The recent death of Milan Kundera brought me back to the fall of 2006, to the aftermath of what we Israelis call the Second Lebanon War, when I first read his work.
It was the first year of my military service as a junior spokesman to the foreign press. And like much of the Israeli population, I was angry and confused. What began as a limited military operation quickly escalated into an all-out conflict with what turned out to be a well-armed, well-trained, and well-funded militia. The Israel Defense Forces, too accustomed to the relative low intensity that characterized the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians, was caught radically underprepared. Cities as far from the northern border as Haifa were targeted daily. The government responded with weakness and hesitation, or so it seemed at the time.
Experts say we did not lose that war. But it felt as though we did.
It was then that I picked up The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a book I had intended to read for some time. It provided the perfect antidote to my personal and existential malaise. Over the next two years, I read every Kundera text I could find. Kundera—along with Cervantes and Rabelais and Nietzsche and Schopenhauer—became my constant companion in what proved to be a difficult year, made bearable by the novelist’s unique perspective, combining intense moralism with ironic, Schopenhauerian detachment.
It was during this period that I also came across Kundera’s acceptance speech for the 1985 Jerusalem Prize, republished in his essay collection The Art of the Novel. It would both fascinate and trouble me for years to come. The Jerusalem Prize is a biennial award given at the Jerusalem International Book Fair to writers “whose work best expresses and promotes the idea of the freedom of the individual in society.” The first prize was awarded in 1963 to British philosopher Bertrand Russell, and since then recipients have included Isaiah Berlin, Simone de Beauvoir, J.M. Coetzee, Susan Sontag, Ian McEwan, Don DeLillo, and Leszek Kolakowski.
Over the years, I have read many of these laureates’ speeches. Many of those winners, it seems, felt the need to criticize the country that had just awarded them for their contribution to civilization. I was particularly incensed by the remarks of Japanese author Haruki Murakami, remarks that received a great deal of attention in the Israeli press:
Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?
Murakami explained in his remarks that by using this metaphor, he was referring not merely to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but also to it, with the Israelis cast in the role of the obdurate wall and the Palestinians in that of the fragile egg. Murakami, of course, was not saying anything unexpected. It took no courage for him to say what he said. He was merely expressing the literati’s received view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Whether Israel was right or wrong, they would support the Palestinians because the egg always makes for a more sympathetic story.
But Kundera’s speech was different. Unlike Murakami, Kundera seemed genuinely grateful. As was often his wont, Kundera chose to take the long view, reflecting on the relationship between the Jews and Europe, and, more broadly, on the Jews and that European literary spirit to which he saw himself heir. To Kundera, being a novelist meant distancing oneself from the affairs of the day in order to let a higher, more permanent form of wisdom flow through you; it meant adopting that attitude of Schopenhauerian detachment, recognizing human meekness and ignorance in the face of the Eternal. Those like Murakami, in his view, were not only abusing their position as hommes d’esprit, but also debasing their art. Rereading this passage after many years, I could see why it was so easy for me to disappear in Kundera’s works, just as he himself sought to disappear in what he would call the “wisdom of the novel”:
It is with profound emotion that I receive today the prize that bears the name of Jerusalem and the mark of that great cosmopolitan Jewish spirit. It is as a novelist that I accept it. I say novelist, not writer. The novelist is one who, according to Flaubert, seeks to disappear behind his work. To disappear behind his work, that is, to renounce the role of public figure. This is not easy these days, when anything of the slightest importance must step into the intolerable glare of the mass media, which, contrary to Flaubert’s precept, cause the work to disappear behind the image of its author. In such a situation, which no one can entirely escape, Flaubert’s remark seems to me a kind of warning: in lending himself to the role of public figure, the novelist endangers his work; it risks being considered a mere appendage to his actions, to his declarations, to his statements of position. Now, not only is the novelist nobody’s spokesman, but I would go so far as to say he is not even the spokesmen for his own ideas. […]. Every true novelist listens for that suprapersonal wisdom, which explains why great novels are always a little more intelligent than their authors. Novelists who are more intelligent than their books should go into another line of work.
Not Territory But Culture
The lines that gave me most pause, however, came at the very beginning of his speech, where Kundera touched on the theme of Jewish and Israeli identity much more clearly:
That Israel’s most important prize is awarded to international literature is not, to my mind, a matter of chance but of a long tradition. Indeed, exiled from their land of origin and thus lifted above nationalist passions, the great Jewish figures have always shown an exceptional feeling for a supranational Europe—a Europe conceived not as territory but as culture. If the Jews, even after Europe so tragically failed them, nonetheless kept faith with that European cosmopolitanism, Israel, their little homeland finally regained, strikes me as the true heart of Europe—a peculiar heart located outside the body.
Despite its brevity, this section contained a metahistorical vision of the Jewish past and future. Incidentally, and probably unbeknownst to Kundera, his speech came exactly at a moment of deep historical inflection in Jewish-Israeli identity. In the 1980s, the Holocaust started replacing the establishment of the state of Israel in the minds of Israelis as the most important event in twentieth century Jewish history.
