SOURCE: Holtzman, Avner. “Strange Fire and Secret Thunder: Between Micha Josef Berdyczewski and Amos Oz.” Prooftexts 15, no. 2 (May 1995): 145-62.

Speaking of the impact of Micha Josef Berdyczewski's literary work on later Hebrew writers, many critics have referred to Amos Oz, who is considered the most prominent heir to the “Berdyczewski style” in Israeli literature. However, no systematic attempt has ever been made to define the nature of the linkage between these two writers. The following discussion aims to expose some of the similar aspects in the poetics of Oz and Berdyczewski. It will focus on the comparison between two stories, Berdyczewski's “Beseter ra‘am” (In Secret Thunder, 1920), and Oz's “Esh zarah” (“Strange Fire,” 1963). The detailed analysis of these stories and their literary context will serve us to characterize some principal aspects of the closeness between the two writers. These aspects, such as the intensification of human figures and the rich allusive web, constitute the mythical infrastructure that dominates Berdyczewski's late works and Oz's early ones.

1

Micha Josef Berdyczewski's collection of stories, Me‘iri haqetanah (From My Small Town) appeared in Warsaw in 1900. It was one of nine books of short stories and essays that Berdyczewski published the same year and that transformed him overnight into the leader of a new generation in Hebrew literature and placed him at the center of the controversy between the new generation and the old. At the age of thirty-five, Berdyczewski was not a new name in the field of Hebrew literature. Since 1886, he had been known as a controversial journalist and critic. He drew much attention because of his discussion with Aḥad Ha‘am (1896-97) in the monthly Hashiloaḥ, in which he called for the opening of Hebrew literature to the West in general and to European aesthetics in particular. However, nothing prepared the reading public for the sudden revelation of Berdyczewski as a narrator. Although he had published five autobiographical stories between 1888 and 1892, this could not predict his two novellas, Maḥanayim (Two Camps) and ‘Urva paraḥ (A Raven Flies) and the forty short stories that were included in four of the nine books that were published in 1900. In these stories he portrayed the hero of his generation, a solitary youth trying to rebel against tradition in order to achieve his erotic and intellectual aims, but who in the end finds himself cut off from both the traditional and the modern world. At the same time, these stories display a heterogeneous panorama of the traditional Jewish shtetl in Russia.

Typical of his readers' responses was that of author David Frischmann, who had regarded himself as a sort of literary patron of Berdyczewski since helping him take his first steps as a student in Western Europe ten years earlier:

I would never have believed that in any corner of your heart are hidden such forces … and I did not know, and I never heard from you that you knew so many Jews like these. I knew that you had a close acquaintance with the life of the Hasidim. However, your knowledge of these characters came as a surprise. I was also slightly surprised by your sense of humor, with which I was unacquainted; most of all I enjoyed those places where you poured out that pure warmth that I have mentioned.¹

The collection From My Small Town, to which Frischmann referred, includes twenty-nine stories and short sketches from the life of a small Jewish town in Russia. The intention was to portray a typical Jewish community through a heterogeneous gallery of characters and craftsmen who were members of the different classes. This provincial town is frozen into a routine that defeats all attempts to disrupt it. The account of the life of the town is marked by the contradictory impulses that motivated Berdyczewski as a narrator. On the one hand, he wants to preserve, document, and save from oblivion (put up a marker, as he used to say) the experience of a traditional life, which he feels is about to be destroyed; this act of commemoration represents intimacy and loyalty. This tendency, which first appeared at this stage of Berdyczewski's career, reached its zenith in the last stage of Berdyczewski's work (1919-21), written under the influence of the pogroms in the Ukraine, in which his family was murdered together with almost all the Jewish congregation of Dubova, the town in which he grew up. On the other hand, the stories show a strong satiric impulse, caused by the wish to free himself from that traditional world and to justify his abandoning this world by revealing its flaws, its absurdity, and its contemptuousness.

