C. K. Williams on Antisemitism
One of the crises facing Jews in America today is antisemitism. For much of postmodern times, antisemitism has seemed rather deeply recessive. American Jews have lived in a nation where to be a Jew was, most often, neither particularly noteworthy nor exceptional. For some Jews, intermarriage and assimilation were major issues. But for most Jews and most Americans, being Jewish was not a particularly large problem.
What to make, then, of the recent rise of antisemitism? Why does white nationalism fulminate so avidly against Jews? Why do many non-Jewish Americans respond, in some way, to this demonization of Jews? What does it mean to be Jewish? Does antisemitism have anything to teach us about what a Jew is?
For an entire career I taught American literature, believing in a variety of American exceptionalism that was rooted in the idea that assimilation was more possible here, in a deep-rooted democracy committed to the idea that ‘all men are created equal,’ than in other countries and cultures[1].
What does it mean to be a Jew? I will turn to poetry for an answer to that, believing that poetry sometimes can clarify who and what we are.
Poetry? Poetry. How we exist in the world, how we feel, what we feel: Sometimes we can learn more from poems than from a stack of sociological studies
Divisiveness, scapegoating, irrational hatreds all seem to be on the rise, not only in America, but all over the world. The paradigm for these dark currents is, of course, antisemitism. Antisemitism has existed almost from the start of civilization. It persists. At its worst it is murderous. Today, we often skirt antisemitism as if it is some kind of on-the-turn-to-inedible menu item: if only we ignore it, we need not deal with its poisons. So it is for me, often, and I am Jewish. And I am the child of refugees from the Holocaust.
Although I have taught Paul Celan, and Yehuda Amichai (and written about Celan in these letters), I am most comfortable writing about Wordsworth and Williams, Dickinson and Whitman. Dealing with antisemitism directly is tough. I prefer to avoid the subject. I believe in assimilation. The endurance of antisemitism?
We are about to embark on a poem that does exactly that, faces full front into antisemitism. This deep, deep hatred: What is it, what are its roots, what does it mean for Jews? How does ‘the Jew’ keep coming up as an object of hatred and otherness?
Long ago, when I first started sending out these letters on poetry, a recipient advised me to put the poem first. “Let people read the poem for themselves; then talk about it,” he advised. It was good counsel, and I have largely followed it.
Not this time, though. The poem is relatively long. It focuses on something I would prefer not to consider, and so I have been highlighting that “something” for you before I begin. But not to think about difficult subjects in never a satisfactory response.
The poem is by C. K. Williams, “Jew on Bridge.”
Many years ago, I read a poem by Williams that stayed with me, deeply. It was about sex and initiation into the mysteries of adulthood, about adolescence, about our deepest secrets. I never taught it, although I taught many, many other poems that did not shake me as deeply. I thought its explicit depiction of oral sex would be difficult to address. More, I was in some sense cowardly: Because it focuses on a young man who pays for sex, it passes over the woman who ‘gives’ the sex. In a time of women’s liberation, in a time when we need to be cognizant of how women are portrayed, I shrank from bringing this poem before students, even though Williams saw that she was like a machine – not a person – and in recounting the experience may have been a machine also. I think, maybe, I passed over it rightly. Yet poems do as they will, and I have never forgotten what Williams wrote. You can hear it for yourself by Googling ‘Penn Sound C. K. Williams.’
The poem I want to consider is a later one by Williams, “Jew on Bridge.” It seems to have penetrated my attention to a degree far greater than most poems I read. The Jew on the bridge in a novel arrests Williams’s attention stubbornly and becomes the occasion for his poem: Similarly, I am arrested by the poem he wrote, and cannot ignore it. (I will not examine the entire poem, but only several main points of it).
Williams is noted for his use of what is called “the long line,” something he purportedly took from Walt Whitman, who also wrote in long (albeit musical) lines. It may be that the long line’s root is in Whitman. Maybe, however, his long line has to do with Williams’s interest in telling things as they are, factually, something we associate more with prose than with poems. He once told the New York Times,
For a long time I had been writing poetry that leaves everything out. It’s like a code. You say very little and send it out to people who know how to decode it. But I then realized that by writing longer lines and longer poems I could actually write the way I thought and the way I felt. I wanted to enter areas given over to prose writers, I wanted to talk about things the way a journalist can talk about things, but in poetry, not prose. [my italics]
What I would highlight in those remarks is that Williams wanted to “write the way I thought and the way I felt.” Not really journalism, though he references it.
