The Famous Kamenets-Podolsk Fortress (I think they restored the pointed roofs above the towers recently, I don't remember them being there, back in the day).
Rodger Kamenetz wrote The Jew in the Lotus. I know him because we both belonged to the dubious fraternity of people who lost massive amounts, back in the day, on CMGI. The same mad group that used to hang out on the Raging Bull bulletin board where we planed our imminent retirement. I heard that he was coming out with a book on Braslav (Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka) and I pointed Rodger to some discussions about Reb Nachmen on this blog. That was enough for him to unfried me on Facebook?! (I don’t use Facebook anymore anyway) As is evident by his original title, Rodger Kamenetz assumed the lotus position in the sweet spot of the American Jewish experience. Namely the ignorant Jewish nostalgia served under the generous frosting of the New Age jingles. Now his new book juxtaposes Reb Nahman and Franz Kafka and true to his marketing pitch aspires to understand little about both. Allan Nadler actually had the patience to read the book:
“Kamenetz’s escapade begins in Prague, where he is teaching a summer course about Kafka. While communing in his apartment with the ghost of the great writer, who has appeared to him like a genie from a coffee mug picked up at a souvenir shop, he is given his mission. That mission will end with the wide-eyed Kamenetz in Uman amid the throngs of pilgrims, yearning for mystical communion with Nahman. In a final moment, we see him fondling the Kafka coffee mug at Nahman’s grave while meditating ecstatically on “Jews who believe and Jews who can’t believe, and Jews who want to believe, who come in hope and despair, and I came to Uman for them.”
The almost 300 pages that separate the events in Prague and Uman comprise a rambling, subjective exposition in which Kamenetz meanders between charming if unoriginal renderings of some of the most famous passages in Kafka’s oeuvre and what strike him as related themes and passages from Nahman’s tales, which he approaches as a complete novice.”
Speaking of the deliberately ignorant Jewish nostalgia the American style, is this:
“Another howler derives from Kamenetz’s personal “roots” voyage to the Ukrainian town of Kamenetz-Podolsk, where he fancies his family originated. Excitedly noting that Nahman had also traveled to Kamenetz, he devotes a whole chapter to this episode. Along the way, he once again misses the main point, which is that Nahman’s messianic purpose was to perfect the souls of Frankists who were openly debating the local rabbis and thereby causing the bishop to conduct a public burning of the Talmud.
Without a shred of evidence connecting his family to Kamenetz-Podolsk, Kamenetz is reduced to pleading that “the name had to come from somewhere.” He then compounds his cluelessness by expressing bewilderment that his grandfather was said to have been raised in Lithuania, not the Ukraine. Why, then, did he fail to “discover” the Lithuanian town of Kamenetz—Kamenetz-Litovsk, today in Belorussia—which boasted a major Jewish community and one of Europe’s most prestigious yeshivas (and also forms the setting for a celebrated Yiddish memoir recently published and easily available in English)? As it happens, the memorial (Yizkor) book for Kamenetz-Litovsk records the names of numerous members of the Kamenetzki family (in the Polish rendering of the name) who perished in the Holocaust. One of the survivors is listed on the memorial book’s editorial committee.
And so Kamenetz has managed not only to get Nahman’s visit to Kamenetz-Podolsk all wrong but to get himself all wrong into the bargain. Perhaps one should expect no better of an author who starts out by proposing that “Franz Kafka actually influenced Rabbi Nahman,” a chronological absurdity justified by a non-sequitur—namely, that “the kabbalah presents an expansive theory of the universe far beyond time and space”—followed by an irrelevancy—namely, that Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, was greatly enamored of his somewhat older contemporary Franz Kafka.”