The Holocaust always lurked in the shadows of the Israeli psyche. It symbolized everything that the early Zionists sought to reject: the image of the weak Jew, unable to fend for himself, having to rely on the kindness of others to save him from the anti-Semitic multitude. Occasionally, the Holocaust would burst onto the public scene, as with the Kastner Trial (1954–55) that debated whether the Hungarian-Jewish Zionist leader Rudolf Kastner was a collaborator with Nazi authorities, or more famously, the Eichmann Trial (1961). The Holocaust would also penetrate the public imagination with such books as House of Dolls by Ka-tzetnik 135633 (1953) or Yoram Kaniuk’s Adam Resurrected (1971). My parents, both children of Holocaust survivors, told me that as children they would frequently encounter survivors with post-traumatic disorders, talking to themselves on the street. And so, the Holocaust could never entirely be ignored. But up until the 1980s, Israelis seemed to believe that Jewish history culminated in the Zionist New Jew.
At some point in the 1980s, however, that began to change, just as my parents’ generation, the children of Holocaust survivors, were rising to prominence. In 1986, David Grossman published his highly acclaimed Holocaust novel See Under: Love. In 1988, the popular singer Yehuda Poliker released the bestselling album Ashes and Dust (ef’er ve-a’vak), which dealt in its entirety with the Holocaust from the perspective of the survivors’ children (namely Poliker and his collaborator Ya’akov Gilad).
The biggest change, however, came in the character of Israeli school fieldtrips. Until the 1980s, these school fieldtrips were focused on acquainting Israeli youths with their ancestral homeland. In the 1930s and ’40s and even into later decades, the focus was more specifically on taking young Jews to the famous sites described in the Bible such as the Valley of Elah, where the battle between David and Goliath is said to have taken place; or to other historic sites like Masada, where the last free Jews chose to commit mass suicide rather than submit to Roman rule in the first century. But starting in 1983, an increasing number of youth groups started making organized trips to Nazi death camps in Poland. In 1988, the Ministry of Education began to officially sponsor these trips, and since then, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of Israeli youths have visited the places where so many Jews perished.
The message emanating from this historic trajectory suggested a radical shift: The roots of Israeli identity were to be sought in Europe, not in the Land of Israel. The New Jew was only a chimera; a dream fabricated in the minds of early twentieth century utopianists. It was the diasporic, Old Jew, after all, who emerged victorious at the end of the Hegelian road, and he was now experiencing his eternal return.
Kundera’s remarks, of course, were not nearly as fatalistic. His portrayal of Jewish-Israeli history and identity contained none of the anti-Zionist implications that Israeli popular and public discourses were beginning to reflect; on the contrary, Kundera seemed to have found a way to combine the two narratives: Europe, he clearly stated, “failed the Jews.” Israel—the New Israel, the “homeland regained”—was more Europe than Europe, the “true heart” of the continent, representing all that was good and noble in the European dream. In the narrative offered by Kundera—unlike the emergent Israeli narrative—one did not have to choose between Europe and the Orient. And yet, upon first reading Kundera’s speech, I was incensed. I did not don IDF uniforms for the sake of a “cosmopolitan Europe,” however construed.
A New World Order; the End of History
In 1997, my father’s work relocated my family to Brussels, Belgium. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Two years later, the Cold War ended and the United States fought the Gulf War. The Maastricht Treaty, which formally established the European Union, came into effect in 1993. In the latter part of the ’90s, NATO forces fought a series of successful campaigns against what I was told at the time were the last vestiges of old, reactionary forces in Europe. A New World Order was coming into being, and Brussels—seat of the European Union, NATO Headquarters, and numerous other institutions—was its capital. It was the End of History.
As a teenager, I was enthusiastic about this brave new world. I embraced the reigning zeitgeist and was too ready to adopt a kind of cosmopolitan, deracinated identity, in lieu of my religious and national origins. Being “Jewish” or “Israeli” seemed like anachronistic labels. In the future, I believed, these would no longer matter.
But like all youthful idealists, I was about to receive a rude awakening. In September 2000, a wave of Palestinian violence in the Middle East unleashed a ripple wave of European anti-Semitism on the other side of the Mediterranean. I began seeing anti-Jewish graffiti on my daily commutes on the electric train across the city. Anti-Israel demonstrations were becoming more frequent on the streets. Large gatherings of armed policemen congregating outside synagogues became more commonplace. And then the stories my grandparents told me about the European persecution of Jews only sixty years ago started resurfacing in my memory and became relatable in a way I had never expected.
I began to take seriously the identity I had earlier so hastily dismissed. For the first time in my adult life, I questioned what it meant to be a Jew and an Israeli. Among other things, that questioning led me to forfeit my exemption from national military service and enlist in the IDF in September 2005. To my surprise, however, less than one year later, somewhere by the Israeli-Lebanese border, I found myself equally perplexed by the same questions.
