A Fool's Kabbalah

He’d started out in Paris, then on to Zurich and Prague, cities still vital and unblemished in their appearance; then Frankfurt, Munich, his native Berlin, Vienna, and points east, which were ashes. He had begun as the renowned scholar Dr. Gershom Scholem, dispatched by the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as emissary of the Otzrot HaGolah, the Treasures of Diaspora Archive, and returned to the nervous calm of Prague a broken man.

On the train from Frankfurt he’d neither looked out the window nor read a book. He had no book with him, nor did it even occur to him that, perhaps for the first time in his life, he’d brought along no classic theological or philosophical text to peruse. From all the dogmas and mythologies, canons and wisdom literatures, that had been his food and drink, he was fasting. Wasn’t every day now its own Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement? But like Kafka’s hunger artist his fast was not to be admired; the “banquet” of existence had no special appeal for him. He felt no flicker of sensation upon his arrival in the city that he and Walter had declared as consecrated to its native son Franz. Gershom checked into the Hotel Europa on Wenceslas Square where he had previously stayed, signed the guestbook with an illegible scrawl, and accepted the key. But as he followed the bellhop carrying his suitcase through the plush lobby toward the gilded glass cage of the lift, he broke down. Perhaps it was the rich warmth of the Empire furnishings, the sienna sconces fastened to the polished mahogany woodwork—an atmosphere that seemed impervious to adversity—that thawed the ice around Gershom’s heart enough to admit an ache; then the pain, really a body blow, halted his forward movement, whereupon he folded himself into an armchair beside a stained-glass Tiffany lamp and began to weep like a child.

The young bellhop, red pillbox cocked at a jaunty angle atop his pomatumed head, waited patiently for the guest to get over whatever afflicted him. At length Gershom dried his eyes with a sleeve and rose to plod behind the bellhop, who, without a missed step of decorum, proceeded him to the elevator. The room, with its half-tester bed and faux-balcony outside the high windows, had a soft-hued elegance, which should have been inviting after the barracks-like accommodations at Offenbach. But Gershom was indifferent to its vintage décor; he was slow in realizing that the bellhop’s departure was contingent upon his receiving a tip. Left alone, he struggled to recall his confident state of mind when he’d stopped at the hotel all those long months ago—the mistaken sense of security he’d felt before waking up to the realization that Europe was a charnel house. But the memory, like so much else lost in the maelstrom, was irrecoverable.

He had been tasked with salvaging what was left of a world. It turned out there was quite a bit of it: the still intact Torah scrolls, the books both sacred and secular, menorahs, spice boxes, kiddush cups, seder plates, documents; but no people. To be sure, there were ghosts, a multitude of them and some still living, but their rescue was a haphazard proposition. The books, however, were as palpable as flesh and blood.

Those that had survived the flames had been hidden in impromptu genizahs: airless cellars, attics festooned in cobwebs; antiquities of inestimable value were immured in dank catacombs, buried in forests. Much had been squirreled away by the victims but much more had been confiscated and held hostage by the rapacious predators. It seemed that the enemy had as great a mania for collecting as for destroying; those books that they refrained from incinerating would remain a resource for studying the perverse customs and convictions of an odious race. Academies would be established for that purpose. As it happened, many of the commandeered volumes were stumbled upon by the liberators, who, with the best of intentions, stored them in warehouses for redistributing to their original communities. The problem was, those communities no longer existed. So the books, ritual objects, incunabula, all remained in storage, quarreled over by opposing committees charged with finding them homes.

The temporary home for most of these effects was the Offenbach Archival Depot in the city of Offenbach a few kilometers downstream from Frankfurt on the River Main. The depot was a requisitioned factory building of the I. G. Farben Corporation, who had manufactured the cyanide-based pesticide used to exterminate lice and the inmates of concentration camps. The building itself was a characterless five-story concrete cube with two tall smokestacks, an unlikely site for a depository of treasures.

Gershom’s first sight of the depot left his brain reeling as from a concussion. It was a formidable brain, Dr. Scholem’s; it was, by his own measure, nimble, incisive, and cunning. It was the brain of the man who held the Chair of Jewish Mysticism at the recently established Hebrew University on top of storied Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. There had never before been such a position, and this one was created expressly for Gershom, who had swum against powerful currents of history to attain it. The Jewish historians, in their eagerness to present to the Gentiles an eminently reasonable and unthreatening version of their religion, had consigned an immemorial tradition—namely Kabbalah—to oblivion. Gershom had single-handedly (as he liked to think) resurrected that tradition, with all its dangerous, heterodox, and anarchic reverberations. The impact among scholars and laymen alike had been, in the words of his bosom friend Walter Benjamin, like “a mighty paw” lifted against the Philistines. For Gershom, personally, it was as if he’d raised a lost continent from beneath the sea.