P.S. I juts discovered that Rodger’s book was published by the Nexbook Press, under the Jewish Encounters series, in collaboration with Shoken. Nexbook Inc. is the mothership of the Tablet Magazine, so this pretty much figures (given what I feel about Tablet - Why the Tablet Magazine or any Jewish Publication Sucks). And normally I would be inclined to defend Kamenetz for several reasons. I know how bitter is his exile in Tulane, where he teaches. I also know that all three towns visited by Roger: Prague, Kamenetz-Podolsk and Uman have the elusive dimension to overwhelm the visitors creatively and spiritually. The paintings I did in Kamenetz-Podolsk are still on the wall above me. Kamenetz-Podolsk is a crazy, intoxicating town and I can see how one would like to be from there even if he wasn’t. Uman is the mad friction of the Jewish souls. The souls that on the grand scale are as lost as the most rational human being. Prague is the spiritual refuge of Europe, the land of Golems, exaggerations, the Kafkaesque metaphors and metamorphoses. But here is the thing, I will not defend Rodger Kamenetz this time around. One has to stand up for the rigor once in while, nobody else (except Allan Nadler) will.
P.S.S. I don’t understand, if Allan Nadler accuses Rodger Kamenetz of ignorance, why does he start each of his articles with “a great-grandson of Hasidism’s founder, Israel Baal Shem Tov…”, etc.? If Allan Nadler assumes that the readers are ignorant, then why accuse of ignorance Rodger Kamenetz? Or perhaps we should write it off to the tedious academic style, the occupational hazard of dealing with the idiots students and even greater idiots, the professors. And if that is truly the case, how can one accuse Rodger Kamenetz of the same habit, even with himself?
Kamenets-Podolsk photo via flickr/venushka
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Ben I don’t regularly teach at Tulane– well I taught one course there as a Posen lecturer. However I live in New Orleans, which I very much love so no need to feel sorry for me. I retired from LSU after 28 years. I founded the Jewish Studies program there after the David Duke fiasco, and also founded the MFA program in creative writing. Since you’ve been to Kamenetz-Podolsk you know what a beautiful town it is, but also sad of course, for Jews, who for most of its history were banned from living there after sundown, and as the site of the first brazen mass murder perpetrated by the Nazis. If you have the opportunity to read Burnt Books you’ll have a better sense of what the book is about than you could derive from the review. I don’t know the reviewer and don’t care to. I consider his tone uncivil and disrespectful. I would say that in a review that accuses Rabbi Nachman of insanity, it’s odd to conclude that I have dishonored the rebbe’s memory.
Roger, it’s very hard to honestly judge people and especially their art without knowing them closely. I often fall into the trap. The bulk of the passive aggressive rants are done in that fashion.
P.S. Kamenetz-Podolsk deserves a special post but your reading of it as a place of the persecutions is a caricature. It’s like saying that in Jerusalem there was nothing but blood. There is more to Kamenetz-Podolsk, much more. Some other time.
Oh there’s a lot more to Kamenetz-Podolsk. For instance Nathalie Sarraute spent summers there. Then there’s the mystery of the gapped front teeth, which Herbert Gold once alerted me to, after seeing my surname. He said his father Sam came from there & that the gapped front teeth is a dominating gene. Well interestingly Nathalie Sarraute also mentions it. And I see it in my mirror. Too bad the facts contradicted my poetry & I don’t actually come from there. But I suspect the poetry will always outlive the poor fact, which is something artists understand but not necessarily those who can only tear down but cannot build one thing.
Anyway the current tourist literature (ca 2008) in K-P does not mention Jews whatsoever, neither the site of their execution nor even the site of their market nor the site of the Talmuds burning in 1757. And in Burnt Books where I travel with the Ukrainian born scholar Petrovsky-Shtern, we stumble across a “woodshop” that may well have once been a synagogue. But I wasn’t writing a book about Kamenetz-Podolsk or even its beauties though I praise them. I was writing a book about something else entirely and using the materials given which is what artists do. Real writers and artists will understand what I’m doing and there’s no point complaining if a person who is color blind can’t see red or green or a person whose never created something but likes to lift his leg on what others do, so he can make his little mark on the world.
Some of what I feel about K-P is my old fantasy from childhood not knowing where my grandfather came from and piecing together a myth, as the facts were not available to me. That’s my Kam-Pod and you have yours, Nathalie Sarraute has hers. Grace to be alive and live as variously as possible.