Мария Степанова - In Memory of Memory

This episode has a tragicomic Russian counterpart — a quote from a letter by Boris Pasternak, written in 1926, “Everywhere you look, a mass of yids, and — this has to be heard — it’s almost as if they deliberately want to make themselves into caricatures, or they’re writing their own denunciations: they haven’t even a shadow of aesthetic feeling.”

Unlike Proust himself, the narrator is not burdened by his Jewish or homosexual identity. He was created by the author in the role of an observer, a piece of clear glass, whose gaze would be unaffected by the shameful diseases of the century, one of which Proust considered to be assimilated Jewishness, not knowing himself what was harder to forgive: being different, or wishing to be like everyone else. In his opinion this wish was doomed to failure. In a later episode with Bloch there is an impromptu parade of “the unwelcome” across the Balbec beach, whose main failings are the peculiarities of their breed, which can’t be drowned out, or polished out of them:

Always together, with no blend of any other element, when the cousins and uncles of Bloch or their coreligionists male or female repaired to the Casino, the ladies to dance, the gentlemen branching off toward the baccarat tables, they formed a solid troop, homogeneous within itself, and utterly dissimilar to the people who watched them go past and found them there again every year without ever exchanging a word or a sign with them, whether these were on the Cambremers’ list, or the presiding magistrate’s little group, professional or “business” people, or even simple corn dealers from Paris, whose daughters, handsome, proud, derisive and French as the statues at Rheims, would not care to mix with that horde of ill-bred tomboys, who carried their zeal for “seaside fashions” so far as to be always apparently on their way home from shrimping or out to dance the tango. As for the men, despite the brilliance of their dinner jackets and patent-leather shoes, the exaggeration of their type made one think of what people call the “intelligent research” of painters who, having to illustrate the Gospels or the Arabian Nights, consider the country in which the scenes are laid, and give to Saint Peter or to Ali-Baba the identical features of the heaviest “punter” at the Balbec tables.

It isn’t altogether clear on first reading who would not care to mix with whom: the “solid troop” or those who watch them pass. Of course, people of the Orient, as E.T.A. Hofmann described them a century before, could certainly be ill-educated and ridiculous: this is often the preserve of those who have had to arm themselves against constant suffering and who mistrust sudden good fortune. Jewish children of the Belle Époque were the first or second generation to have a secular education; they were the product of a series of decisions, each of which drew them further out from under the protecting roof of tradition. Hundreds of new concepts, of shifts of behavior and changes to everyday ritual, entered their lives together with education, and all these needed to be invented from scratch, based on this novel object, culture , to which they now had a right. It is somewhat comparable to the early post-Soviet experience as I remember it twenty years later, now life has more or less straightened itself out: the new words have found homes, and what was once clumsy mimicry seems to have become the reality.

In the 1900s the new language, spoken with an unaccustomed awkwardness, began on the beaches, in artistic salons, in rooms misted with cigarette smoke where young medical students gathered. The first attempts to talk about the world as if it now also belonged to them had a parodic quality. They were overly demonstrative, the outsider’s uneasy connoisseurship, trying to create the impression that “we Jews” have occupied such armchairs forever, that there is not a restaurant, a wagon-lit, a lift that could surprise us, that we have the right to admire ourselves in the plate glass mirrors of civilization. This is where Mandelstam’s famous “yearning for world culture” originates — it is nothing to do with the literary movement Acmeism, a short-lived Russian phenomenon. Mandelstam clutched to the memory of world culture as he did to the life buoy of friendship, but his longing for conversation as equals was more ancient and more pained.

In Proust’s novel the young writer Bloch describes going to Venice to “sip iced drinks with the pretty ladies,” and he says of the resort hotel: “As I cannot endure to be kept waiting among all the false splendor of these great caravansaries, and the Hungarian band would make me ill, you must tell the ‘lighft-boy’ to make them shut up, and to let you know at once.” In a letter written in 1909, eighteen-year-old Mandelstam also makes colossal efforts to write in keeping with the European tone of his addressee, the poet Vyacheslav Ivanov:

I have strange taste: I love flashes of electricity over the surface of Lake Geneva, respectful footmen, the silent flights of lifts, the marble entrance halls to hotels, and English girls playing Mozart to one or two listeners in a dimly lit salon. I love bourgeois, European comfort and I have a sentimental attachment to it, as well as a physical one. Perhaps my weak health is to blame for this? I never ask myself if it’s a good thing.

This is a touching and convincing imitation of what will later be the theme of Nabokov’s opening chapters in Speak, Memory : the comforting presence (and, later, the utter absence) of Swiss hotels, English collapsible tubs, and gleaming Pullman cars. Yet something almost imperceptible in the intonation gives the impression of a tiny gap between the author and his bourgeois comfort. Mandelstam’s family fell into rapid decline and this was his last visit abroad, and to Europe. He would remind himself of it all his life, up until the point when his memory is compressed into his late, great poems in the 1930s.

In the year after the Revolution, in the St. Petersburg Writers’ House an evening of new poetry was announced. Somewhere in the Writers’ House there was a bust of the poet Nadson, who had died young. He had been incredibly famous at the end of the nineteenth century and was now all but forgotten, twenty years later. His friend, the elderly Maria Dmitrievna Vatson, said of the bust to Anna Akhmatova, “I want to get him out of there, because he might get hurt otherwise.”

I am so scared of hurting these people, even more so because I feel it in myself, this sense of hurt, a blood link and a proximity with each of them, all those who hid their Jewishness like an embarrassing defect, or paraded it like a cockade in full view of everyone. Very soon even that choice became a fictitious one: whatever a Jew did — with his seed, his immortal soul, his corrupting flesh — he could not alter the contract drawn up with the external world, as the twentieth century demonstrated. Even the right to weakness (to treason and denial) would be withdrawn with the other rights, as even atheists and converts were drawn into the extermination camps.

On April 20, 1933, Thomas Mann wrote in his diary: “I could have a certain amount of understanding for the rebellion against the Jewish element…” He was writing about the recently introduced law forbidding Jews to work for the Civil Service, the first of dozens of carefully planned restrictions intended to set into motion the engine of regression in the Jewish element , their thorough and meticulous distancing from civilization, and its capacity to make life bearable. Step by step their existence was reduced to the bare biological minimum. Among all the various prohibitions (visiting swimming pools, public parks, stations, concert halls, traveling around Germany, buying newspapers, meat, milk, tobacco, owning woolen goods or pets) there was one stipulation: after August 1938 every Jew whose name did not unambiguously indicate Jewish heritage had to add “Israel” or “Sarra” to his or her name: Maria Sarra Stepanova, for example.