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Friday, February 22, 1985
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BY JOSEPH COHEN
Special to The Jewish News
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Of the incalculable losses we
have all suffered in the Holocaust,
not the least of those losses to 20th
Century literature was the death
in 1940 of Walter Benjamin, the
German-Jewish literary critic,
philosopher and mystic. an early
friend of Gershom Scholem, Ben-
jamin, unlike Scholem, chose in
the 1920s not to go to Palestine,
hoping to secure an academic post
in his native Germany. It was a
fatal decision.
The professorship in modern
German literature at Frankfurt
University to which Benjamin as-
pired and for which he was emi-
nently qualified was denied to
him. Like Ludwig Lewisohn who
Was unable to obtain an academic
post after completing his doctoral
studies in America, Benjamin's
only alternative was to become a
free-lance writer. Attracted
simultaneously to Marxist dialec-
tic and Jewish Mysticism, Benja-
min produced through the ten-
sions between these conflicting
modes of thought some of the most
brilliant literary criticism of our
age, revealed particularly in his
essays on Kafka, Proust and
Baudelaire.
These critical studies and much
of Benjamin's other writing is
marked, as Scholem has noted, by
a pervasive sadness which inten-
sified as Benjamin was forced
both as an artist and a Jew into
the role of an alien in his home-
land.
Benjamin often wore his
Judaism lightly, but that did not
preclude his taking it very seri-
ously.
Like so many others, he tarried
too long in Germany after Hitler's
rise to power, hoping for the mira-
cle that never came. When the
Second World War started, he fled
first to Paris and then sought to
cross the Pyrenees into Spain. At
the border town of Port Bou, the
customs officer, acting arbitrar-
ily, admitting some and denying
others, turned Benjamin back just
two days before Spain officially
granted safe passage to the refu-
gees gathered in the mountain
village. At the end of his re-
sources, his energies flagging,
Benjamin, without any prospect
of rescue, committed suicide.
For nearly two decades Benja-
min's name, the circumstances of
his life and death and his writ-
ings, were veiled in obscurity.
Remembered by Scholem and a
few other friends, his surviving'
works were republished, and
since the 1960s Benjamin's repu-
tation has grown steadily.
Given the drama of his flight
and death and his symbolic ap-
peal, it was inevitable that his
image would be invoked in the
literary reconstructions of the
Holocaust. In Elaine Feinstein's
new novel The Border, it is Ben-
jamin's spirit. that both infuses
and suffuses her story of a once-
Jewish Viennese intellectual
couple whose path crosses Benja-
min's first in Paris and again in
Port Bou where tragedy also
awaits them.
Joseph Cohen is director of the
Jewish Studies program at
Tulane University in New
Orleans.
The Border is, of course, far
from being dependent for its im-
pact upon the haunting spectre of
Benjamin, alive and dead. His
presence and his fate are elements
that enhance rather than domi-
nate Feinstein's novel. By virtue
of those elements the particular
dimension of loss is universalized
in this delicately but masterfully
told story.
The narrative, set forth in
diaries and letters, concerns the
plight of Hans and Inge Wendler.
He is a poet, she is a physicist.
Both are thoroughly assimilated
people of high culture, shocked
into the reality of having to ac-
knowledge their Jewish roots.
Long oblivious to their Jewish an-
cestry, they are astonished to find
themselves forced to respond for
the first time in their lives in 1938
to the condition of being Jewish in
central Europe. In her astute and
perceptive command of this sub-
ject, Feinstein reminds us of
Aaron Appelfeld.
This is a story of an ambivalent
and shifting love in a marriage
between people of opposite na-
tures. Polarized both by the ex-
ternal oppression of the Nazis and
the internal oppression of an af-
fair Hans has with a younger
woman, the Wendlers find endless
opportunities to re - examine their
own and each other's realities,
raising questions of fidelity ver-
sus independence, humanism
versus science, subjectivity ver-
sus objectivity, male rationality
"The Border" by
Elaine Feinstein. St.
Martin's Press.
versus female intuition, mysti-
cism versus materialism and
power versus powerlessness.
However imposing these ques-
tions are, Feinstein manages to
avoid didacticism and prosaic ex-
position. These questions are not
marshalled before us like troops
on a parade ground. This book is
so sensitively written that the
philosophical disputations do
their parading off in the distance
while the tormented lives of the
characters are played out directly
before us.
We share their torment as they
seek an accommodation for and a
resolution to not only their op-
posed natures but to the overrid-
ing infidelity that threatens the
survival of a union in which the
spouses, despite their difference,
are nonetheless heavily depen-
dent upon each other. One could
almost reduce the relationship to
the mathematical formulas of a
magnetic field were it not for the
poignance and beauty of the tale.
By virtue of Feinstein's attrac-
tion to Benjamin and her use of
his story. in The Border she has
extended and accelerated 'the re-
covery of one of this century's
most remarkable Jewish writers ;
at the same time, adding luster
her own name.
Copyright 1985, Joseph Cohen