Since Berdyczewski used to base his stories on authentic memories of the town in which he grew up, it was not surprising that the people involved, who lived in the town and who served as raw material for his stories, were hurt by the satiric dimension in his stories and reacted to the appearance of his book with considerable anger. When the first copies of From My Small Town reached Dubova, a storm broke out, since many people identified themselves in the stories and saw the portrayals as caricatures intended to mock and humiliate them. They felt that Berdyczewski had violated the town by revealing intimate secrets to everyone without any artistic camouflage, using questionable gossip to settle personal accounts with rivals from his youth, thus slandering the townsfolk. These charges are evident in letters that were sent to Berdyczewski on this subject and are currently housed in his personal archive, “Ginze Micha Joseph” in Holon, Israel. The letters reveal that characters in the stories retained identifiable characteristics, and in many cases, even the names of their originals.

The reactions of his father, Rabbi Moshe Aharon Berdyczewski, and his younger brother Mendel were especially agitated and pained. They rebuked him for his lack of consideration for his family who live in the town, and especially for the harm he had caused his father's position. His father wrote:

My son, what can I tell you about the extreme [?] and the shame that you have caused me by sending the book From My Small Town, and you were stupid enough to make a laughingstock of your hometown throughout the Jewish world … and especially when you know that my livelihood is from my small town, and why did you have to spread burlesque throughout the Jewish world, acquiring enemies for yourself and humiliating me?

(April 16, 1900)

His brother added comments in the margins of the same letter:

Everybody who lives in the town is angry with you since you used them to present a portrait of the Jews as they were a few years ago. They express their contempt for you every day between the afternoon prayer and the evening prayer in the synagogues and intend to avenge themselves when you visit us … my father burnt the book so that nobody should see it.

The hurt reactions of the people of Dubova underscore the ironic vision that characterizes the stories in From My Small Town. Indeed, the narrator's direct and indirect criticism is aimed at those collective qualities that characterize the inhabitants of a small town: the way they lock themselves up in their small world, which causes them to regard each stranger as a wondrous being and to admire a fellow townsman simply because he departed for the big world; the cruelty and immorality that the householders show when they hand over a lonely stranger for army service; the superstitions that the Jews use to make a living from the non-Jews; the insistence on the letter of Jewish law despite its catastrophic impact on a poor woman; Jewish self-degradation before non-Jews; theft and cheating as a natural part of the order of life; the continuous cruelty of husbands to their wives; and the love of quarrels and conflict that embittered the life of many families. Especially marked is the scorn of the narrator for a bunch of comic blown-up “Alazons”—the town philosophers, members of prominent families who were full of self-righteousness. It is hardly surprising that this mockery enraged the inhabitants of the town, who were easily able to identify the originals in each story, and who saw the collection as a straightforward documentary of their world. The main charge against Berdyczewski was that rather than painting the town in a realistic light, he had embraced a distorted perspective, slandering people and presenting them in a despicable light. The men of Dubova saw this as a form of betrayal and a breach of faith on the part of the author, who had misused the intimate secrets to which he had access as part of a small community.

One may also assume that what had enraged the inhabitants of the town—and had remained unmentioned for reasons of modesty—was the treatment of the sexual obsessions of the heroes of the stories. In several cases, the heroes were said to lust for servants, and in most cases, they acted out their desires. The stories depict cases of incest, of a mad lust to marry woman after woman, of the adultery of husbands and wives, and even the case of a husband who derives a perverted pleasure from his friend's attempts to seduce his wife. One person who was much struck by the “atmosphere of sin” that characterized From My Small Town was H. N. Bialik, who expressed his dissatisfaction in a letter to Ravnitzky immediately after the book appeared. His general opinion of the book was positive and even enthusiastic: “Nice and pleasant! A true talent … each and every sketch, formed from one drop of ink, is a wonderful work of art.” What bothered him, however, were “the servants who serve too much. Almost every male in his sketches lusts after a servant, God forbid.”²

Why, indeed, did Berdyczewski portray his town in this way? Was he motivated by personal considerations, or by a more general satiric appetite, or did he want to express an ideological critique of traditional Jewish life? Before trying to answer these questions, let us consider another case, one that also deals with the reception of a collection of stories by readers who felt wronged by the writer's representation of their world.