What Williams discovered in his “long line” is that it allowed a poem to follow the way thought wanders as it proceeds: thought in time, not a conclusion reached or an image seen. [Earlier, I wrote about A. R. Ammons’ poem “Corson’s Inlet.” Not long lines – often very short, in fact – but it too follows the engendering and wandering thought of the poet, and in some sense it is a long line – the three page poem is just one sentence.] Maybe this is what a lot of poems are: Not image or conclusion, but a tracing of how the mind wanders through the world the poet encounters? It may even be that the movement of thought is one of the central structures of poems. Poems do hard work, and often that work is movement from confusion toward, well, not certainty, but greater enlightenment, even if what is illumined remains unresolved.
Williams’s poem begins with the poet considering Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov, the central character in Crime and Punishment. The Russian novelist provides the starting point for the poem. Raskolnikov is wandering through the city, sleepless, thinking of crime and punishment. Then, seemingly for no reason, Raskolnikov sees a Jew on a bridge he is crossing. Williams is stunned: The sentence strikes him with great force. Why did Dostoyevsky write this sentence? Why is it in the novel? The whole poem originates[2] in these questions.
Here’s the whole poem. I will talk about its most salient verses in the commentary which follows. But note, if you will, the line endings. In the first two stanzas, three of the six lines end with “brain.” (The word recurs four other times in those six lines.) It is Raskolnikov’s brain he will be considering, and that brain is what the poem takes as its point of departure. How we think is central to the poem.
More important, the word “Jew” ends seven lines; if one considers ‘rhymes’ (“too” three times, “to” once, and “you” once) the repetition hammers home a theme: you, too, Jew. The word ‘Jew’ occurs nineteen other times in the poem.
The poem ends with a three-part repetition in the last stanza: “Breath.” That word, of course, rhymes with “death.” Death occurs at the end of the line two stanzas earlier; the word, or dying, or its German translation, occurs nine times in the poem. Yet we recognize, I think, that death is in many ways an antonym to breath: to breathe is to be alive, not dead.
O.K., on to the poem. Be brave. It is long.
Jew on Bridge
C.K. Williams
Raskolnikov hasn’t slept. For days. In his brain, something like white.
A wave stopped in mid-leap. Thick, slow, white. Or maybe it’s brain.
Brain in his brain. Old woman’s brain on the filthy floor of his brain.
His destiny’s closing in. He’s on his way, we’re given to think, though
he’ll have to go first through much suffering, to punishment, then redemption.
Love, too. Punishment, love, redemption; it’s all mixed up in his brain.
Can’t I go back to my garret, to my filthy oil-cloth couch, and just sleep?
That squalid neighborhood where he lived. I was there. Whores, beggars,
derelict men with flattened noses: the police break their noses on purpose.
Poor crumpled things. He can’t, though, go back to his filthy garret.
Rather this fitful perambulation. Now we come to a bridge on the Neva.
Could you see the sea from there then? I think I saw it from there.
Then, on the bridge, hanging out of the plot like an arm from a car,
no more function than that in the plot, car, window, arm, even less,
there, on the bridge, purposeless, plotless, not even a couch of his own: Jew.
On page something or other, chapter something, Raskolnikov sees JEW.
And takes a moment, a break, you might say, from his plot, from his fate,
his doom, to hate him, the Jew, loathe, despise, want him not there.
Jew. Not as in Chekhov’s ensemble of Jews wailing for a wedding.
Not Chekhov, dear Chekhov. Dostoevsky instead, whom I esteemed
beyond almost all who ever scraped with a pen, but who won’t give the Jew,
miserable Jew, the right to be short, tall, thin or fat Jew: just Jew.
Something to distract you from your shuttering tunnel of fate, your memory,
consciousness, loathing, self-loathing, knowing the slug you are.
