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Remembrance
Enters Eternity
Escape From
Mount Moriah
by Jack Engelhard
ComteQ Publishing,
2000, 118 pages, ISBN:
0967407486
Reviewed by Dr. Eugene E.
Narrett
Remarkable lives, lives filled with
chiaroscuro, make for great literature,
fiction or nonfiction, and Jack
Engelhard's remarkable life has led to a
notable literary gift. He has demonstrated
this with novels so taut with ideas and
action that they find their way to
Hollywood (and inevitable simplification
-- Indecent Proposal) and more
recently, with a volume of memoirs whose
succinct evocations of person, place and
mental process allow worlds of sentiment
to stand silently present without crowding
or directing the reader's own thoughts and
response. Impelled by his sensitivity to
the ambiguities of motive, to empathy,
ambivalence, and striving for a saving
certainty, Engelhard is a master of the
telling moment and phrase, of the summary
comment (though his characters often get
the last word) that implies even more than
it clearly states. In evoking the fullness
of a human person he has the simplicity
and deftness of a master: a sharp mind,
self-awareness, and a deep and feeling
heart.
The author knows that the roots contain
the essence of the tree and its fruit, and
that they live in its seeds, however far
the winds of circumstance may carry them.
And so in this volume, vignettes about his
root, his father, are frequent for the man
was an exemplary figure of loss and
spiritual richness. Noah Engelhard was one
of those immigrants who never adapted to
the wrenching culture shock of his forced
transplantation (from France to Canada
during WW II). Originally a youthful Torah
scholar and leather cutter in Poland, wars
in the east brought him to France where he
prospered as a master designer of leather
handbags, and owned a factory in Toulouse.
But the Nazi occupation destroyed that,
and his generosity to other refugees
exhausted the remainder. In Canada, his
classic designs were out of fashion and
he, Noah ben Yakov became "Joe," the guy
who fetched Cokes in another man's
factory: "Joe! Joe! Where's my Coke!"
Like many immigrants, the author's
father was a Jew too gentle and ambivalent
to impose his teaching methodically on his
son; he was an uprooted Jew who carried
the House of Study within him and who
searched every Sabbath for a synagogue in
which the Rabbi was not a shallow
positivist, affirming his congregation's
attenuated Judaism; who searched even for
a serious argument that would revive the
world of Torah that had been violently
uprooted.
- Left to his own choosing, the
life of a scholar would have suited my
father fine. He belonged in a House of
Study, secluded from the turmoil of
business, removed from the urgencies of
daily cares. In a Yeshiva his knowledge
of Torah could be stimulated, his
wisdom put to the test -- and his worth
as a scholar and a man could be
recognized and appreciated.
-
- But that never
happened.
In that clarity of description, in that
gift for succinct summary and alertness to
pathos, in that sensitivity to the
emotional demands and language a culture
imparts, Engelhard's literary gifts
shine.
Along the way, in brisk but loving
detail he sketches another world, a
distinct culture not merely remembered but
felt so fully it is reconstructed in
spirit:
- Approaching the
[factory] landing you could
hear the roar of the sewing machines.
Closer, you smelled the adhesives and
the leather. Cutters were bent over
huge tables slicing up giant stretches
of animal hides. They were grinding in
frenzy, never gazing up from their
machines, as though somewhere in their
urgency of livelihood they had lost the
human sense of wonder and
curiosity.
As Engelhard paints it, the world of
exile extends from the fashionable and
also the back streets of postwar Montreal,
from two-bit backbreaking jobs, to tenuous
status as low-rent tenants at whim, to
country vacations paid for by nerve, worry
and improvised labor. Always aware and
happy with what he's gained in the New
World, especially as an American, he is
keenly aware and deftly sketches the
soul-wrenching loss and distortions that
emigration, especially forced emigration,
imposes on the individual and on
relationships.
But these experiences -- with rats in
the weeds at a garden-nursery, with
Jew-hating city toughs, with relatives,
rich and poor, who couldn't relate, with
eviction and frequent poverty -- did not
defeat but aroused and deepened the
author's sense of awe at the variety and
mystery of human motive and deeds. His
insight was quickened by seeing his
parents various and imperfect efforts to
adjust to the loss of one world and
immersion in another in which he moved
almost effortlessly; but like many first
generation Jews, never with a sense of
fully belonging; always with a sense that
something essential had been left
behind.
This volume's attention to uprootedness
(so like the masterly paintings of Samuel
Bak, of whose art, and whose own memoir,
this work reminds me), and a lifetime
reflecting on the many facets of this
experience, enable Engelhard to offer
several wonderful epigrams about the
singularity of three millennia of Jewish
experience, so awesomely recapitulated in
the past 60 years, the years of his life
(born July 1940, as the Nazis overran
France). In discussing the nearly
untranslatable Jewish expression, "nu," a
word that carries bemused acceptance
within it, Engelhard speaks of the paradox
of Jewish survival, of belief in or memory
of a pure flame inside a soul repeatedly
buried in dust and ashes. What results
when filtered by centuries "is a kind of
hopeful resignation," he writes; a will to
live and somehow taste some of life's
sweetness that always carries "both hope
and hopelessness." The mind sees and the
heart feels the defeats and
impossibilities of realizing the dream;
yet the flame in the soul still glows. As
the Hassidic saying puts it, "the soul of
man is the candle of God." And though God
is only marginally present in these
stories, one senses that Engelhard is
always ready, even eager, for Him to
speak.