At the beginning of 1965, a collection of stories appeared in Israel with the title Artsot hatan [Artzot ha’ tan] (Where the Jackals Howl). It was the first book by Amos Oz, who was twenty-six at the time, and a member of Kibbutz Huldah, which he had joined at the age of fourteen. The collection included nine stories,³ seven of which were set in a kibbutz with heroes who were kibbutz members. The critics viewed the stories favorably, expressing astonishment at the potency of the language, the depth of the descriptions, and the complexity of the plots. However, several critics were surprised at the representation of the kibbutz; among the readers, members of the kibbutzim were especially sensitive to this. The following appeared in an article about a literary evening honoring the book at Kibbutz Mishmar Ha‘emek, an event in which the author himself participated.

Together with the praise (considerable), there was also criticism (not insignificant), in which readers claimed that the author distorted the proportions, emphasizing the ugly and the negative, choosing characters from the fringes of society and not representing the kibbutz in the right light.⁴

Indeed, whoever reads these stories as a depiction of kibbutz life can easily understand the surprise and indignation that members of the kibbutzim felt in response to the book. The stories are filled with wild animal-like characters and with mentally unbalanced characters (three of the kibbutz stories end with a suicide). Many of the characters are obsessive, sick, repugnant, incestuous, and full of hate toward society. The ideological norm that is the basis for kibbutz life is presented with formidable irony. The youth of the kibbutz are presented as a collection of impulsive he-men; members of the older generation, the founders, are viewed as caricatures of thinkers and idealists who may be impressive in their oratory, but who are caught somewhere between naïveté and hypocrisy.

The expectation of a positive or at least a balanced portrayal of kibbutz life finds expression in a long letter that Ya‘akov Hazan, leader of the Hashomer Hatsa‘ir movement and the Mapam party, sent to Amos Oz after this same literary evening.⁵ Hazan wrote to defend the reality, which he felt had been distorted in the stories of Where the Jackals Howl: “It is a fact that the kibbutz has not yet received the literature that it deserves in the light of its internal essence and its contribution to the shaping of our national and social lives.” In his opinion, an author who lives in a kibbutz should not use kibbutz life as the material for artistic experiments, but should see himself as a partner in the kibbutz's struggle “as a fighting life unit … a fortress in a hostile world, a fortress whose external walls are all breached and that exist in the hearts and brains of the kibbutz members alone. … I expect that this should be your approach as an artist to the problems of the kibbutz.” As a sensitive and intelligent reader, Ya‘akov Hazan felt that the descriptions of kibbutz life in Where the Jackals Howl were no more than a pretext for the presentation of universal themes. He saw this as a negative trait, as a detachment from the ground of real life and a breach of the realistic ideal “to find our man in art, in our special environment, Jewish, Israeli and kibbutz.”

There are significant similarities between these two cases of literary reception. In both cases, we are dealing with authors who grew up in an intimate, closed society and published stories that were apparently based on biographical material from their communities. In both cases, members of the limited or wider community—the town and the kibbutz—protested against representations they understood to be distortions of reality, which warped proportions and emphasized negative and ugly aspects, but ignored the positive foundations of community life.

It seems that in both cases, there was a basic misunderstanding of the forces, motives, and intentions that lay beneath the two books. What appears to be distortion to the people involved is, in fact, a significant expression of poetics and of the literary philosophy of the two authors. The parallels between these two cases can help us in arriving at a more meaningful identification of the real connection between Oz and Berdyczewski. Scholars and critics of Hebrew literature have already noted the connection, and some have even identified Berdyczewski as the literary progenitor of Amos Oz.⁶ But these intuitive observations have yet to be examined thoroughly. Let us begin the examination here.

2

During his career, Amos Oz has mentioned his literary affinity to Berdyczewski more than once. His first recorded expression on this subject was in August 1965, just after the appearance of his book Where the Jackals Howl, when he was asked in an interview who his favorite writers were. In his reply, he spoke only of Berdyczewski:

One of my strongest literary experiences was the meeting with Berdyczewski's world. His world and his subjects are not my world and subjects, and his techniques do not encourage me to imitate him, but there is something in the way he looks at the world that arouses my inner excitement, as if I am meeting a relative.⁷