What’s the Jew doing anyway on that bridge on the beautiful Neva?
Maybe he’s Paul, as in Celan. Antschel-Celan, who went over the rail of a bridge.
Oh my Todesfuge, Celan is thinking. The river’s not the Neva, but the Seine.
It’s the bridge on the Seine where Jew-poet Celan is preparing himself.
My Deathfugue. My black milk of daybreak. Death-master from Germany.
Dein goldenes Haar Marguerite. Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith. Aschenes-Antschel.
Was it sunrise, too, as when Raskolnikov, sleepless, was crossing his bridge?
Perhaps sleepless is why Raskolnikov hates this Jew, this Celan, this Antschel.
If not, maybe he’d love him. Won’t he love the prisoners in his camp?
Won’t he love and forgive and cherish the poor girl he’s been tormenting?
Christian forgiveness all over the place, like brain on your boot.
Though you mustn’t forgive, in your plot, Jew on bridge; Deathfugue on bridge.
Celan-Antschel goes over the rail. As have many others before him.
There used to be nets down near Boulogne to snare the debris, the bodies,
of prostitutes, bankrupts, sterile young wives, gamblers, and naturally Jews.
Celan was so sick of the Deathfugue he’d no longer let it be printed.
In the tape of him reading, his voice is songful and fervent, like a cantor’s.
When he presented the poem to some artists, they hated the way he recited.
His parents had died in the camps. Of typhus the father. Mama probably gun.
Celan-Antschel, had escaped. He’d tried to convince them to come, too.
Was that part of it, on the bridge? Was that he wrote in German part, too?
He stood on the bridge over the Seine, looked into the black milk of dying,
Jew on bridge, and hauled himself over the rail. Dein aschenes Haar …
Dostoevsky’s Jew, though, is still there. On page something or other.
He must be waiting to see where destiny’s plotting will take him. It won’t.
He’ll just have to wait there forever. Jew on bridge, hanging out of the plot.
I try to imagine what he would look like. My father? Grandfathers? Greats?
Does he wear black? Would he be like one of those hairy Hasids
where Catherine buys metal for her jewelry, in their black suits and hats,
even in summer, shvitzing, in the heat? Crackpots, I think. They depress me.
Do I need forgiveness for my depression? My being depressed like a Jew?
All right then: how Jewish am I? What portion of who I am is a Jew?
I don’t want vague definitions, qualifications, here on the bridge of the Jew.
I want certainty, science: everything you are, do, think; think, do, are,
is precisely twenty-two percent Jewish. Or six and a half. Some nice prime.
Your suffering is Jewish. Your resistant, resilient pleasure in living, too,
can be tracked to some Jew on some bridge on page something or other
in some city, some village, some shtetl, some festering shvitz of a slum,
with Jews with black hats or not, on their undershirts fringes or not.
Raskolnikov, slouching, shoulders hunched, hands in his pockets,
stinking from all those sleepless nights on his couch, clothes almost rotting,
slouching and stinking and shivering and muttering to himself, plods on
past the Jew on the bridge, who’s dressed perhaps like anyone else—
coat, hat, scarf, boots—whatever. Our hero would recognize him
by his repulsive, repellent Jew-face daring to hang out in the air.
My father’s name also was Paul. As in Celan. His father’s name: Benjamin.
As in Walter. Who flung himself from life, too, with vials of morphine.
In some hotel from which he could have reached safety but declined to.
Chose not to. Make it across. Though in fact none of us makes it across.
Aren’t we all in that same shitty hotel on that bridge in the shittiest world?
What was he thinking, namesake of my grandpa? Benjamin, Walter, knew all.
Past, future, all. He could see perfectly clearly the death he’d miss out on.
You’re in a room. Dark. You’re naked. Crushed on all sides by others naked.
Flesh-knobs. Hairy or smooth. Sweating against you. Shvitzing against you.
Benjamin would have played it all out in his mind like a fugue. Deathfugue.
The sweating, the stinking. And that moment you know you’re going to die,
and the moment past that, which, if you’re Benjamin, Walter, not grandpa,
you know already by heart: the searing through you you realize is your grief,
for humans, all humans, their world and their cosmos and oil-cloth stars.
