The End of Everything, by David Bergelson

About a week ago on the new website Jewish Ideas Daily, there was a blurb on a new translation of a book by Yiddish writer David Bergelson:

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2010/1/21/on-books/1/the-end-of-everything

I read the blurb while sitting in the amazing HUC Klau Library, so I just had to walk a few steps to find a brand new copy of this very translation on the shelf. 

Like the few other Russian novels I've read, this one had plenty of depression and general misery to go around. In an essay Lionel Trilling once wrote, "every situation in Dostoevsky, no matter how spiritual, starts with a point of social pride and a certain number of rubles..." and that is exactly how Bergelson's novel begins, too. Mirel, the daughter of Reb Gedalye, goes through a series of successive engagements to different men. She continually feels pressure to get engaged because 1) what else is there to do and 2) it would really help her father out financially. But each time she gets engaged - and there is never really any real passion or feeling on her part toward any of the men, just a sort of resignation - she almost immediately begins to work on how to break the engagement. 
Here are some of my favorite quotes that I think are pretty representative of the book: 

"For some time now she'd feld the slow, painful demise of her vapid, commonplace, self-absorbed life."

"With cold, vaguely formed resolution she neared her father's house, and with the same icily unemotional determinaton she went inside...she lingered at the door, and it occured to her that she didn't live as other people lived but wandered all alone along the periphery of life, that from childhood on shed been stumbling about there in a long restless dream that had no beginning and no end: Now, it seemed, she'd come to some decision and would take some action, yet perhaps she'd come to no decision and would take no action. All alone she'd merely continue to stumble about as in an eternal dream of chaos and would never arrive at any destionation..."

"While she was lying here alone on the margins of life, other people were living fully. From a distance she saw the way they lived..."

You can probably get the gist of Mirel's character from those. There are other female characters in the book who go to university, and I don't know if Bergelson intended for his readers to want to yell at Mirel to follow their example, or something, at least. The back cover of the book describes it as the "Yiddish Emma Bovary." I didn't go back and check a copy of M. Bovary, but this section from Bergelson's book struck me as similar to what I remember of Flaubert:
"...his remark still echoed in her ears: 'A provincial tragedy.' She couldn't tell where the barb of this insult, and the resentment she felt at it, really lay: whether in the fact that Herz couldn't be bothered to remember her name or in the phrase itself that he'd coined about her: 'A provincial tragedy.'"

That Herz character is interesting. He's a poet who writes Hebrew poetry. In another scene, some of the characters name-drop about "Ahad Ha'am" in order to show their political/cultural affiliations. Either Joseph Sherman, the translator, or the New Yiddish Library publishers, did a nice job with lots of historical and cultural footnotes throughout the book. Bergelson probably has more than a few characters who represent people from his own circle:

"A little farther on, in the middle of the large room, stood the master's youngest brother, Sholem Zaydenovsky, a perpetually discontented young man with the appearance of an overgrown yeshiva student...after the death of his fanatically observant parents not long before, he'd found himself to be nothing more than a partially agnostic, venemous freethinker...toward money he now felt a deep antipathy coupled with a shopkeeper's pathological love for it that was his genetic inheritance, believed that no one was as capable of making it as he was, and for this reason held an uncommonly negative opinion of Jewish youth: - our people are quite incapable of producing any healthy types." 

Lest I sounded like I was being too hard on Mirel earlier, I do understand that she had limiting social conditions. I think Bergelson also makes sure his readers are aware of that point in describing a startling dream that Mirel has:
"She found herself walking alone across an open field somewhere, toward a church where a great many yelling people had congregated, demanding to know: Is a woman a human being or not?"

I suppose Bergelson is also presenting Mirel as a metaphor for all Jews in modernity. If so, then the question from Mirel's dream echoes Shylock's speech from The Merchant of Venice: "Hath not a Jew eyes..." and so on - showing that not much had changed on that front. But then one would also wonder whether, like Mirel, Bergelson really saw all other modern Jews as provincial tragedies. I don't know what Bergelson thought of Zionism, and it doesn't seem to appear in his novel at all. 

So, yes, a slightly depressing read - but artful and interesting. A relevant quote from different book I've started reading:

"Rather than appealing to 'socialism' of some not-yet-existing kind to calm the fever of the despairing intellectual, Dos Passos is simply despairing and for this he earned [Lionel] Trilling's admiration. 'I can think of no more useful political job for the literary man today,' Trilling wrote in praise of Dos Passos, 'than, by representation of despair, to cauterize the exposed soft-tissue of too easy hope.'  

All the Goodes

I think that one of the small joys of going to hear a great performer is to discover what it is they choose to play. While I may think I have listened to a large sampling of classical music, it is always a delight to hear a piece of music I have never heard before, and played exquisitely. I have to admit, Richard Goode did precisely that this evening.