Around 2010, I read another essay by Kundera that helped me make more sense of his earlier speech, as well as, perhaps, my own questions of identity. That year, a collection of Kundera writings was published in English under the title Encounters. In that collection I found an essay he wrote on the German-born Italian writer Curzio Malaparte, known primarily for two books, Kaputt (1944) and The Skin (1949). The first was (arguably) a work of war reportage on the final years of the Second World War. The second was (again, arguably) a work of fiction, but inspired by the events of the immediate postwar era, as a new Europe was coming into being. Here Kundera returned to the theme of “cosmopolitan Europe,” and effectively admitted something surprising: that the old literary Europe to which he belonged, that Europe which had vexed me so much in my young adulthood, was dead. It died amidst the fighting of the Second World War and in the ensuing dual-occupation by American and Soviet forces in its immediate aftermath. He writes:
The new Europe [was] born of an enormous defeat unparalleled in its history; for the first time, Europe [was] vanquished, Europe as Europe, the whole of Europe. First vanquished by the madness of its own evil incarnated in Nazi Germany, then liberated by American on the one hand, by Russian on the other. Liberated and occupied. I say this without irony. These words—both of them—are accurate. And in their juncture lies the unique nature of the situation.
I returned to the Jerusalem Speech and reviewed some of the names Kundera mentioned: Rabelais, Tolstoy, Cervantes, Kafka; Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Don Quixote. They were all names and titles we associate with high European literature; all names we associate with Kundera. And, seemingly, by Kundera’s own admission, they were all products of a civilization that is no more and that will never rise again. But with time, I came to understand what Kundera understood (or at least I imagine he understood) before me: that this Europe would continue to live in Jewish lore.
Consider now some of the great texts of Judaism: The Books of Moses, the Mishna, the Talmud, Judah HaLevi’s The Kuzari, Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, Hayim Nahman Bialik’s poetry, Shmuel-Yosef Agnon’s Only Yesterday. All eternal texts in their own way, certainly; but also, texts of their time and place. In them is contained worlds that have now also passed: the Ancient Near East, Roman Palestine, the Persian Empire, the Andalusian Enlightenment, and so on.
Historians of the Jews often point out the impact of external cultures on the development of Jewish thought. Critics of Judaism often use this as proof that the Jews are unoriginal. Champions of Judaism, especially in multicultural democracies, point this out to highlight the impact of cross-cultural fertilization. To me, however, this is not a moral question but a phenomenological one. It touches on something essential in Judaism. There is something in the very nature of the Jewish constitution which preserves ancient cultures even after these die out; and not just as memory but as an eternal reality which continues living in the Jewish soul.
And so does Kundera’s Europe. From the distance of almost a decade since I first read his Jerusalem Speech, I think I see now why he felt so at ease in that “little homeland finally regained.” I think he, too, saw the occasion as something of a homecoming.
In that same collection with the essay on Malaparte, Kundera wrote about his friends, the writer Josef Škvorecký and his wife Zdena, themselves Czech exiles who lived in Toronto: “however great their cosmopolitanism, the Škvoreckýs were patriots. […] The Czech nation was born (several different times born) not because of its military conquests but because of its literature. And I don’t mean literature as a political weapon. I mean literature as literature.” I believe Kundera saw this triage—patriotism, cosmopolitanism, literature—operating also in Jewish national identity.
Ultimately, however, I could not accept Kundera’s position as my own. It is very tempting and very dangerous for Jews to see their identity as primarily “literary.” George Steiner famously expressed such a position, perhaps most poignantly in his 1985 essay, “Our Homeland, the Text.” The Israeli novelist Amos Oz tried to advance a similar position (although with less acuity) in Jews and Words (co-authored with his daughter Fania Oz-Salzberger in 2012). In both cases, the writers’ reappraisal of Jewish identity as based on literature reflected their deep ambivalence about the price that was paid for the realization of Jewish sovereignty, perhaps especially the need to use force. But this position also reflected a moral cowardice and a form of escapism. As Gershom Scholem—not one to make light of the importance of texts to Jewish identity—put it in an interview in 1970, “I have no argument with George Steiner. He is trying to live outside of history, while we in Israel are living responsibly, inside of history. […] We have paid a high price for having been outsiders and aliens during our two thousand years of exile, a price of hatred, persecution, massacre and martyrdom. Today, the outsider is in fashion in the Western world, and the Jewish intellectual seems to be benefiting thereby. But what will happen tomorrow?”
Kundera was certainly no moral coward. There is greatness and nobility in his perspective as an ironist who observes world history from a distance. But it is not a perspective appropriate for a Jew in the late twentieth century or in the early twenty first, and for the same reasons Scholem alluded to decades ago.
At the end of the Second Lebanon War, I had confused the political and military leaders with the cause they supposedly represented. My distrust in the former led me to despair of the latter. But I was young and inexperienced. I had not yet understood that ideals are not synonymous with the men who claim to fight in their names, and that while both ideals and men may be fallible, they are fallible in very different ways.