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A Hebrew Novel in Which a Mésalliance Serves as a Metaphor for the Jewish Condition in 20th-Century Europe

Nov. 29 2017

First published in 1929, and groundbreaking for its supple Hebrew style, David Fogel’s Married Life has as its protagonist Rudolf Gurdweill, a would-be writer who attends regular gatherings at a café with a circle of Jewish friends. At one such meeting he notices, and then approaches, the statuesque and evidently Gentile Baroness Thea von Tokow; they agree to marry before the evening is over. Dara Horn describes what happens next:

The baroness turns out to be . . . a dyed-in-the-wool sadist, a sexual predator who sleeps with a different man every week of their marriage, bites Gurdweill during their rare sexual unions, shreds Gurdweill’s manuscripts, and treats Gurdweill as her slave, ordering him to do her bidding, hitting him when he doesn’t instantly comply with her whims, and threatening to strangle him in his sleep. (Nor, we learn, is she particularly unique; her brother cheerfully tells Gurdweill about his hobby of strangling family pets.)

But Gurdweill, . . . is well beyond your average melancholy poet. He is a masochist, one who repeatedly burned himself and stuck himself with needles as a child without knowing why. As an adult, he relentlessly rationalizes Thea’s abuse in order to remain with her, because it is exactly her cruelty that makes him feel worthy, the crumbs of her attention becoming his great prize. (One often wishes that Gurdweill would look up Freud in the Viennese phonebook, but that would require exactly the agency that Gurdweill lacks.) It’s a match made in hell, and the reader’s hell is witnessing Gurdweill’s endless arguments with himself about why it’s all perfectly fine. . . .

If this were a contemporary American novel, it would be a story about a psychopath. But Fogel makes it painfully clear that the dynamic between Gurdweill and the baroness is not exceptional. Instead, it is mirrored in every experience this novel’s Jewish characters have. When Gurdweill and his friends visit an unfamiliar café, they are seated beside the “Aryan Nature Lovers Meeting, Neubau Branch” and overhear the group’s anti-Semitic speeches—but they find the atmosphere perversely appealing. . . . When they ride the city’s tram, a drunk harasses them with anti-Semitic slurs—but they barely respond, leaving Gurdweill feeling “ashamed, as if he had been the cause of the quarrel.” . . .

Vienna, we slowly realize, isn’t the backdrop for Gurdweill’s marriage. Gurdweill’s marriage is the backdrop for Vienna, for Austria, for Europe itself, full of Jews who will abase themselves without limit for any crumb of social acceptance, and full of non-Jews who gleefully know it.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Anti-Semitism, Arts & Culture, Austrian Jewry, Hebrew literature, Jewish literature, Vienna

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic