A Book of Secrets by Michael Holyroyd

At this point, reader, I throw up my hands in despair at any of these characters behaving with proper consideration for their biographers – Victoria Glendinning, James Lees-Milne, Diana Souhami, me. A tragic love story –for this is what it is – has been made chaotic and incredible by the tumult of contradictions. Lady Sackville, who was threatening to cut Vita out of her Will and come to the aid of “little Harold”, could not help observing (with a tinge of admiration) that it was ‘quite like a sensational novel’.



Early in February 1920, the two women headed erratically for Dover. On the way Violet tried to tell Vita that on their last night together she had allowed [her husband] Denys some degree of sexual intimacy. But Vita shut her ears to this. The very suspicion drove her crazy. The choreography of their story grew wildly complex. Violet (who hated traveling alone and had never done so before) nervously crossed the channel by herself and proceeded to Amiens. Vita, preparing to follow her the next day from Dover, sent telegrams to her parents and [her husband] Harold so that they should know her plans and be able to rescue her. Instead she was unexpectedly joined by Denys whom she hadn’t telegraphed. The two of them, who had recently wished each other dead, got along surprisingly well as they they traveled to Calais together where, another surprise, they met Violet who, unable to be alone any longer in Amiens, had found her way back to Calais. The following day, after an evening in Violet’s hotel bedroom discussing French literature, the three of them hurried on by train to Amiens from where Denys, his entreaties all rejected, traveled back in despair to England.



Denys was suffering from tuberculosis, but to Alice Keppel [Violet’s mother’s] way of thinking this was hardly an excuse for his abysmal retreat from France – she had expected better from a decorated war hero. Quickly taking command, she procured an essential ingredient in a modern novel of sensation – a small aeroplane – and instructed Denys to fly back to Amiens. This development was much to the liking of Lady Sackville who inquired whether there was room in the plane for little Harold. There was and the two husbands flew off together.



The confrontation between Denys and Harold and Violet and Vita at the ruined town of Amiens was truly dreadful. Vita appeared shocked by the appalling abuse Violet kept shouting at Denys, who remained silent and pale as a ghost. “To my dying day I shall never forget the look on his face,’ she wrote ‘…If he a slipped down and died at our feet I should scarcely been surprised.’ But it was what Denys had confided to Harold on their plane journey, and which Harold now whispered to Vita, that suddenly changed the direction of events. Vita already had her suspicions – though she had tried to stifle them. Had Violet allowed Denys to have sexual intercourse with her? Did she ‘belong’ to him? Denys refused to answer these questions even when Vita promised never to ‘set eyes on Violet again’ if the answer was yes. And when she questioned Violet herself she saw a look of ‘absolute terror’ pass over her face. That look gave her the answer and it was obviously yes. Yet she knew how limp and docile Violet was in bed, how passive she could be in someone’s arms, how she permitted anything being done to her, how her abandonment suggested masochistic tendencies.


Could Denys have done to Violet some of those very things Vita herself had done? ‘I was half mad with pain,’ she wrote. Violet, now in tears, held ferociously on to her. ‘I couldn’t get away till Denys helped me,” Vita remembered. Guarded by Harold, Vita began packing – then suddenly dashed through to kiss Violet before hurrying off with him. They took a train to Paris from where Vita was to continue her journey home. But Denys and Violet, traveling separately, unfortunately took the same train to Paris …And Denys, seeing Vita in hysterics, ‘perjured himself’ (in Harold’s opinion) by assuring her that there had been no sexual relations between Violet and himself after all.



Even a sensational novelist would end the story here…




‘As soon as one had left her one wanted to go back to her,’ Vita wrote in her novel Challenge, ‘thinking that this time, perhaps, one would succeed better in seizing and imprisoning the secrets of her elusiveness.’ And so after a few weeks apart, they met at Avignon and traveled on together to Bordighera, San Remo and Venice. They were quarreling now, promising one thing, threatening another – and then Violet fell ill with jaundice, ‘a most unromantic complaint’. They could no longer be happy together or apart. “We are invited to Happiness,’ Violet wrote, ‘and we don’t answer the invitation.’ But the invitation date had passed, Vita believed. ‘We weren’t happy – how could we be?’



‘We hardly see each other now,’ Violet complained after they returned in the spring of 1920. This was partly as the result of severe policing by Alice Keppel. The scandal circulating round her elder daughter was by now extreme and the family was in danger of becoming, Mrs. Keppel feared, ‘the laughing stock of the country.’ Already decent families were refusing to invite Violet to their houses. It was essential that no further odium be added to the wretched business before Sonia married the affluent Hon. Roland Cubitt. As the date of Sonia’s marriage approached, and afterwards the news came of her pregnancy, Alice Keppel’s treatment of Violet grew harsher. ‘Her undisguised hatred of me is a terrible thing,’ Violet told Vita’…She says that her affection for me is dead, and that after Sonia’s baby is born, I may do what I like.’



Might Vita even now rescue her? ‘I can’t live any longer without seeing you,’ Violet wrote. She tried to jump out the window but was prevented by Denys, though he had advised her, since she set no value on life and was making everyone wretched, that suicide might be the ‘most decent thing one can do.’ Mrs. Keppel was inclined to agree.’ Mama made me cry and cry last night,’ Violent wrote her friend Pat Dansey. ‘She said that if she had been me she would have killed herself long ago!’



Feeling there was no one else who cared what happened, she still relied on Vita. ‘I want to reconquer all I have lost,’ she declared. The correspondence between them was crowded with resolutions, evasions, misgivings, sadness. Violet paraded her helplessness and appealed to Vita’s sense of power. It was an awful year with short haphazard meetings that opened up old wounds on parting. ‘We wanted far too thirstily to be uninterruptedly together,’ Vita explained. And so, defying everyone, they absconded one more time, staying in Hyeres and Carcassonne from January to March 1921. It was, as it always had been, like ‘two flames leaping together.’ But this journey was, in the words of Harold Nicolson’s biographer Norman Rose, ‘The last flickering of a blazing fire.’ The fire never quite went out. Meeting again some twenty years later, Vita warned Violet that ‘we must not play with fire again.’



‘ I think we have got something indestructible between us…a bond of childhood and subsequent passion, such as neither of us will share with anyone else,’ Vita wrote to Violet just at the end of World War II. Violet had always believed this to be true. But by March 1921, when Vita was finishing the narrative of their affair and wondering in ‘great unhappiness’ whether she might ‘never see Violet again’, Violet already knew the answer: ‘You have chosen, my darling; you had to chose between me and your family, and you have chosen them.’



Over fifty years later, when Vita’s novel Challenge was finally published in Britain, there appeared to be ‘nothing here for the prurient’, Paul Theroux wrote in the review for The Times, ‘one is left wondering why it was suppressed for reasons of delicacy.’ But it would have shocked Lady Sackville’s friends because they knew the dramatis personae. Had Vita made the protagonists two women, the novel might have gained a place in the history of lesbian literature as a predecessor to Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (which Vita thought ‘loathsome’). When it was eventually published in 1974, it sold well as a romantic pendant to Portrait of a Marriage. But the social climate had changed from one of deference before the aristocracy to one of incredulity. ‘The literary merits of the book are strong,’ Nigel Nicolson stated in his forward. But reviewers were unable to discover this merit. Today Challenge merely emphasizes the contrasting achievement of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. It is an inanimate book – with an interesting subtext.



Violet Trefusis’s novels ( Echo, Broderier Anglaise, Hunt the Slipper, Pirates at Play), however, coming at the end of a great tradition of the novel as social tragi-comedy of manners, added a penetrating and authentic minor variation to the genre, which might be called flirtatious tragedy. She combined French wit with English seriousness and relied, not simply on customs belonging to a social milieu that no longer exists, but on the way human nature operates in a highly mannered and amoral circumstances. She was a chronicler of the human heart. The writer who worked alone for two three hours each morning went about her business ruthlessly dissecting the women who occupy the rest of the day so emptily in smart society ‘not caring a damn for anyone.’ Unable to write at the end of her life, she is stranded: ‘utterly lost, miserably incomplete, condemned to leading a futile, purposeless existence’. As she had predicted in one of her letters to Vita.(Violet died on March 1, 1972)


A Book of Secrets; Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers by Michael Holyroyd Farrar, Straus and Giroux, N.Y. 2010

Salt by Adam Gopnik

The newer cookbooks show two overt passions: one is for simplicity, the other is for salt. The chef’s cookbook from the fancy place has been superseded by the chef’s cookbook from the fancy place without the fancy-place food. Simplicity’s appeal as a religion is inherent. But the trend is in part a reaction to the cult of complexity of the Ferran Adria school of molecular cooks, with their cucumber foam and powdered octopus. Reformations make counter-reformations as surely as right makes left; every time someone whitewashes a church in Germany, someone else paints angels on a ceiling in Rome.



But simplicity remains the most complicated of all concepts. In one month we may stumble over six recipes for a ragout or Bolognese – plain spaghetti sauce, as it use to be known, when there was only one kind – with chicken livers or without, diced chuck roast or hamburger, white wine or red. Yet all movements in cooking believe themselves to be movements toward greater simplicity. (Even the molecular gastronomes believe that they are truly elemental, breaking things down to the atomic level.)




Simplicity is style, but salt is the ornamental element –the idea of tasting flights of salt being a self-satirizing notion that Swift himself couldn’t have come up with. The insistence on many kinds of salt – not merely sea salt and table salt but hand-harvested fleur de sel, Himalayan red salt, and Hawaiian pink salt – is everywhere, and touching, because, honestly, it all tastes like salt. And now everyone brines. Brining, the habit of dunking meat in salty water for a bath of a day or so, seems to gave first appeared out of the koshering past in Cook’s Illustrated, sometime in the early nineties, as away of dealing with the dry flesh of the modern turkey, and then spread like ocean water in a tsunami, until now both Keller and Peel are keen to brine everything: pork roasts, chicken breasts, shrimp, duck.



Although brining is defended with elaborate claims to tenderness, what it really does is make food taste salty: we’re doing what our ancestors did, making meat into ham. All primates like the taste of salt; that’s a feature, not a bug. Salted food demands a salty sweet. I read that in Spain recently one connoisseur had “a chocolate ganache coated in breads floating in a small pool of olive oil with fleur de sal sprinkled on it," while we can now make pecan-and-salt caramel-cheesecake chocolate mousse with olive oil, and flaky-salt sticky peanut cookie bars for ourselves.



The salt fetish has, I think, a deeper and more psychological cause, too: we want to bond with the pro cooks. Most of what a pro cook has to his advantage comes down to the same advantage that Caribbean sugarcane planters used to have: high heat and lots of willing slaves (The slaves seem happy, anyway, until they escape and write that testimonial, or start that cooking blog.) But the pro cook also tends to salt a lot more than feels right to an amateur home cook; both the late Bernard Loiseau and the Boston cook Barbara Lynch have confessed that hyper-seasoning and, in particular, high salting, is a big part of what makes pro cooks food taste like pro cooks’ food. The poor home cook, with no hope of an eight –hundred-degree brick oven, and lucky if he can indenture a ten-year-old into peeling carrots, can still salt hard – and so salt, its varieties and use, become a luxury replacement, a sign of seriousness even when you don’t have the tools of seriousness at hand.

Elizabeth Pennell by Adam Gopnik

The most original, and until our own day probably the best of all the attempts to blend narrative and instruction in a Cookbook, was the work of the now forgotten English writer Elizabeth Pennell whose revival we owe to the historian Talia Schaffer. Pennell was the first to see the cookbook as a literary form – a thing worthy saving and collecting, analyzing and writing for its own sweet and savory sake. Pennell was one of those rare astonishments, a person genuinely “out of time”. She would have been right at home in the 1980s, far more than she was in the 1890s: the Nigella Lawson of the Age of Whistler, or the Padma Lakshmi of Oscar Wilde’s set. She was many things – an English aesthete, who wrote for The Atlantic Monthly , and one of the first feminists who was not a bluestocking. “Gluttony is ranked among the deadly sins; it should be honored among the cardinal virtues” is the arresting first line of her 1896 Diary of a Greedy Woman.



Her portrait shows her as handsome, as the time would have had it, rather than really pretty – a slight off print of the Getty Girl type. She affirms women as gluttons, creatures of the flesh; and the erotic – indeed, oral erotic – content of her book is so evident as almost top embarrass the modern reader. “Accept the gospel of good living and the sexual problem will be solved,” she says, in one of the bluntest and most magical sentences of the late nineteenth century. Her self-declaration as a “greedy Woman” – not a dainty epicurean damsel, not a loving wife and mother providing for her wee mouths, but a woman with an appetite on her and a hunger in her – is one of the most charming, and yet truly “radical,” self-fashionings of the era.



Yet her diary is a cookbook – of a kind that wouldn’t reappear until our own time, a first person account of how to eat by cooking things. She recommends wine for breakfast –she is a partisan of Graves particularly, finding Pinot Noir to heavy, a judgment leading one to think that the clarets of our great-great-grandfathers days were much less fruit-forward than the ones we know – to be followed by Cognac but no sweet. She calls the British sandwich “grim and gruesome” (which until around 1980, it invariably was. Her ideal dinner is eerily contemporary, very much like one at Chez Panisse: a filet of beef with mushrooms but only market-fresh ones, pommes soufflees (a sophisticated sort of French fried potato), no desert, but a Port Salut cheese, and a single tangerine, the whole thing washed down with a good bottle of Burgundy.



Yet all of this is couched not as couched “Epicurean” revelry but as spurs to shopping and cooking. Her greed is productive. Her recipes are makeable but also offered as prose poems –for example, on turbot au gratin:



In Turbot gratin, the ecstatic possibilities are by no means limited. In a chaste silver dish, make a pretty wall of potatoes, which have been beaten to flour, enlivened with pepper and salt, enriched with butter and cream –cream thick and fresh and adorable- seasoned with Parmesan cheese and left on the stove for ten minutes, no more nor less; then let the wall enclose pieces of turbot, already cooked and in pieces, of melted butter and cream, with a fair covering of breadcrumbs; and rely on a quick [i.e. broiler hot] oven to complete the masterpiece.



Elizabeth Pennell had extremely, almost scarily, good taste. She loved Burgundy, Cognac, strong coffee; she wanted simple food that wasn’t too simple – roasted spring chicken, a ragout of mushrooms – and subscribed to the enduring truth that “the secret of good cooking lies in the discrete and sympathetic treatment of the onion.” ”And After,” she adds, “if you still hanker for the roast beef of old England, then go a gorge yourself at the nearest restaurant.” She wants you to accompany this with a good Beaune, and then with coffee, “a mix of Mocha and Mysore,” forgo feminine liqueurs, but rely on cognac,” the “immortal liquid,” and then “lean back and smoke in silence, unless speech, exchanged with the one kind spirit, may be golden and perfect as the dinner.”



She recommended salad as a meal, while deploring the “salad cream” that was still an alarming feature of British meals just a generation ago. She loved Italian food and put it on the same level as the French. Pasta she especially adored, introducing her readers to the delights of spaghetti, the “smaller and daintier variety” of macaroni. She has the sense to insist that the best way to it is is cooked al dente and served with grated Parmesan and butter.



I feel about Pennell as A.J. Liebling felt about Pierce Egan, his favorite chronicler of early 19th century prizefighting: that here at last is a friend at court, a source of wisdom, an ally. One of the hard-to-tell truths about even the best food writing before our time is that we often have to read past the food, which we don’t quite “get”, on our way to the hunger, which we do. Almost all descriptions of dinners past reveal something weird and Martian in the choices – you bounce along happily enough with Brillat-Savarin or even La Reyniere eating truffled turkey, and then suddenly you have long inscrutable stretches of boiled lamb and larks on brochettes and sweet Sauternes served withy boiled salmon in anchovy cream. Where, reading old recipe books, you usually say, “Huh?” as often as “Ummm,” with Pennell it’s all just right; there is nothing on her menus which is not delicious…



However new her sentiments, she still wrote in the form of a cookbook, reproducing in her own English aesthetic, Chelsea-and Whistler way, the mock-epic microscopic sound of the first generation of food writers, of Brillat-Savarin and Grimod.I have called their tone the tone of accepted defeat, the deep wisdom of loss, and Pennell, though writing from the triumphant seat of Victorian Britain, duly partakes of this tone, though she adapts it for the same reason that moves all English and American food writers unto our own day: the assumption is that good food is all over there, across the Channel, and that we over here can get it only on holiday and in memory. Her cookbooks are an anthology of evocations: breakfasts by the Loire, supper in Naples, a bouillabaisse from Marseille, or a dish of simple pasta from outside Rome. “In the dish of macaroni lies all of Italy for the woman with eyes to see or a heart to feel…olive clad slopes and lonely stone palms; the gleam of sunlit rivers winding with reeds and slim tall poplars, the friendly wayside trattoria and the pleasant refrain of the beaming cameriere, ‘Subito, Signora, ecco!” – a refrain of ceaseless as the buzzing of the bees among the clover.” Thinking of “the creamy subtle little Suisse cheese” recalls visions of Paris, radiant in Maytime, the long avenues and boulevards all white and pink with blossoming horse chestnuts, the air heavy laden with the fragrance of flowers; a vision of the accustomed corner in the old restaurant looking out towards the Seine and of the paternal waiter holding the fresh Suisse on a dainty green leaf. Life holds few such thrilling interludes.”



She laments the philistine North she calls her home, even as her heart inclines toward the Elysian fields. Her advocacy of strong drink and stronger coffee, in a nation of tea-drinkers, is amazing, and she writes, all to accurately, that “over the barbarous depths into which the soul of the inspiring berry has been dragged in unhappy Albion, it is kinder to draw a veil.”


Alas, as every Canadian knows, there are no springs so sweet as those that come a week too soon, and then fade back into winter. The delight in sharing recipes that Pennell’s writing stirs was ended by the frost of educational necessities; the budding possibilities of the personal cookbook were nipped by the need to teach. The form would break in two: food writing, the cookbook improper, an offshoot essentially of travel literature , preserved some of Elizabeth’s tone: meanwhile, the cookbook proper evolved into something big and impressive, with the colorings of authority, from a dictionary to an encyclopedia, from an anthology to a grammar.

…………………………………………………………………………



The bad habit of the strategist is to go one bridge too far, and the worse vice of the over-educated is to read one book too many. It is a form of hubris: wiser to find something good, enjoy it, and not contaminate it by searching too much further. Do not discover Carlyle’s politics, or Scott Fitzgerald’s parenting, or Philip Larkin’s taste n porn. It will screw you up to no purpose, and diminish the writer without adding to your understanding.



You see, Elizabeth, I found the book you wrote upon your return to Philadelphia in 1904. It was full of life. Like me, you have and keep a warm appreciation of the beauty of old Philadelphia- its grid, so neatly laid out in inward-looking streets and squares with none of the restlessness of New York’s less perfectly ordered plan. The Schuylkill city’s spaciousness, its slight air of 18th century clarity and red-brick value. You love all that, too, and I read all that with pleasure.



And then I found within your book a line of stark, vigorous bigotry directed not just at the undeserving but at – well, directly at me, or, rather, at my not-so-distant great-grandparents, who were among the Russian Jews who have since your youth taken over the center city of Philadelphia. And what possessed you was not mere social bigotry but real animus. What particularly offended you was the presence of Russian Jews, on the legendary inner, tree-named streets of the city, Chestnut, Walnut, Spruce, and Pine. I take this to heart. My great-grandparents moved around town, as it happened, but ended up on Locust Street – just a few blocks away from Chestnut and right by Walnut, and I spent my quite “assimilated” but still distinctly literary-Jewish-intellectual boyhood riding and racing on Spruce and Pine. So I felt, on reading your words, as blue a betrayed as if I had found my wife in flagrante with another man – and a young, blond S.S. officer at that. And I have since discovered, what is harder to accept, that this was not a passing bigotry in an otherwise open-minded life, but a recurrent theme of yours: your husband, Joseph Pennell, in particular, was an obsessed anti-Semite who wrote and illustrated a long book about the hideousness of Russian Jews, serialized, bizarrely in The Pall Mall Gazette!



We have, of course, been here before. My beloved Chesterton had a true program (a word that sits in sinister poise with ‘pogrom’) for Jewish expulsion from England. With an effort o will, one can see, if not sympathize with, the shock of Old Americans at the newcomers – a prejudice not entirely unknown to the Jews who, having been here for a century, now see their “own” neighborhoods and landmarks disappear under the pressure of Muslims and West Indians. But there it is. You hate my kind, the the place where my kind went, in exactly the street where not just my kind but my family lived! Can we eat in peace knowing you despised my grandparents?



In a way, a bitter way, I should be grateful for this discovery, for it raises the central point of these pages, the key issue, the big thing too easily avoided: how much can the table truly reconcile – how sweetly can, or should, the rituals of social life reconcile us to our opposites? It is sentimental, surely, to pretend that the ugliness of life escapes the table; we rightly condemn the French intellectuals and artists who made too easy a social peace with their occupiers. But is it unrealistic to wish that some reconciliation of opposites might yet take place there? It is a hope, at least. Very different people do dine together, or try to. We think about Dr. Johnson, greatest of religious conservatives, reconciled over a good dinner in 1776 with John Wilkes, greatest libertine libertarians, through the good offices of James Boswell,. We can’t wish away differences, but we can hope for an end to hostilities. Disdain for others is a part of life; learning to dissimulate through manners is as good a cure as we may be able to hope for. While wait for the reign of Universal Love, we can at least share then premise of the Common Table.



Obviously we don’t want to sit down to dinner with Nazis but maybe we do want to sit down to dinner with people before they become Nazis, if it might help them from becoming so. It is not wrong to hope that the revelation of a common human touch, a common taste, shared and relished, can become itself an argument for humanity. We disapprove, and rightly, of those that at down with their occupiers, but we smile, and often, at the countless travelers’ tales of violence averted by bread and salt and beer.



The answer, I think, is that there isn’t one. We try to reconcile as many kinds as we can, eat with whom we can, draw lines as we have to, accept as much as we are able. Liberal tolerance is an injunction urging efforts, not an instruction manual making rules. It says, Do your best with as many as you can until the very last moment when you can’t anymore. And how will you know when you can’t? By the feeling in your stomach.



The Table Comes First; Family, France and the Meaning of Food by Adam Gopnik; Alfred A. Knopf, N.Y., 2011

Chava Rosenfarb by Jeff Sharlet

For years after the war and after the camps, Chava Rosenfarb woke up every morning at 4:00 a.m. to write. She’d open her eyes in the darkness and slip out of bed without waking her husband, make herself a cup of coffee, and sit down in her study, still wearing her nightgown. The study was even smaller than her kitchen – barely large enough for the table she had bought from a doctor’s office for ten dollars. On it she kept her notebooks. Sipping coffee, she’d start with the one on the top, and by the light of the table lamp, beneath a portrait of the Yiddish writer I.L. Peretz, she’d review yesterday’s stories. Rereading drew her back like a current, not into her pages but into the world to which she wanted to return. When she felt that world thickening around her, she’d skip ahead to where she’d left off the night before, pick up a pencil, and begin to write, slipping from her apartment in Montreal back to the last days of the Lodz ghetto.



First to greet her there was always her favorite creation, Samuel Zuckerman. Born of Chava’s memories of the rich men of Lodz, Samuel was a “salon Zionist” and heir to a fortune, a Polish patriot who dreamed of Israel for other, poorer people, he couldn’t bear to think of leaving Lodz. His passion was writing – a history of the Jews of Lodz, 250,000 of them, living in a city then known as the Manchester of Poland for its forest of smokestacks.



But Samuel never got to tell the story. The war always came, and the barbed wire of the ghetto always crept up around him, and Samuel always betrayed Chava. Every day Chava wrote, he betrayed her. He joined the Judenrat, the Nazi-controlled Jewish government of the ghetto. He gave in so easily that Chava – sitting in a pool of dim light before dawn, speaking aloud as if Samuel was before her- wondered if she’d ever really known him, if her creation was really her own. That raised an interesting question, one that made Chava’s pencil pause on an alef or a beyz or a giml. If she, the creator, had no power over her creation, what was the good of being an author?



The novel she was writing, Dern boym fun lebn (The Tree of Life) would chronicle the five and a half years leading up to the ghetto’s final “liquidation” in 1944; other than that unavoidable end, Chava had no clear plans for what might happen to any of her characters. She knew she could not save them, from themselves any more than from the Germans. One day, though, Samuel abandoned the Judenrat and its privileges, and joined his fellows' suffering. He rescued himself. For that Chava loved him.



After Samuel came Adam Rosenberg. A pig to Samuel’s peacock, he was even richer than Samuel, his mouth “filled with a treasure of gold teeth.” But he was hollow, an obese man stuffed with nothing. “Puffing and panting,” wrote Chava of Adam at the ball, “he pressed his immense belly to the frame of his skeletal wife, as her protruding shoulder blades moved in and out, up and down, like parts of a machine.” Adam loved machines more than people. And he hated his fellow Jews, their flesh his flesh, nearly as much as he did the Nazis. But Chava spoke with him as she did with Samuel, and she listened to him attentively as she listened to Rachel Eibushitz, a tall, handsome teenage girl with wide, gray-green eyes, the same color as Chava’s. It was Rachel who allowed Chava to write about all the others. Like Chava, Rachael realized early on that she was different; while others simply suffered in the ghetto, she watched. She was fascinated by their suffering and by her own, as alert as Adam to all the symptoms of humanity, but entranced, not revolted.



At first Rachel wrote poems about the people around her. When poetry seemed to delicate, her lines too easily broken, like bones grown brittle, she wrote stories. And when those became ashes, she wrote only in her mind, words without form. After it was all over – the ghetto, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belson – in a tiny room in a small, warm apartment during the cold mornings of Montreal, Rachel – Chava- wrote The Tree of Life…



As much as The Tree of Life plumbs the depths of collaboration, it explores the ethics of art in the presence of atrocity. Even artists – or, maybe, especially artists – face charges of betrayal. A painter is disdained by his colleagues because he makes portraits for the Nazis; he responds that his work hardly differs from that of a doctor: “Let’s not kid ourselves, by bringing a Jew back to health, you only fix a machine that works for the Germans.” A teacher finds herself denounced by her students for participating in musical events sponsored by Rumkowski. “Culture in the Ghetto is a sin!” they shout. Rachel, still in school, finds every literature class turned into an argument over literature’s right to exist at all. The lesson of the ghetto, insists one classmate, is that art is nothing more than a refuge for those who crave predictability, an alternative to real resistance. “Art is rebellion,” Rachel counters. “A desire to correct life.”



But Rachel has her own doubts. “Take the form of the novel,” she says:
The fact that it must have a beginning, a middle and an end. Life is not like that. Beginning and end are birth and death. But in between, life flows sometimes in waves, sometimes in circles, sometimes it moves forward, sometimes it’s still…there’s a lot of non-narrative in life, while in the novel the story must keep going.


By 1940 the German occupiers had squeezed the city’s quarter million Jews into a small slum, the new Lodz ghetto. Henekh Morgentaler’s father had been among the first taken by the Nazis; his sister escaped to Warsaw. His family gone, he spent most of his time with the Rosenfarbs. But even as the ghetto pressed Chava and Henry together, it began pulling them apart. Henry despaired. Chava flourished even as her once full body grew bony and spare.



“Usually when you’re hungry you don’t talk about art,” she remembered, echoing a line in her book, ‘Inter arma silent musae,’ as they say. And its true. But not for the Jews. The Jews could discuss poetry and art on an empty stomach.” And politics. Chava followed her father’s lead into the socialist Bund. She compiled a secret library for her comrades, going from door to door asking for books she would then loan out from her parents’ apartment. She collected more than three hundred volumes. Poets and historians and novelists and musicians were all reduced to the same simple genre, survival. They’d gather in small rooms and sit close for heat and chant their works like lamentations.



To the Bund “Jewish” was a nationality, not a religion, but Chava wanted that, too. The Germans had imposed on a Czech rabbi the job of creating a museum of the Jewish life they were strangling. They gave him the art and books they’d looted and a building to put everything in. Then they left him alone. The rabbi decided to bring the Torah to the ghetto. Beore the war the Torah was a book for educated men who knew Hebrew. Now, the rabbi thought, everyone needed it. He would begin with Psalms, 150 poems that contained all the states of the soul: gratitude and despair, joy and fury, vengefulness and mournfulness and sorrow and endurance and awe. But ordinary people, the men who were workers, not rabbis or rich men, and all the women, couldn’t read them. Hebrew was a holy tongue; they only knew Yiddish, dismissed as jargon, a poor man’s stew of German and Russian and Polish and some Hebrew. So, the rabbi decided, the Psalms must go into the stew. He began translating them.



But the rabbi was a refined man, his knowledge of mameloshn, “ the mother tongue”, rooted in German. He needed a real Yiddish writer to help him. A Yiddish writer? They were all dead or dying. “I could do this for you,” Chava said, her voice wary and her tone that of a businesswoman, speaking the language of starving people. In exchange for her help, the rabbi would give her a few hours a week in his warm office and all the coffee she could drink, supplied by the Germans. Deal. He would also teach her, a girl, Torah. She would accept that, too…



At the rabbi’s museum Chava met writers and artists, wraiths who gathered to make dioramas of prewar Jewish life and sip the rabbi’s German coffee. Among them was Shayevitch, author of an epic poem of the ghetto. Shayevitch introduced Chava to the secret circles of artists who met in the home of a serene woman who wrote loving verses about the Sabbaths of her childhood, fictionalized in The Tree of Life as Sara Samet.



After the Germans deported the Sabbath poet, the group met in the hut of a painter who made pictures of Lodz before the war. When he was taken away, Chava and Shayevitch continued their discussions on their own, at first walking through the ghetto streets, then, after Shayevitch’s wife and daughter were deported, by the stove in his barren home. Finally they talked about whatever art they still believed in as they hid in a tiny room of the Rosenfarb’s apartment, where they and Chava’s family and a few others hoped to wait out the liquidation of the ghetto. They lasted ten days before the Germans discovered them.



Chava took her poems and stories with her to the camps. As soon as she arrived, a Jewish capo, a collaborator, seized them and threw them in the mud. Shayevitch, who Chava had urged to bury his epic poems as others had buried documents and treasures, clutched his writing to him. It died with him in Dachau.



Chava’s mother was named Sima, and she was one of the few older women in the camps. Those who survived the ghetto and all the deportations of the old, the sick, the unlucky – shot in the woods of Chelmno and shoveled into mass graves – had been weeded out at Auschwitz. Sima arrived there with her two daughters. Leaning on their arms she had slowly moved forward in the line that forked like a snakes tongue: Left to work, right to gas and ashes. In between life and death stood Mengele; or at least that’s what Chava remembers now. Sima and her daughters came before him. Mengele pointed at Sima: the crematoria.


“No,” said one daughter. “She’s my sister.”

“Our older sister,” said the other daughter.

Mengele stared at the three women. “How old?”

“She’s thirty-nine,” Chava said, shaving enough years off her mother’s age.


“He looked at her and let her go,” Chava remembered decades later. “And that’s how we saved our mother.”



Herman, a German overseer, saved Chava. He gave her a pencil. It was the most precious gift she ever received, a dangerous thing to have and a dangerous thing to give. She asked him for it, and he had given it to her. No paper to write on, just the pencil. She hid it in her shoe, and when she returned to the barracks she kept it in her shoe, each step reminding her of her treasure until nightfall. Then she slipped the pencil out and took it to bed with her. She had an upper bunk, close to the ceiling. While the other prisoners froze, starved, and dreamed nightmares no worse than their days, Chava scribbled across the planks of the ceiling. When there was no more pencil left, she read the words she’s written. She read them every night before she slept. Slowly they crept into her mind. Each word became a part of her, until she no longer had to think to remember them. She hid them deep inside herself, and when the Germans sent her to Bergen-Belson, there to starve among corpses because the crematoria no longer worked, the words recited themselves within her, the beginning of the story of how Chava survived.



Chapter Six, “For Every Life Saved” in Sweet Heaven When I Die; Faith, Faithlessness, and the Country Between by Jeff Sharlet; W.W. Norton & Company, N.Y., 2011

Coal Country by Eric Enno Tamm

The smog was thick and blue like cotton candy. I could barely see the aerated sewage ponds along the south bank of the Yellow River. It was early morning. I was on the T58 train crossing a steel bridge over the murky “mother river” on my way from Zhenzhou to Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province.



I was traveling on the historic Peking-Hankow Railway, the first major trunk line in China, connecting Peking with the populous Central Plains and Hankow in the southern Yangtze River basis. Built in 1905, it is 12,212 kilometers long. A three-kilometer steel bridge traversed the Yellow River and, according to Baron Mannerheim, in 1907, was the “most remarkable part” of an otherwise monotonous journey. He mentioned that the scenery was “slightly enlivened” by a rugged granite range running “at a considerable distance” to the west, but these mountains never materialized during my morning ride. I could barely see beyond a half-kilometer of cotton and wheat fields. The sooty haze was just too thick. I was heading into coal country.



The Taihang mountains are the Great Smokies of China, separating the loess plateau of Shanxi from the delta region of the coast. Whereas the name of America’s famed massif is taken from the natural haze rising from lush forests, Taihang gets its smokiness from burning coal.



Our train passed numerous rail wagons heaped with coal. I sat in a compartment with two Chinese businessmen and stared out at the bleak landscape. The autumn foliage had disappeared. Dark granite peaks loomed over barren farm plots and soot-stained villages trapped in deep gorges. Everything looked blackened. The train creaked and groaned as it rumbled along a serpentine line. Winter was nearing – in was October 30 – the Shanxi’s coal would soon be stoking furnaces across China. It was the largest coal-producing province in the country, with 270 billion tons in proven reserves. As a result Shanxi has the ignominy of having sixteen cities on the State Environmental Protection Administrations “black list” for air quality below grade 3, meaning they suffer serious pollution.



I arrived in Taiyuan at 10PM and stayed at a business hotel across from the train station. I went for a stroll the next morning. Taiyuan is the most blighted city that I have ever visited. South of the train station, I came across a temple complex with twin soaring pagodas, then wandered along a river the color of bile. Garbage was everywhere. Heaps smouldered on the streets. So many torn bits of plastic hung in trees that they looked like fall foliage. The roads were horrendously dusty, potholed and cracked. I saw a teenage boy crawling on the sidewalk, dragging his deformed legs behind him and begging for change. A sooty film covered everything.



