to prominent artists who suffer under the military junta for being communists: the composer Mikis Theodorakis, best known in the West for Zorba the Greek, and the poet Giannis Ritsos.
Moonlight Sonata:
- I know that each one of us travels to love alone,
- alone to faith and to death.
- I know it. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t help.
- Let me come with you.
- Yannis Ritsos
Everything in Greece has changed and seems odd to Jakob, who settles into Athos's ancestral home on Idhra Island and indicates that he writes this account of his life in Athos's study. The homecoming observations are rapid and impressionistic.
There are several oddly positive references to Christianity in the chapter. First, when Jakob takes a book of psalms to read himself to sleep, he turns at random to Ps. 22, which in the Christian reading is a prophecy of Jesus' crucifixion. He also describes how Idhra has watched over and blessed everywhere weathered old icons. He refers to the face of "their Redeemer" without sarcasm. He states clearly that he feels out of place in Greece and in particular with the new bustle and commercialism, which had bothered him also in Toronto. He reiterates Athos's contention, several times already mentioned, that the Hebrew and Greek scripts form a harmony and the two cultures share a unique historic destiny. Note that Jakob finds the prayer shawl (tallit) that Athos gives him but he never uses. He is struck by the intense blue color of its stripes. He describes the requirement that one forgive others and seek forgiveness on the Day of Atonement, which he calls by the generic term Day of Awe, meaning the High Holy Days. Characters in a story are scandalized that a renowned rabbi refuses to absolve them for mistakenly scorning him. The rabbi, however, does not identify with the one scorned and insists they seek forgiveness from him.
This is a fine example of the parable, a story illustrating a moral, and a literary form much identified with Jesus. Jakob is able to surmount prejudice. Much of the chapter deals with good and evil, using this extended parable and a series of aphorisms, interwoven with snippets of Bella's concern for orchestration as she memorizes musical scores. This underscores how firmly she remains in her brother's mind. In the end, he decides that her spirit stays close not in order to draw him to her but to be in a position to push him back into the world.
Idhra gets Jakob writing again, including the poetry for which he is soon to become well known. To date, his attempts have sounded like ghost stories even to friends. He writes feverishly all night, as had Athos. The first example he gives, set in italics, is parabolic: Zdena and Bettina growing to resemble one another.
Many more details of life during the Holocaust emerge: the never-changing painted clock face at Treblinka station, the coming together of victims, perpetrators, and witnesses, the virtue of the few who help save lives. Jakob emphasizes that evil needs only occur once, but goodness requires repetition. Jews in all generations identify with the generation of the Exodus and take part mystically in that trek. There is collective unity also in the Holocaust. Having approached the subject several times, Jakob analyzes how the Nazis manage to kill so many people without conscience or remorse.
He finds the key in photographs of the officers, laughing. Propaganda has convinced them that Jews are sub-human, so there is no crime in eliminating them - it is, in fact, a necessity, like sanitation. The problem comes when the killers discover that the Jews are, in fact, human, and the shock triggers brutality. They choose to live by the comfortable lie and do their job. (see pg. 165-166)
Jakob pictures life in crowded camp barracks and death in the gas chambers. (pg. 168) In horrible detail he portrays opening the doors onto carnage, but finds that the piles of twisted corpses struggling to survive on the last pockets of air provide an "obscene testament of grace". The phrase, rather tinged by the Christian outlook, leads him to perceive how despair transforms into faith, which he finally embraces.
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