Some months later, speaking at a meeting commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Berdyczewski in Tel Aviv, Oz disclosed the meaning of that excitement in greater detail. Describing the deep forces that burst out of Berdyczewski's stories, he spoke of the formation of the characters as God's messengers demanding reparations from religion and society, characters whose “cries explode the thin crust that was the foundation of the antiquated life patterns.”⁸ Oz revised and developed this discussion over the years,⁹ until he summarized it in a final version in his essay “Man Is the Sum of His Sins and of the Fire Locked in His Bones.”¹⁰

Although this is, of course, an essay on Berdyczewski's stories, it is also possible to find in it a key to understanding the forces that fuel Oz's creativity and the laws that govern it. Oz sees the narrative art of Berdyczewski—and indirectly his own poetics—as remote from the realist ambition to represent reality in full. In his opinion, Berdyczewski's poetics is metaphysical in the sense that it is not based on psychology or ideology, but aims to decipher the mythical law that governs the world and man's soul. The concealed axiom is that the reality we see serves as a mask for the forces of fate and of nature that are directed from the shadows. In this context, Oz goes into detail about the way in which Berdyczewski draws his characters, not as “flesh and blood but as earthly representatives of the mystic forces and of the giants of nature. As it were, the forces were corporealized, donned a man's form, became mortal, and virtually mounted the stage in order to play an old game again, a game in which the roles and the moves, the plot and the ending are fixed as the stars in their orbits.” Berdyczewski's heroes, according to Oz, almost always find themselves forced to confront an existential choice between two types of life, a decision, in fact, between life and death. On the one hand is the possibility of living a trivial, mediocre life with the security of routine, at the cost of complete castration of the soul and the inclinations. On the other hand is the possibility of fulfilling one's desires and living a splendid life, scorning the laws and limitations of society but paying the price of one's life.

This conflict can be applied to the characters and situations in the stories of Where the Jackals Howl. Thus, Oz's essay on Berdyczewski's fiction—and his own—offers a view of literary creation very different from the conventions of realism and closest perhaps to the conventions of the medieval romance. Oz writes of constructing larger-than-life characters in an eternal quest after treasure, or perfect love, who struggle with the representatives of the forces of nature and fate that hinder their progress.

The criticism that expressed disapproval of the early Berdyczewski stories and the early Oz stories employed realistic psychological and social criteria, when, in essence, their center of gravity lay elsewhere. What, for instance, accounts for the sexual obsessions and the other sins in which the heroes of From My Small Town wallow? This is not a matter of socioethical corruption, but rather the first appearance of the sinful rebellious Jew, who was to figure prominently in Berdyczewski's Hebrew and Yiddish writing from then on. The author shows a supportive attitude to his heroes as they try to fulfill their desires by breaking out of the social norms of life within the framework of Jewish law and conventional morality. The forces of life are hidden within these Jews like “a cinder whispering within a heap of ashes,” as Bialik says in “Hamatmid,” and their realization requires the abrogation of collective norms. This is the source of Berdyczewski's well-known interest in sin and sinners: the sin reveals the life forces within the Jew, especially when it involves sexuality. Therefore, the use of the township as the setting in which repressed desires break through in sins and evil deeds does not derive from a satirical impulse, but from an attempt to reveal the man in the Jew. As the narrator says, revealing his motives to future readers in the prologue to the story “Parah adumah” (Red Heifer, 1906): “they should know that we were Jews, but also flesh and blood with all that that involves.” This explains the attractiveness of Berdyczewski's stories and articles for a whole generation of Jewish Zionist youth in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. Responding to his demand to realize the forces of life within the Jew as a prerequisite for a national renaissance, young people found a spur and stimulus for their decision to emigrate to the Land of Israel and to become farmers.¹¹

The stories in Where the Jackals Howl express a similar view of reality, albeit in a different ideological context. They reveal the tension that is characteristic of Amos Oz's early works between, on the one hand, the forces of knowledge, culture, order, light, and reason, which protect human existence but also produce its stagnation, and, on the other hand, the forces of lust, nature, darkness, and madness, which enthrall one in their irrationality and destructiveness. This conflict tears the soul of Oz's heroes and upsets their ability to reason. It expresses itself in his stories in many ways, e.g., in the construction of the setting—the bright and protected kibbutz contrasted with the dark lands of the jackal that surround it, or the construction of the set of characters, with the typical couple consisting of the reasonable, sane husband and the erratic, mysterious, and demonic woman. As Oz wrote of Berdyczewski, one can live a rational life, safe but barren, under the protection of the kibbutz and its ideology, or one can cross the fence to touch the primary forces of the soul, paying the price of burnt wings, madness, and death.