By day three I was ill with a sore throat and plugged nose. I felt so lethargic I could barely get out of bed. I lay wheezing the entire morning and only mustered enough energy to call the State Key Lab of Coal; Conversion, the Taiyuan Iron and Steel Company and the Institute of Coal Chemistry to arrange interviews. Of course, everyone refused to talk to me…



Taiyuan hasn’t always been a blighted industrial town. When he traveled there at the beginning of the 20th century Mannerheimm was charmed by its old temples, medieval city wall, macadamized streets, public garden and pond, and shops decorated with beautiful, brightly colored designs. Taiyuan, he wrote, had “an unusually attractive appearance” and “looked pretty in its verdant surroundings against a grey background of mountains. The town sparkled in the sunshine then but has since fallen on hard times.



“In the spring, there are rolling clouds of dust that pick up junk and that move at thirty or forty miles and an hour,” said my American guide. “Big, gigantic dust storms roll over the city.” He pointed to fine yellow dust caking a parked car. During his first two-year stay in the 1990s, the city was so dirty and polluted that after a day outside his blond hair turned black. He came down with asthma. “I couldn’t hack it – the dirt and all,” he said. Now, a decade later, he always wore a hat and carried wraparound sunglasses that, like goggles, kept airborne grit out of his eyes.



“Here it is”, Stern said, slipping on his sunglasses and putting a hoodie over his son’s head. He pointed down the street. I turned and saw a massive yellow dustball rolling over the rooftops. It started barreling down the narrow street towards us. Stern quickly hailed a taxi. We dove into the car just as the dustball descended on us. I got some grit in my mouth and had difficulty breathing. On the street, people frantically dashed about searching for shelter as a fierce wind blasted a barrage of dirt, twigs, newspapers and garbage down the street.



Taiyuan felt like purgatory. After four days in the city, a gloom overcame me. I fell ill with the flu: aching bones, sinus problems, sore throat, fatigue, a nagging cough. My spirits lifted only when I stepped aboard a bus to leave.



The bus was old and filthy, its windows smeared with dirt. I sat one row from the very back - a safe seat, I figured- in case of a head-on collision with a coal truck, a common occurrence in Shanxi. A peasant sat across the row and spat on the floor. Three other swarthy nongmin (country folk) sat behind me and began smoking non-stop. I waved my arms angrily to clear the smoke and cracked opened the window. I had hoped the bus ride would be a reprieve from Taiyuan’s horrendous air quality but the bus quickly filled with a blue haze as the smokers fell into nicotine bliss. No matter where I went in Shanxi, coal dust, grit and cigarette smoke followed but I knew that salvation lay just ahead. I was leaving polluted Taiyuan for one of Buddhism’s holiest mountains. I imagined dramatic vistas, whimsical golden temples and invigorating alpine air. Paradise. I could almost smell it.



The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds by Eric Enno Tamm

Chang Cheng by Eric Enno Tamm

Despite its name, the Great Wall of China is not great. It is certainly long – some ten thousand kilometers – which is why the Chinese dub it Chang Cheng, the Long Wall. China’s first emperor unified the country through its construction. The Qin Dynasty (221 -206 BC) began building the wall after all else failed to deter “barbarian” invaders. However, a chink soon developed ion the dynasty’s armour. “The strength of walls depends on the courage of those who guard them,” Genghis Khan once said. Indeed, the wall failed to keep out the marauding Mongols, who conquered China in 1279.



After routing the Mongols, the Ming Dynasty revived wall building. The fortress Jiayuguan was completed in 1372, during a period when the Ming rapidly expanded the wall westward to protect against another invasion. But by the end of the dynasty, the wall had become of military weakness and ineptitude. “Up went the Long Wall and down came the empire,” wrote one seventeenth-century official.



Yet the wall wasn’t just defensive. In the museum at Jiayuguan, I saw not just bows, battleaxes, spears and swords but a rich collection of farming implements too: iron ploughs, stone mills, hoes, ceramic jugs. “The Qin Dynasty saw the start of farming garrisons,” states a display, “when a large number of peasants were immigrating to border areas for both cultivation and defense of the frontiers. The Ming Dynasty expanded this system on a “vast scale” in the Hexi Corridor. Through irrigation and sheer tenacity, Han Chinese farmers turned steppe, alpine forest and desert – traditional territories of Mongol, Tibetan and Turkic peoples – into settled agricultural lands. The Great Wall fortified these farming garrisons. “These walls look less land-protecting than land-grabbing,” writes one historian, “designed to enable the Chinese to police peoples whose way of life differed from their own, and to control lucrative trade routes.”



The Jiayuguan fortress is practically empty now. Outer ramparts protect an Old Town that consists of a few tourist shops, restaurants and a dim, smoky temple dedicated to the God of War, a red-faced deity whose crazed expression looks like something out of Japanese manga. Inside the fort, I wandered an expansive gravel yard where barracks and warehouses once stood. Only a replica yamen (office and residence) of the military commander remains. It was nearly closing time, and so the massive fort was unusually devoid of visitors.



I climbed a wide brick staircase to the three-storey pagoda over the main gate. Like a sentry, I stood looking out over the parapet into the desert valley. A soft, orange sun was slipping toward the hazy horizon. The earthen ramparts turned tangerine in the glow. A train shooting in from Xinjiang reminded me of the long, bobbing camel caravans of yore laden with melons, spices, jade and gold. I squinted into the sunset and imagined the processions of the old Silk Road trotting toward me over the undulating plain.



I then turned around to look at modern Jiayuguan. The contrast was jarring. The scene was out of a Charles Dickens novel: clouds of steam, inky trails of smoke and brown smog oozed up over concrete apartments, a forest of brick chimneys, power plants and industrial mills.