To accomplish the endeavor, he had spent years ferreting out ancient texts from every antiquarian bookshop in Berlin, Munich, and later Palestine. In Jerusalem he’d stalked the booksellers—some wearing fezzes, some with sidelocks and patriarch beards—to their dusty, back-alley lairs. In them he’d discovered priceless volumes the sellers in their ignorance believed to be worthless curiosities, though they nevertheless touted the books’ “pricelessness” and bargained fiercely with the prospective buyer. He conned their brittle pages, some still bearing the smudged fingerprints of generations of aspiring sages and sorcerers. (Books written in the hoary biblical tongues that Gershom had taught himself as a teenager, much to the consternation of his comfortably assimilated family.) He’d distilled their fantastical wisdom into weighty volumes of his own, which revealed, in precise dialectical language, recipes for conjuring creatures from other worlds and formulas for entering the mind of God.

So who could have been better equipped for undertaking the job at hand than he, a universally recognized professional in the field of recovering dispossessed literatures? With a messianic zeal he would redeem the invaluable books scattered by the planet’s premier cataclysm and spirit them back to the Promised Land where they belonged. Such was his arrogance when the pillars of the university packed him off to Europe to assess the situation and collect the stray Judaica for the university’s precious reserve. But once he’d entered the stagnant air of the Offenbach Depot, escorted by a beleaguered Captain Isaac Bencowitz of the U.S. Army’s Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Unit, all of his high-minded designs were confounded.

Four of the five loft-like stories were stacked floor-to-ceiling with books, scrolls, and manuscripts, many of them bound in bales of scalloped pages. Many volumes were piled willy-nilly like slag from a volcanic eruption, the sacred alongside the profane, holy scripture in Hebrew and Aramaic bundled cheek-by-jowl with Yiddish storybooks. All were damaged, worm-eaten, mildewed, some with pages scorched by fire or gnawed by rats. Others, retrieved from damp bolt-holes and subterranean vaults, were draped over lines stretched beneath the ceiling like clothes on a line. Here, in the moted shafts of amber light that filtered through the wire-glass windows, was the mountainous residue of an extinguished culture disposed of like rubbish. Relentless bibliophile that he was, Gershom had come to respect in essence the gospel of the kabbalists: that words—Hebrew words in particular—had souls. The language of the mystical texts assumed a life exclusive of the mortals who had written it, its authors mere conduits for transmitting visions, symbols, and myths; they were expendable, those entranced archaic authors, once their task was accomplished. But here, seeing the books in such heaps minus the righteous folk that had honored them, they appeared as so much detritus, lifeless as bodies from which the souls have been expunged.

Standing before them, Gershom was struck dumb, his legs weak as water, his eyes clamped shut against the sight. There was a compartment in his brain, hermetically sealed but expanded over the years, wherein the hidebound scholar preserved a perception of himself as a wild-eyed seeker after revelation. This was an alternative Gershom—“the shadow Scholem” as his dead friend Walter had it—conceived to complement the deviant history he’d chronicled as a foil for the conventional. That Gershom, with his elfin ears and rudder-like nose (which he often exaggerated in his own mind to grotesque proportions), enticed him on occasion into places where the scholar feared to tread. The Gershom that resided in that seldom-visited, timeless compartment of his brain sank to his knees, called for a skullcap and prayer shawl, and began to recite, in his classical Hebrew, Kaddish, the prayer for the dead—while the professor and dignitary in his funereal suit only sniffled and wiped his nose with a monogrammed handkerchief, furtively dabbing an eye in the process. The good captain pretended not to notice.

“We’ve catalogued nearly a million items so far,” he announced in his official capacity, though his slack, deep-furrowed face looked anything but official; his khaki uniform, with its soup-stained lapel, appeared as if slept in, his rimless spectacles befogged. “But, as you know, so many libraries and Jewish holdings still remain in unsympathetic hands.” He assured Gershom, who’d composed himself enough to reclaim his capable face, that he would have his work cut out for him when dealing with those ill-disposed national entities. “The question is of course what to do with all this stuff once we’ve gathered it.”