The first of Oz's critics to delineate the basic tensions of his world was Gershon Shaked, in an article on Where the Jackals Howl:

One assumes that a dark and irrational world surrounds a person on every side. This is not entirely negative, but in fact attracts one with its terrible charms. “Strange Fire” eternally flickers in the depths of the existence—he who does not admit to it is nothing more than a characterless dwarf; he who becomes addicted to it, loses his human image. In paradoxical fashion, the author prefers the strange world, “The Other Place” (Satan's dominion), to the ordered human society, where people live in forged placidity a life of ideals.¹²

This description applies not only to Oz's kibbutz stories. The same themes are to be found, for example, in the early Jerusalem stories, such as “Strange Fire,” and the novel Micha’el sheli (My Michael, 1968). In these two works, which are set prior to the Six-Day War, in the divided Jerusalem of the fifties and sixties, Oz makes masterly use of the topography. The Israeli part of Jerusalem, like the kibbutz, is an illuminated area surrounded on three sides by dark areas across the border. The unique status of the divided Jerusalem—a city surrounded almost completely by hostile areas, which also attract and arouse one's curiosity—provides a precise structural parallel to the archetypal world of Oz's early works. The description of external reality in these works is not meant to be realistic or to comment on the social situation, but to serve as a metaphor for the structure of the human mind, whose sane and enlightened part is like the visible tip of the iceberg, but whose center of gravity, the unconscious and the irrational, lies beneath the surface.

3

In order to compare the two authors, we will focus on two stories: Berdyczewski's “Beseter ra‘am” (“In Secret Thunder” 1920), and Amos Oz's “Esh zarah” (“Strange Fire,” 1963).¹³ Amos Oz hints at the connection between the two stories by taking a passage from Berdyczewski's story and placing it at the beginning of the story “Strange Fire.” It is the only story from the collection Where the Jackals Howl that has an epigraph, which gives this gesture added significance:

The night spread its wings over mortals. Nature weaves its web breathing continuously. Creation has ears, but for creation, the sense of hearing and what is heard are one thing and not two. The beasts of the forest move on in search of prey and food, domestic pets stand near their mangers. Man returns from work. He has barely left his work and love and sin are preparing to trap him. God has sworn to found the earth and to fill it. And flesh will draw close to flesh.

The passage that Oz has chosen comes from the climax of “In Secret Thunder” (chapter 12), the scene of the destructive sexual encounter between the hero, Shlomo the Red, and Shoshana, his son's wife. This constitutes the sin that sets in motion the decline of the hero to the point of his final ruin. Quite possibly, Oz chose to place this passage at the beginning of the story to hint at a connection between this story, particularly its plot of the destructive seduction, and Berdyczewski's work. The connection is stronger in this story than in the other stories of Where the Jackals Howl.

This special connection is already expressed in the title “Strange Fire,” which in its biblical context (Lev. 10:1; Num. 3:4; Num. 26:61) refers to fire on the altar from a profane source. In Berdyczewski's world, this phrase usually refers to a strong sexual urge with sinful connotations. This title also refers to the talmudic legend “Strange Fire,” which was included in a collection compiled by Berdyczewski, Tsefunot ve’aggadot (Hidden Things and Legends).¹⁴ The hero of the legend is a prominent and righteous person who is attacked by an uncontrollable lust for a young attractive woman living in his house and under his protection. The phrase “strange fire” is used in a similar context in Berdyczewski's story “Bein hapatish vehasedan” (“Between Hammer and Anvil,” 1903). At one point in the story, an attractive thirty-year-old woman tries to seduce the hero—who at the time is thirteen years old—kissing and embracing him, to which he reacts by crying out “strange fire.” In the next paragraph, the author uses the phrase in a wider context, emphasizing the positive and stimulating strength of sin in a man's life: “Most longings are derived from strange fire, which stimulates everything that is alive within us and fills us with joie de vivre.”¹⁵ The expression “strange fire” also appears in the story “Hasovev” (The “Roundabout,” 1913), where it describes the hero's addiction to a strong and destructive erotic temptation: “and his soul sank into the strange fire, burning and burning without cease” (p. 84).