Back in my room I pulled out Baron Mannerheim’s journal for bedtime reading. In 1907 Mannerheim stayed in a caravanseri below a corner tower inside the fortress. His Uyghur cooked prepared pilaf and murmured his evening prayer over a gurgling pot. As the sun began to set, the Baron heard the “monotonous drawn-out notes” of the evening tattoo, an army drum call, echoing in the night. “These were followed by gunfire warning honest folk to hasten home,” he wrote, “and then I heard the Chinese Empire being locked up securely behind five massive iron gates, and there we all were safe and sound under lock and key.”



The Horse That Leaps Through Clouds; A Tale of Espionage, the Silk Road and the Rise of Modern China by Eric Enno Tamm; Counterpoint, Berkeley, 2011

Nec Spe Nec Metu by Hans Goerg Moeller

On Amazon.com, a reader of my book Luhmann Explained wrote "Niklas Luhmann was a student of Talcott Parsons, from whom he apparently learned only how to write impossibly vague and convoluted prose. I have found reading Luhmann extremely soporific, so I thought this book [Luhmann Explained] might be refreshingly lucid and penetrating. Perhaps, I thought, if I could only stay awake, I could learn a lot from Luhmann. Alas, such does not appear to be the case…if your teenager is bad, don’t ground him; make him write an essay on the sociological theory of Niklas Luhmann.”



I sympathize with this reader’s point of view. Having read texts by Luhmann for about twenty years, I have increasingly asked myself why, even though I find the theory very appealing, its inventor did not manage to express it in a reasonably enjoyable manner. Sometimes, particularly in his later works, Luhmann’s irony and humor interrupt his otherwise extremely dry, unnecessarily convoluted, poorly structured, highly repetitive, overly long, and aesthetically unpleasing texts. The irony and humor are refreshing, but do not suffice to rescue most of his books and many of his articles from being, generally speaking, “extremely soporific” reading material. I readily admit, the material sometimes made me fall asleep.


[Hans-George explains, rather than excuses, why Luhmann was such a bad writer in Chapter Two.]



Sigmund Freud set up a famous list of the three insults to human narcissism, namely Copernicus’s proof that the earth was not the center of the Universe (the cosmological insult), Darwin’s discovery that man was not the crown of creation (the biological insult), and his own findings regarding the insignificant powers of the ego compared to drives and unconscious forces such as the libido (the psychological insult). [In the author’s view] Luhmann now adds another insult to this list – one that could be called the sociological insult. If Luhmann’s analysis is correct, then human society cannot steer itself. Just as we cannot control the universe, our bodies, or our minds, we are also unable to shape the social world we inhabit according to our ideals, wishes or intentions.



We try to cope with this insult by creating utopias such as “the liberal free market order, socialist welfare justice, social market economy, and the welfare state”; the gestures and promises of which Luhmann compares to the rain dances of the Hopi Indians and ascribes the same important function: to spread the impression that something is being done rather than merely waiting until things change by themselves.



In Luhmann’s immediate social environment, that is, post World War II Germany from the 1960s to the 1990s, the new left, both in academia and in politics, tended to apply “shock and awe” rhetorical strategies as their primary communicative tools. First, moral outrage was created – about the Nazi background of the parent generation; about the Vietnam war and American imperialism; about the capitalist Schweinesystem (pig system); about the nuclear arms race; about unfair trade mechanisms; about human rights violations; about nuclear power plants, the dying of the forests, other environmental disasters and so forth. Then, beautiful counter-visions were suggested: political and sexual liberation, an economy based on fairness and nonprofit orientation, political justice and equal rights for all, pacifism and disarmament, wind and solar power, a green conscience, and so on. The most prominent German leftists were Jurgen Habermas, the proponent of a ‘discourse without domination", and Ulrick Beck with his reflections on “risk society”, are good examples of these communicative techniques. Moral communications of this sort function by highlighting the scandalous and by contrasting it, at least implicitly, with a cathartically relieving remedy. In this way nonironical ethics and nonironical reason produce a lot of social and psychological heat: they are exciting. People will be shocked, be enraged, and feel threatened by being alerted to all the bad and catastrophic things around them that they hadn’t really been aware of, as well as awed, enamored, and passionate about the wonderful solutions that are just around the corner if society would only complete its own enlightenment. Nonironic shock and awe morality, in other words, operates by fueling both fears and hopes. It depicts an image of hell, but also offers a Kuschelecke (“cuddling corner”) for relaxation.



The Luhmannian attitude towards society, with all its pain and joy, with its perils and consolations, is strikingly different. Luhmann is not blind to the suffering that “exists on a massive scale and in such forms that are beyond description” in today’s world but, rather than following the impulse to react to these circumstances with shock and awe, theory (as opposed to philosophy and ideology) takes on an alternative stance: nec spe nec metu ( neither hope nor fear), an ancient Latin phrase that Luhmann somewhat playfully uses to advocate “a kind of stoic attitude” in social theory, and thus, if such an extension may be allowed, towards the world in general.



The Stoic aspect of Luhmann theory allows the theoretician to develop a potential for tolerating the otherwise intolerable. The insight of theory into its inability to take control in the world and steer society towards a land of milk and honey does not lead to mental paralysis or defeatism, but to relaxation and alleviation. Dramatically put, one can say that nonironic reason hardens whereas ironic reason lightens. It is not tragic that political decisions cannot essentially decide anything about the future of society or mankind; it is rather a form of pressure release. That no ultimately decisive decisions are possible makes coming to a decision less difficult, not more so. “Stoic politics” will hardly become fundamentalist; there is not enough at stake. Room for contingency leaves, metaphorically speaking, some breathing room. Or, ironically speaking, theory helps us to see – and do- things more philosophically.



Given the non-ecstatic equanimity that theorists may enjoy in their theoretical communication, they are well positioned to enrich society with the same. Theory operates with a radical Gelassenheit, or intellectual and communicational ease. It is, after all, only theory. This may be called its Daoist aspect. Thus, if Luhmann is not able to come up with a Kuschelecke, he at least offers a sort of yoga mat.



The Radical Luhmann by Hans-Georg Moeller, Columbia University Press, N.Y. 2012