The New Criterion

Jul 05, 2007 01:01 PM

The Meaning of Suffering: Part VII

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Roundtable Index: Introduction | Part I: Roth | Part II: Palazzi | Part III: Pearl | Part IV: Yellin | Part V: Guimond | Part VI: Glazov | Part VII: Evanier | Part VIII: Kimball | Part IX: Roth | Part X: Palazzi | Part XI: Pearl | Part XII: Yellin | Part XIII: Guimond | Part XIV: Glazov | Part XV: Evanier | Part XVI: Kimball (Conclusion) |

David Evanier, both a novelist and a journalist. He is the author of Red Love, The One-Star Jew, The Swinging Headhunter, Roman Candle: The Life of Bobby Darin, and Making the Wiseguys Weep: The Jimmy Roselli Story. He is co-author with Joe Pantoliano of Who’s Sorry Now. He is a former fiction editor of The Paris Review, assistant editor of The New Leader, assistant editor of Hadassah Magazine, writer for the civil rights and research division of the Anti-Defamation League, and a contributor to Commentary, The Weekly Standard, National Review, and The American Enterprise. He is the author of the new novel-in-stories, The Great Kisser.

Evanier: While I feel the closest identification with Judah Pearl and Frimet Roth among the panelists, especially Pearl’s view that God is "our ideals, values and principles," I must confess that I basically feel aliented from the premise of this discussion. I see no meaning in suffering, and certainly no way in which it would increase my belief in the existence of God. I began my life sitting itchily in synagogues waiting for some revelation to relieve the tedium. All the praise of God struck me as obsequious, redundant and very boring. Thinking that perhaps my crazy parents had influenced my response to religion, in recent years I took another reluctant peek at Jewish liturgy, and had the same reaction I had in my early youth. Paradoxically, I hasten to add that among those I most admire are many believers, partly because their moral codes are unwavering, and I wish I could share their certainties.

What it all comes down to for me is the terrible suffering of the century we have recently left behind us: the Nazi Holocaust, the Soviet Gulag, the incredible suffering of Eastern Europe under Communism, the Armenian Holocaust, the Chinese Communist Holocaust (or more politely, the Cultural Revolution), Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, North Korea--the list goes on and on. Think of all that horror going on simultaneously, and it leaves one breathless. Now are are into the 21st century, and we have 9/11, Islamic fascism and terrorism, Darfur, the Hezbollah, Iran and manifold forms of human slavery and insanity. Just recently we witnessed a student’s shooting rampage (21 innocent lives plus the killer, and over 30 more injured) at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute. These are all statistics to us; we cannot really imagine the human cost of all this carnage. I think of all of those in Israel, many so young, who have been the victims of suicide bombers and other terrorists--those who survive in living hells, maimed, sightless, paralyzed. Israel does not render them visible to the world because it protects their privacy and dignity.

Counterbalanced to this picture of the world as it is, what could possibly give us belief in a higher being, or at least in the possibility of a moral universe? Israel, for one, which remains one of the miracles of all time, taking the remnants of Jewry from the stinking hellholes of Europe, providing sanctuary, and creating a vibrant democracy of incredible strength and courage. And, of course, America. What would the world be without the United States? Who would stand up to the terrorists? Who would provide any hope or example of human decency in the world? Who else but the best democracy in the world could right its wrongs to its black citzens in such a thorough-going, committed and comprehensive way as we have done?

Who can forget that while Jews were being slaughtered pitilessly and horrendously in Nazi camps, American Jews were thriving in the United States? (Although yes, millions could have been admitted to our shores if FDR had let them in). But still--as I write in "The Great Kisser," a Holocaust survivor I met told me of himself and his brother cracking lice off each other’s bodies for hours at night in the barracks of the Kaiserwald concentration camp. At the same moment in the United States, "Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn and Samuel Goldwyn and Irving Thalberg ruled the studios. America, America! How the Jews flourished. Einstein, Freud, the Marx Brothers, Ted Lewis, Mel Torme, Bess Meyerson, Clifford Odets, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Arthur Miller, Irwin Shaw, A.J. Liebling, Jerry Lewis, Jennie Grossinger, Philip Rahv, Delmore Schwartz, Walter Winchell, Lillian Hellman--and Ben Hecht and Meyer Levin, who were labeled ranging lunatics for talking about the Holocaust openly in ways the New York Times refused to do."