All of it worse than your fear and grief for your own minor death.
So, gulp down the morphine quickly, because of your shame for the humans,
what humans can do to each other. Benjamin, grandfather, Walter;
Paul, father, Celan: all the names that ever existed wiped out in shame.
Celan on his bridge. Raskolnikov muttering Dostoevsky under his breath.
Jew on bridge. Raskolnikov-Dostoevsky still in my breath. Under my breath.
Black milk of daybreak. Aschenes Haar. Antschel-Celan. Ash. Breath.
In the third stanza the narrator, Williams, declares himself. Speaking of Raskolnikov’s neighborhood, he declares, “I was there.” On that particular bridge, and in Raskolnikov’s part of St. Petersburg.
Can’t I go back to my garret, to my filthy oil-cloth couch, and just sleep?
That squalid neighborhood where he lived. I was there. [my italics]
We have to be sharp readers, for there are two “I’s” here. Although the poem begins with Raskolnikov, it turns to the narrator, who says “I was there.” Both of them deserve an “I,” which we see in that third stanza: these are two different “I’s,” the first referring to Raskolnikov’s thought, the other to the poet’s.
With both of them, Raskolnikov and the poem’s speaker, we come to a bridge over the river Neva. And we come to what the poem is about, a stubborn ‘fact’ that the poet cannot pass by. Raskolnikov, in the novel, sees a Jew on the bridge. This brief notice is entirely gratuitous to the plot, for the Jew is just that, a Jew, undifferentiated except by his Jewishness, whatever that is. He is just there, in the novel, without a reason to be there. What follows ais n extraordinary stanza which relates how Williams is snagged by this one sentence in Dostoyevsky, a writer “whom I esteemed:”
Then, on the bridge, hanging out of the plot like an arm from a car,
no more function than that in the plot, car, window, arm, even less,
there, on the bridge, purposeless, plotless, not even a couch of his own: Jew.
What is the Jew doing there?
On page something or other, chapter something, Raskolnikov sees JEW.
And takes a moment, a break, you might say, from his plot, from his fate,
his doom, to hate him, the Jew, loathe, despise, want him not there.
No, not necessary to the plot, to the development of the narrative, to anything at all. Yet Dostoyevsky puts the Jew in there, on the bridge. The Jew is essential to his[3] thinking, and so the Jew appears even if he has no relation to the plot. The brute fact of the “Jew.” Raskolnikov hates Jews, and regardless of the relevance of that hatred to the story, Dostoyevsky inserts an example of this hatred into the novel.
We are, and this is why I am writing this letter, face to face with irrational, unexplainable, antisemitism. The Jew as other, as something alien and not needful of explanation. Pure otherness. Beyond the human, or rather before it. Subhuman. The Jew as something that is not human.
Jew. Not as in Chekhov’s ensemble of Jews wailing for a wedding.
Not Chekhov, dear Chekhov. Dostoevsky instead, whom I esteemed
beyond almost all who ever scraped with a pen, but who won’t give the Jew,
miserable Jew, the right to be short, tall, thin or fat Jew: just Jew.
Something to distract you from your shuttering tunnel of fate, your memory,
consciousness, loathing, self-loathing, knowing the slug you are.
[my italics]
Here the poet is sure, certain: It is not just Raskolnikov but his creator, Dostoyevsky who sees, inserts, this ‘Jew’ into the narration. The “Jew” here, is the ‘distraction,’ the deflection, the projection, from self-loathing to the convenient ‘other.’
The poem is, I think, understandable up to this point without external reference. We do not need to be intertextual. Sure, there is Dostoyevsky, but we can understand what Williams is writing about without having to read, or re-read, Crime and Punishment. We understand the poem even if we have not read Chekhov.
But that self-sufficient internality is about to change. There is something about the bridge that stirs memory for Williams, and his memory is of Paul Celan, a poet of whom I have written earlier.
Here is a précis of the poet Celan’s life: He was born Paul Antschel, and used an anagram of that name as his nom de plume: Antschel - Celan. He grew up in Czernowitz, Romania. Jewish, his parents were sent to a forced labor camp by the Nazis. There, his father died of typhoid fever and his mother was shot to death. Celan survived the war and wrote difficult, convoluted poems about the Shoah and about death (and also about love, and poetry). He committed suicide by jumping from a bridge in Paris into the Seine. His most famous poem, which he grew tired of[4] was entitled “Todesfugue,” or “Deathfugue.”
Thus, the poem turns to intertextuality: Many of the words of Williams poem are recollections of the words of Celan’s poem. The bridge over the Neva reminds him of the bridge on the Seine where the Jew-poet Celan is preparing himself to jump to his death. Celan’s words in the Williams poem are bolded, below:
My Deathfugue. My black milk of daybreak. Death-master from Germany.
Dein goldenes Haar Marguerite. Dein aschenes Haar Sulamith. Aschenes-Antschel.
Golden hair, black hair the color of ashes. “Celan-Antschel goes over the rail.”
He stood on the bridge over the Seine, looked into the black milk of dying,
Jew on bridge, and hauled himself over the rail. Dein aschenes Haar …
Dostoevsky’s Jew, though, is still there. On page something or other.
Williams returns to thinking about Dostoyevsky’s Jew, “Jew on the bridge, hanging out of the plot.” Jews, bridges. Celan. He continues to think: “I try to imagine what he would look like? My father? Grandfathers? Greats?”
Was this Jew on the bridge that the reader sees only passingly in Crime and Punishment similar in appearance to the poet’s own antecedents? Williams continues to think: Does that Jew wear the black of earlier times, looking like contemporary Hasidim (sectarian Jews who declare their allegiance to rabbis of days gone through, in part, dressing like those in days gone by)? Williams thinks of these contemporary Jews, Hasidim, sweating (“shvitzing:” he turns to the Yiddish for the term), whom he sees as “crackpots...They depress me.”
Is this what being Jewish is? Being Hasidic, or ultra-Orthodox? And what about himself, an assimilated Jew, distant from both the small towns of his ancestors and the black-garbed people who live in the city? Is he Jewish? Science, with its percentages, cannot answer. (“I want certainty, science: everything you are, do, think; think, do, are,/ is precisely twenty-two percent Jewish, Or six and a half. Some nice prime.”) Maybe, he ruminates, the answer is to be found in his posture towards the world, compounded of both suffering and a “resilient pleasure in living.” The assimilated Jew: Not religious, but carrying on secular elements of Jewish experience.
Williams does not stop thinking. Is it possible that he too is connected to that “Jew on bridge?” That there is something between him and the 18th or 19th century “shtetl,” some small rural Jewish ghetto-town; or those sweating, “shvitzing,” in a slum where Jews dress as in the olden days in black and with fringes? Hasids with tzitzis, like his long-ago ancestors, who wear the fringes of an undergarment, fringes which the Book of Numbers commands Jews to wear? Could he be more connected than he wants to recognize, connected by the Jew-hatred he comes face to face with in Dostoyevsky’s throw-away comment in Crime and Punishment?
Maybe the Jew on the bridge in the novel is not dressed in black, although maybe he is. Dostoyevsky, whom we have learned Williams greatly admires as a writer, notices the Jew even though “he’s dressed perhaps like anyone else.” But he is Jewish, regardless of his dress: “Our hero would recognize him/ by his repulsive, repellent Jew-face daring to hang out in the air.” Irony abounds in this sentence: Raskolnikov is the protagonist of the novel, but as this poem reveals, he is hardly a ‘hero;’ nor are the faces of Jews prima facie repellent and repulsive, save of course to antisemites.
The poet keeps on thinking. The thought goes onwards. The Jew on the bridge has reminded him of his forebears. He recognizes that his own allusion to Paul Celan is not just literary, but familial: “My father’s name was also Paul.” And his grandfather’s name was “Benjamin. As in Walter.” Walter Benjamin, another great Jewish writer, a critic. He, like Celan, committed suicide, not on a literal bridge but in the midst of his bridge-like passage from Nazi-occupied France to possible freedom in America.
Walter Benjamin tried to escape from the Nazis by taking the route through southern France into Spain. Fearing he would be returned to Nazi imprisonment in Vichy, he swallowed enough morphine tablets to kill himself in his hotel room in northern Spain. Thus, through the similarity of names – a metaphorical connection, depending on the likeness of the names Paul and Benjamin[5] to his father and grandfather – the speaker of the poem sees connections between his parentage and two Jewish writers, Paul Celan and Walter Benjamin, who killed themselves under the shadow of Nazi antisemitism.
Benjamin “chose not to. Make it across.” But that, says Williams, is the case of all of us. We never make it through life successfully to – where? Paradise? Life everlasting? Such sad lines:
Though in fact none of us makes it across.
Aren’t we all in that same shitty hotel on that bridge in the shittiest world?
Walter Benjamin, he thinks, could foresee his future if he were to be re-captured by the Nazis: Enclosure in a concentration camp and death by genocide.
He could see perfectly clearly the death he’d miss out on.
You’re in a room. Dark. You’re naked. Crushed on all sides by others naked.
Flesh-knobs. Hairy or smooth. Sweating against you. Shvitzing against you.
[my italics]
There it is again, “shvitzing,” now the link between contemporary Jews, ghetto Jews and those Jews who died in the concentration camps.
There is a ‘you’ in these lines, and it has a quadruple resonance. The poem is referring to the inmates of the concentration camps. Walter Benjamin is envisioning himself in the future, in a camp. Williams is addressing himself, imagining himself as a possible victim of genocide. Williams is addressing the reader. “You,” for this is a fate that can befall any or all of us.
Williams recognizes that Benjamin – Walter Benjamin, not his grandfather – would have foreseen his death, and something more, “the moment past that,”
the searing through you you realize is your grief,
for humans, all humans, their world and their cosmos and oil-cloth stars.
All of it worse than your fear and grief for your own minor death.
So, gulp down the morphine quickly, because of your shame for the humans,
what humans can do to each other.
“What humans can do to each other.” We are back to the “Jew on bridge” that he encountered in Dostoyevsky’s novel. We cannot forget that the poem began with, and continually returns to, that deep, deep recognition – even below conscious thought – that the “Jew” is there, to be taken as totally ‘other.’
Human beings consign groups of other humans to total ‘otherness.’ They become like that “miserable Jew [without] the right to be short, tall, thin, or fat Jew: just Jew.” Our individuality is reduced to the alien object, easy to reject as human, easy to discriminate against, easy to murder. Those “oil cloth stars?” The Torah reading table is, in many Hasidic congregations, covered by oilcloth which features a six-pointed Jewish star of David.
Thinking about the Jew on the bridge the poet encountered in Crime and Punishment has led Williams’s thought to this, that there is nothing that stops “what human beings can do to each other.” Williams has approached the Shoah indirectly, not through the camps but through two antecedent writers who, Jewish, perished because they recognized that antisemitism has no stop or limit.
This is what is so striking, for the poet, in Dostoyevsky’s novel: The hard, inescapable fact that otherness comes so easily to human beings. That it runs so deep, undergirding how we ‘automatically’ see the world. Antisemitism is, as it was for Dostoyevsky, a ‘fact’ so basic that is part of how people see the world. ‘People’ being, in this case, those who are not Jews.
The multitudes who died in Auschwitz are not the only victims of this othering, for all Jews everywhere live under the sign of that terrible destruction.
Williams is, like Whitman, large. “Do I contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself./ (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” wrote the nineteenth century poet. Thus, for Williams, also large, the condition of Jews is also the condition of all humans. For there is no limit on “what human beings can do to each other.”
To objectify a human being, as the Dostoyevsky he admired did to that “Jew on bridge,” is to enable the destruction of human beings.
As Williams thinks, in this poem, about Dostoyevsky’s novel what strikes him so powerfully is its almost throw-away line about a Jew standing on a bridge. “Benjamin, grandfather, Walter; Paul, father, Celan: all the names that ever existed wiped out in shame.” There is no escaping the history and reality of otherness, or the destruction of those who are seen as ‘other.’
