Defenses of the Imagination: Jewish Writers and Modern Historical Crisis

This is from the book - flap. "With characteristic clarity of thought and precision of expression he provides a multifaceted, informed account of the troubled encounter between the literary imagination and modern history as seen through the strong focusing prism of a dozen or more Jewish literary figures. These include Osip Mandelstam,Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, S.Y.Agnon, Lea Goldberg, Uri Zvi Greenberg, Charles Reznikoff and Bernard Malamud. In this work as opposed to his previous one 'After the Tradition' Alter focuses not on the relationship between the Jewish writers and their historical experience but rather on the imaginative strategies in confronting their own historical moment. As always with Alter there is a great clarity to the writing, and a rich interpretative skill that deepens our understanding of the literary work in question.Here is a typical passage of the work in which he illuminates the situation of three different writers at once. " According to a Hasidic tale that Agnon himself, among others , has transmitted , the Baal Shem Tov used to go to a certain spot in the forest when he had something difficult to perform, where he would light a fire,then accomplish the task through prayer. His disciple, the Maggid of Meseritz, could no longer light the fire, but at least he knew the appointed place and the prayer to recite. A generation later Rabbi Moshe Leib Sassov had lost the secret of the prayer as well, but he still knew his way to the place in the forest. At the end of the line Rabbi Israel of Rizhyn, the great - grandson of the Maggid, could neither light the fire nor say the prayer nor find his way into the forest, but at least he could tell the story. This is very much the condition of Kafka, and of Agnon left to tell stories when what is urgently needed is the secret path, the holy fire, the divine words. Benjamin was preeminently a critic who knew what such storytelling meant, and understood in all its ramifications the condition of being bereft of fire in the trackless dark of this world. p.61