I rushed in a few minutes late and missed the first few minutes of one of Bach's Prelude and Fugues from the second book of the Well Tempered Clavier. And finding that someone had decided to make my seat theirs, I had to wait a while longer before finding a seat I could occupy. Such was a small trifle, simply listening to Mr. Goode play, wherever I was, was good enough. Mr. Goode then played a set of three Haydn Sonatas. I could look up the numbers if you want. Following a brief intermission, he returned with Schumann's Kreisleriana. All were excellently played, with keen attention to detail. Furthermore, the acoustics of the hall, the Herbst Theater, were stunning in my opinion. I haven't been to many solo piano concerts, but often the tone of the piano can get muddied in the middle registers due to no fault of the performer per se, but the poor acoustics of the hall. Not so here at the Herbst theater. The piano was very clear and vibrant. I look forward to hearing Brad Mehldau there tomorrow night.

As Mr. Goode played the Haydn sonatas, I could not help but thinking of how delicately these works were put together. The counterpoint and delicate balance between the voices, the modulation from one key center to another. It takes a deep appreciation of the intricacy of the composition to play these with as much elan as Mr. Goode did; I thought he did a remarkable job of elucidating these details from the composition itself. It reminded me of what I have read about Berrocal sculptures (as in Martin Gardiner's essay From Burrs to Berrocal). The work as a whole is not understood nor fully realized until each piece has put in its proper place in the proper order.

The Schumann was very nice as well. Not as rigorous in form as the Haydn, but harmonically richer, Mr. Goode was able to play it in its full romantic glory. Hearing it reminds me of a whole set of piano compositions of the romantic period, the Fantasies and Songs without Words, that I really have not investigated, probably because I've been somewhat traumatized by solo piano music for a while. I'll have to re investigate that pocket of rich romantic music.

Playing a short second set is not necessarily grounds for playing three encores, but whatever. I couldn't really complain at hearing a Chopin Nocturne and the Sarabande from Bach's Partita no.1. There was something else, but I didn't recognize it.

Blue Skies

Let in a little sunshine
Everything is in balance

Terry Teachout's new biography of Louis Armstrong has received much praise from those who have reviewed it, and I really have little to add to the insightful reviews that have been written. The two clips above are inspired by one of the anecdotes near the end of the book. "Richard Brookhiser tells of how, when doing battle with cancer, he was unable to listen to any music other than the Goldberg Variations and Louis Armstrong: 'Bach said everything is in its place; Armstrong said the sun comes shining through.'" Funny how I listened to primarily the Goldberg Variations and Louis Armstrong the few weeks before my big exam. I'm glad that I didn't have to reach such life threatening circumstances in order to see the profundity of these two bodies of music.

Pops, however, remains a very clear, precisely written, and seemingly unbiased account of Armstrong and his career as one of the most influential jazz musicians. While much has been written about Louis Armstrong's early career in the slums of New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth century, Pops does an excellent job of filling in the rest of the narrative. Louis Armstrong's first big break with the recordings of the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens was not the only big event for his career. Those recordings arguably changed the face of Jazz in the 1920's, propelling it to high popularity, Louis with them, but Louis also had a remarkable break in the 1950's with the inception of Louis Armstrong and his All Stars, a recording of which is posted.

One of the key aspects that Pops brings out about Louis Armstrong is his unfaltering dedication to the music he played. Until the last years of his life, Louis was almost continuously on the road moving from performance to performance. Near the end of his career, Louis was told by the doctors to take eight weeks off to rest and recover. After three weeks, Louis called the rest of his band in to go back on the road. He simply could not stand to take so long off.

In all ways, he personifies the career path laid out by Caleb in Middlemarch: "'That depends,' said Caleb, turning his head on one side and lowering his voice, with the air of a man who felt himself to be saying something deeply religious. 'You must be sure of two things; you must love your work, and not always be looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honourable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying There's this and there's that - if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. no matter what a man is - I wouldn't give two pence for him' - here Caleb's mouth looked better, and he snapped his fingers - ' whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn't do well what he undertook to do.'"

We should all strive to be as dedicated to our work as that.

In contrast, I went to a lecture this evening on "The Electric Louis Armstrong" This was supposed to be a lecture about how advances in recording technology played a significant role in Armstrong's career. Unfortunately, Loren Schoenberg only made passing reference to the intended topic of the lecture. Fortunately, he and a few other musicians played a few numbers to ease the bitter pill of the lecture itself. In essence, Loren spend the entire time relating Abe Lincoln to B. Obama, with a passing reference to how Louis is kind of like them too. The lecture was full of cliche phrases about the importance of jazz and how, at a jazz performance, "Something is Created." Oh, he also asked the bass player and drummer accompanying him to improvise while he read the Gettysburg Address, which, by the way, is on the same level of importance as Senator Obama's speech on race relations in the US. Hungadunga and a colon.