And how we are reviled for our decency, our kindness, our democracy. Morton Sobell, co-conspirator with the Rosenbergs, made one honest observation in his life in his book, "On Doing Time." He wrote of getting out of prison in the 1970s and noting with amazement that blacks no longer bowed their heads but held their heads high with pride and dignity. He wasn’t writing about the Soviet paradise he’d given his life for; he was writing about the civil-rights revolution in the United States. What country would so determinedly change course within a period of perhaps forty years as the United States has done, thoroughly integrating its black population, including into the highest offices and best educations available anywhere in the world? The America of the 1930s had its despicable system of segregation in the South, its pockets of anti-Semitism, its American Firsters sympathizing with Hitler. anyone expressing those sentiments today would be totally ostracized, unless, of course, they were on the Left and sugar-coating their hatreds of Jews, Israel and the United States in politically correct language.

So, for me, the only redemption for human suffering--the only countries that relieve and fight human suffering and oppose tyranny--that I can see are the United States, Israel, and the handful of other democracies that still exist because of them. And of course, personal examples of human decency, nobility and courage.

Frimet Roth sensitively cites Rabbi Shapira’s writing of the "monstrous torments" of the Holocaust and that "it is indeed incredible that the world exists after so many screams...as if, G-d forbid, He remained untouched! It’s incomprehensible." That’s exactly where I stand with God.

I don’t want to overstate the case, but certain key segments of the American literary world have since the 1960s attempted to erase the awareness of suffering. Norman Podhoretz has written of the celebration of mindlessness and incoherence, the suppression of introspection, that marked the work of the beats, of Ginsberg, Kerouac and the rest. This state of insistent "innocence" blocked out history and suffering to the extent that was possible. By now we have an even more ingrained version, the "Hollywoodization of suffering": the avoidance of pain, the erasure of history at all costs. I recently heard a screenwriter in his thirties who had just returned from Hollywood speak of his trip: "It was okay...I saw a guy who spent ten years in the Gulag. That was cool." Someone else’s suffering was the source of titillation and pleasure for this "artist."

The super-cool, hip attitude of the beats has been expanded in much of literature (with honorable exceptions) to the frigid, the mannered, the strained the the grotesque--so that as greatly gifted a writer as Philip Roth can produce an artifricial ode to a man in old age still carrying out his adolescent sexual rebellion in "Sabbath’s Theater" to the degree that he masturbates on the grave of his deceased lover. Roth received countless accolades for this inauthentic celebration of a "free spirit." this forced grotesquerie is, like its obverse, sentimentality, unreal, and skirts the complexity of real feeling, suffering and conflict in human existence. These are the narcissistic attitudes toward life and history (although certainly not always shared by Roth himself) that lead to the believe that George W. Bush, not Islamic fascism and terrorism, is the number one enemy of mankind.

Probably the key exemplar of this viewpoint is Norman Mailler, recently celebrated in a sandalous, incoherent five-page piece by Lee Siegel in the New York Times Book Review. In that amazing demonstration of sophistry, unless I missed something in that clunky cascade of words, Siegel argued that Mailer’s long history of artistic failures were somehow a feat of greatness that dwarfed the real achievements of most of his contemporaries. I’ve heard the revered Mailer defended in every nook and cranny of the literary community even as his reputation has simultaneously plummeted. Most recently, when I mentioned the famous incident of wife-stabbing, a writer said to me, "It was only a penknife."

When I am in the company of Gulag survivors and the parents of children murdered by terrorists as I am in this symposium-- a political prisoner of 19 years in a Chinese prison camp, the parent of a child who was killed in a terrorist attack, or the father of a son heinously tortured to death who represented the best of mankind: Danny Pearl, about whom Judah Pearl writes so poignantly and beautifully--I feel humbled by the limited, less severe kind of experience I have known. But Frimet Roth also writes of "the inherent sadness in our existence," even when we have not been touched by the overriding historic tragedies of the epoch. I do see so much personal suffering that is also not relieved by God. The kind of suffering I observe most is related to age and fate and the human condition: either of the neurotic-psychotic variety or the physical kind,including the death of cherished mates. What I witness probably most is the way that age impacts on some of those around me: those who were physically vigorous and youthful suddenly assailed by terrible, mortal illnesses, or those who were, in their youth, charming, daffy, creative neurotics, becoming seriously disturbed, helpless, financially precarious, unenchanting senior citizens.

I am honored to be in the company of this symposium, whose participants, in the beauty and tenacity of their accomplishments, their artistic and scholarly achievements, their wisdom, their morality, and their human commitment, defy the depredations and debilitations of tyrants, history, time and aging. Theirs is the triumph we all aspire to. I do not need a God to comfort me; they, and many others, are examples enough for me.