Many of these short vignettes have a
clarity so vivid in detail and sparse in
evocative diction that they shine, filling
the everyday prosaic world with the spirit
of the world to come. In this they are
like Hassidic folk tales transposed to the
cities of suburbs of the new world in the
1940's and '50s, tales whose traits kept
their wonder for someone who saw one world
in the context of another. This quality is
very palpable in memoirs like, "Relatives
from America," "A Sabbath Drive," "A
Telegram from Israel," and "A Sister from
the Past." Mystery and ambiguity fill the
unspoken spaces of these simple tales.
Needing a lift into town on a Sabbath
afternoon in the country, young Jack gets
a lift from a friendly French Canadian
driver though neither understands the
other: one has no English; the other,
little French. But the vignette is not one
of simple goodness or transcultural
compassion. Though seemingly no one knew
or saw him riding in a car on Sabbath, a
few weeks later the Rabbi of Jack's
Yeshiva summoned him and his father to
meet. "You were seen hitchhiking on the
Sabbath," he charges. "When?" his father
asks. "Where was this?" There's no answer,
just the unexplained fact. Hadn't he
learned over and again that "One sees"?
That "on the Day of Judgment, even the
walls will testify against you..." Was the
kindly driver a tempting demon? Is it
possible that just as was believed in the
vanished world of Jewish Poland, nothing
is hidden, not even in suburban North
America for a family that is sporadically
religious; perhaps especially for those
who are sporadically religious?
Wonder arises from those simple moral
dilemmas everyone finds as they walk their
daily lives, or simply gets the mail. One
day a telegram comes from Israel: Jack's
father's mother, whom Jack himself has
never seen and with whom his father has
scarcely communicated in half a century,
has "at age 102, been gathered to her
people," in Israel. Why should his father,
who treasures the memory of his mother's
saintliness, know such a sad fact, one he
cannot change? So the youth conceals the
telegram until the banal routines of a
laundry day bring it to light. And then, a
guilty revelation dawns: "I had committed
a sin; I had interfered with the
mitzvah of sitting shiva and
saying kaddish. My sin could never
be undone." Walking the streets of
Montreal that evening, the dark sky
suddenly opened to reveal an intense
brightness, as if in supernal confirmation
of his thoughts. And yet, consoling the
penitent, his father's forgiveness comes
like a benediction: "You meant well;
what's done is done." In the meantime,
wonder and the Beyond have asserted
themselves in a heart formed by millennia
of exile and the imperative to remember
and hold on. Common sense and the
commonplace do not negate, Engelhard
suggests, but serve as vessels for
retaining wonder and faith. Assimilation
is never complete; it too becomes a medium
through which transcendence will emerge
and shine, layering people and events with
eternal meaning and dignity.
And these are remarkable people,
teeming memorably in a book so spare and
easy in its telling one reads it in less
than two quick hours. And then one returns
to reflect, to reflect on the warmhearted
but officious sister, whose loneliness
makes her needy, and whose finely honed
sense of shame leads her to depart as
suddenly as quietly as she arrives. On a
middle-aged man, a holocaust survivor,
weeping at the sight of a newspaper
photograph, of a Jewish soldier, finally;
of a talented, bullying choirmaster, and
the shame of muddy boots at a wedding; of
an adolescent watching the World Series at
a malt shop while the local Romeos flirt
and then go out back with the beauty
behind the counter, taking the TV with
them. These anecdotes are rich with a
range of initiations and a broad palette
of moods, insights, and memorable
encounters with Truth packaged simply for
our wonder.
The collection ends with an anecdote in
which Engelhard, remembering an annual
visit to an Orthodox synagogue, finds
himself among men of his father's
generation and culture, looks at himself
as a new father in the context of what
kind of Jewish tradition, and what sources
of Jewish strength he, an externally
assimilated Jew, will be able to bequeath
to his own son. As he listens to the
chanted prayers and ancient melodies, he
writes
- It occurred to me then, that I
was now 42, and when my father was that
age, he was an old man, one of the old
men of the synagogue.
-
- He also knew
everything.
-
- Years from now I wonder, who
there will be to show me the right
page? And will there be any old men
left for my son? He is only two years
old, and the old men cover him with
love.
-
- To them he is the flame. He is
their eternity.
In his doubt, sense of loss, and in his
love, Engelhard affirms his caring and his
faith for the threefold intertwining of
his son, his people and tradition. In the
above question, his succinct but poetic
description answers itself in an ancient
verse. "In Zion there will be a
remnant, and they will inherit..."
These wonderfully readable memoirs have
the vivid reality of a lived dream; they
sparkle like the islands of an enduring
world amid the dazzling, distracting
sea-spray of our everyday lives that
immerse us in the present. We know there
is more to us: that there must be a living
soul. He intentionally shaped his
reminiscences into eighteen memoirs,
explaining that the number '18' in Hebrew
spells "life," chai, and also the
affirmation, "he lives!"
Memory and sensitivity, like
self-restraint and shame, are branches of
love and of understanding the mysterious
beauty of life. To offer another metaphor,
they are a well of soul distilled into
generations of Jews for millennia by
unique paths of suffering and hope. Beyond
what the mind believes or reason can show,
the vivid descriptions and memories in
this book are forms of honoring this
tradition, sparkling simple facts
attesting to its endurance.
Order
at Amazon
-- Order
at Powell's
About
the reviewer...
The
reviewer has published extensively on
American culture and politics and on the
history and geopolitics of the Middle
East. Dr. Narrett earned his BA, MA and
PhD degrees from Columbia University in
New York City. An art critic, artist, book
reviewer, columnist, in recent years he
created, directed and taught in the
Liberal Studies Program at Cambridge
College. He is the author of
Gathered
against
Jerusalem
(2000), Israel
Awakened
(2001), and Israel
and the
Endtimes
(2006).
Visit
Dr. Narrett's Essay Archive in The Radical
Academy
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