Gershom’s English was discerning enough that he winced at the word “stuff,” but the man’s rueful expression was at variance with his cavalier language; it was clear that his reverence for the labor weighed heavily upon him. Then he removed his glasses and began to wipe them with the hem of his military tunic, peering at his visitor through tired, red-rimmed eyes.
“Sometimes,” he sighed, “I get the urge to strike a match and make a bonfire, then jump into the flames along with the books.” He replaced the glasses and attempted a smile that his eyes could not support.

Gershom shuddered, unprepared for such a confession. “The distribution, as you might imagine,” he reassured the man with a purposeful emphasis, “is our gravest concern.”

The captain appraised the scholar as if to determine whom exactly he was speaking for. Had he asked, Gershom, so previously secure in his role, would have been hard-pressed to answer with confidence. So unmoored did he feel. He was grateful when, once they’d adjourned to his small office, also deluged in books, the captain opened a cabinet and offered Gershom a tin coffee mug into which he poured several fingers of dry gin. He did the same for himself.
“La chayim,” each said in his turn.

He’d come first to a Paris still resonant with memories of his dead friend Walter. Not the Walter of their last encounter, with whom Gershom had quarreled over his friend’s tortured attempts to reconcile his Marxism with his devotional nature. (“A losing battle,” Gershom had insisted.) It was on that occasion when Walter, forswearing their shared convictions, had advocated the elimination of magic from Walter’s own theory of language. That Walter, short-winded and paunchy, his signature pompadour prematurely graying, was so torn between one fixed idea and another that he was incapable of taking steps to save himself from the coming storm. What Gershom remembered most was the time before that. Then, virtually penniless as usual, vacillating as always between competing enthusiasms, Walter Benjamin was the most magnetic personality on earth.

The neon of Montparnasse burned as brightly in 1946 as it had in 1927. The boulevards were awash in its ruby glow; the lights coruscated off the windscreens of motorcars whose klaxons vied with the blare of jazz trumpets in the clubs and cabarets. Lovers were still entwined like caducei in the cathedral niches and along the embankment of the Seine. But no one was deceived by the music and the incandescence. The liberated city had had its moment of shrill celebration, leaving the population to salvage what dignity it could from a sediment of shame and regret. It had been different nearly twenty years before, when they’d met in the midst of what came to be known as Les Années Folles, the Crazy Years. Then, even the decorous Gershom had not been proof against the city’s antic energies. He was further buoyed by his hopes that, after a decade of persuasion, his friend would soon come to Palestine.

“There’s a position waiting for you at the university,” Gershom had assured him over herbal liqueurs. “The chancellor Magnes has agreed to vouch for you. You can write your lectures on the lilac-scented verandah of a Jaffa café while looking wistfully at the Mediterranean sunset.”

“Gerhard,” replied Walter—he’d never been comfortable with Gershom’s adopted Hebrew name; “Gerhard, you needn’t twist my arm.” The prospect was genuinely attractive. Under the auspices of an aspiring new nation, the critic could pursue his uniquely metaphysical approach to the great Jewish texts. This was his latest hobby horse, which he might soon swap, as was his custom, for another in mid-stream. But at that time Eretz Israel was, as it would remain for the rest of his days, an alluring possibility.

Of course, his Aliyah, his ascent to the Land, would have to wait until Walter had first attended to his current literary commitments. “There’s the commissioned piece I’m doing for an anthology of the writings of Wilhelm Von Humboldt, a positively revolutionary essay on the philosophy of language for Die Literarische Welt and another on Hölderlin for Die Neue Rundschau, not to mention my half-completed monographs on Baudelaire, Proust, and Franz Kafka . . .” (Kafka being the writer with whom he and Gershom had lately come to share an obsession.) There was also—and this Walter needlessly confided to his friend in whispers—the apocalyptic idea he’d recently conceived for what he called “an enchanted encyclopedia.” The yet uncopyrighted idea was inspired by his fascination with the lavish shopping arcades of Paris, around which he would construct “a unified field theory of practically everything.” That these projects were never-ending and would dog him in his hand-to-mouth peregrinations back and forth across Europe until the bitter end, was not yet apparent. All that was clear then was that Paris was a carnival, and Walter was as intoxicated with it as he was with his own mercurial brilliance.