He, Williams, teaching at Princeton and living a good life, is connected to the image he finds in Dostoyevsky. He is connected to Jews everywhere even as they ‘shvitz’ in crowded cities or in concentration camps. He is connected through the names Benjamin and Paul to his Jewish father and grandfather and to those who died in the face of the destructiveness of Nazi antisemitism.
The poem recognizes that this is not just the fate of Jews, but of all people. We pass the thought of our own death – what a remarkable line, “All of it worse than your fear and grief for your own minor death” – to recognize that it is shameful to be a human being, to be a member of a species capable of wiping out others of their species.
Not just others: individuals. “Benjamin, grandfather, Walter; Paul, father, Celan: all the names that ever existed wiped out in shame.”
Let me turn theological for a moment. The central tenet of Judaism, its watchword, is the Shema. It is a two-line prayer, with the first line accorded the central importance. But there are the two verses, sung at every Jewish service:
שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָֽד
בָּרוּךְ שֵׁם כְּבוֹד מַלְכוּתוֹ לְעוֹלָם וָעֶד
Hear, o Israel the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.
Blessed be the name of his glorious kingdom for ever and ever.
The name of the Lord shall reign forever. Yet the names of His creatures, according to this poem, shall be eliminated: “all the names that ever existed wiped out in shame.” As individuals are wiped out, so is the possibility of God. We live in a time, after the Shoah, when in ways that Nietzsche never considered, ‘God is dead.’
There is so much for Williams the poet to consider. The final stanza recapitulates the poem, and all he has thought about. Dostoyevsky and Raskolnikov and their “Jew.” Paul Celan. Bridges to nowhere, bridges to destruction. The daybreak that does not break clear, but black, the same color as the hair of the dark-haired Jewish girl who perished in the concentration camps and was incinerated, wiped out, become smoke and air.
Celan on his bridge. Raskolnikov muttering Dostoevsky under his breath.
Jew on bridge. Raskolnikov-Dostoevsky still in my breath. Under my breath.
Black milk of daybreak. Aschenes Haar. Antschel-Celan. Ash. Breath.
Williams still lives, still draws breath. But on the breath of the human is an inability to see the other, an inability that becomes murderous. For the other is not human, and is therefore capable of being destroyed. What had a name becomes, through such objectification , nameless and perishes. All that survives the twentieth century is ash[6]. And also, tenuous, capable of memory: breath.
I began this letter saying the poem is about irrational hatreds, about antisemitism. As Williams thinks about Dostoyevsky, as he thinks about the appearance of a serendipitous and non-essential Jew in the Russian’s novel, he thinks about how the otherness, the ineradicable otherness, of the Jew is part of Dostoevsky’s consciousness. Ineradicable, just there, as natural as breathing the air.
And that antisemitism connects up with what Celan wrote about, and what killed him. And killed Walter Benjamin too[7]. And it connects up with his forebears, with his father and grandfather.
How Jewish am I, Williams thinks halfway through the poem? Can it be reduced to percentages? In her great poem “In the Waiting Room” (which I have also written about) Elizabeth Bishop thinks of her ‘womanliness:
What similarities….
held us all held us all together
or made us all just one?
How—I didn't know any
word for it – how “unlikely”...
“Unlikely” that we are all human: Who would have believed? “Unlikely” – this is what C. K. Williams is coming to terms with in the poem – that he is a Jew.
It, being a Jew means being consigned to ‘otherness’ without features, no longer having a name, capable of being hated and destroyed but not of being described or even taken as an individual with a specific and identifiable existence. This is what Williams ruminates on. This is what he found in Dostoyevsky. “Jew on Bridge.”
The poet’s stream of thoughts is not a happy one: Death, destruction; hatred, irrational otherness are part of a connectedness that he neither asks for nor welcomes. Such is what it is, for Williams, to be a Jew in the twenty-first century.
This is a poem full of terrors. We humans will always be the ‘other’ to some of us, always be the object that must be eliminated and destroyed. This is the fate of the Jew, and by extension – for we are all connected – of all of us.
But most specifically and inescapably for Williams, it is the fate of the Jew. Nameless, waiting on a bridge, facing destruction.