One can also connect Oz's story to other works by Berdyczewski. The main scene in Oz's story, involving the seduction of a young man by his intended mother-in-law, is similar to the end of the story “Maḥanayim” (“Two Camps,” 1900), which also describes sexual contact between the hero and a woman who turns out to be his lover's mother. Above all, Oz's epigraph invites us to compare his story to “In Secret Thunder,” with particular reference to the central roles of women in both stories.

“In Secret Thunder” is one of Berdyczewski's last stories. It derives from a short story called “Av uven” (“Father and Son”), written about twenty years previously and included in the collection From My Small Town. Like most of Berdyczewski's stories, it is rooted in the concrete reality of nineteenth-century Jewish life in the towns of the Ukraine. However, as Gershon Shaked has demonstrated, the story is not so much sociological, as it is mythical.¹⁶ Every aspect of the story is exaggerated, especially the characterization of the hero, Shlomo the Red. His power is emphasized in his height and build, his wealth and domination, his social standing, his lust, his masculinity, even his honor and self-control. Considerable tension is generated by the disparity between the hero's strength and his limiting environment, his small and sickly wife and his son, Daniel “the effeminate,” a sober and refined talmudic student. The contrast between the two types, “the red hero” and “the refined talmudic student,” forms a basic pattern in Berdyczewski's works.¹⁷

Shlomo the Red's social status enables him to break through the society's moral strictures, to be a law unto himself and rule over his environment. The style of the story, characterizing the hero by vocabulary associated with God, contributes to the exaggerated unrealistic impression the story makes. One can read the story, as Shaked suggests, as a metaphor for the struggle of vital Dionysian forces within Jewish existence. The struggle is apparent not only in the character of Shlomo the Red, but also in the town itself, which at one point is overcome by a surge of lust that reaches the stage of complete sexual license.

The story centers on the triangle involving the passionate father, the refined, weak son, and the son's wife, the beautiful and demonic Shoshana. She is undoubtedly the strongest female character in Berdyczewski's writings. The climax of the story is the destructive sexual encounter between the father-in-law and his daughter-in-law, who circumvent the son-husband. The satanic Shoshana had appeared suddenly in the town. Her potentially destructive erotic nature is obvious from the first time she appears in the synagogue, and all the males look at her with fear and fascination. Her sadomasochistic relationship with her husband, Daniel, serves as a prologue for the sexual encounter between her and her father-in-law, which is described in terms of a cosmic storm.

Shoshana's qualities stand in marked contrast to those of Daniel's previous wife, the soft and dreamy Batya. Shoshana and Batya are two variations on the type of “the beautiful woman” common to Berdyczewski's stories. To make a sweeping generalization, one can say that Berdyczewski's stories offer two types of beautiful women: the satanic woman, who is active, stormy, and sensual, and the angelic woman, who is passive, spiritual, quiet, and asexual. In “In Secret Thunder,” there is a direct confrontation between these two archetypes, the two wives of one man. In contrast to the demonic eroticism of Shoshana, Batya is presented (chapter 16) as a ghost, rising from her grave clothed in white and knocking on her husband's door on the eve of the Passover.¹⁸ In other stories, the two types may be incorporated into one character. For example, at the end of “A Raven Flies,” the hero has a vision of the woman he loves as a nun dressed in black who turns into a murderous beast of prey. Elsewhere, in stories such as “Hakiyor ha’aḥaron” (“The Last Basin”) and “Ba‘emeq” (“In the Valley”), the author describes the angelic woman, whose virginal purity prevents her from finding her place in the ugly, material world. In stories such as “Qayits veḥoref” (“Summer and Winter”), and “Hasovev” (“The Roundabout”), we see the animal side of the beautiful woman, with her sexuality driving men crazy.

The atmosphere of mythical romance in “In Secret Thunder” is enhanced by archetypal motifs derived from Jewish tradition.¹⁹ Thus, the characterization of Shoshana is strengthened not only by direct contrast with Batya, but also by comparison to ancient heroines. We will draw attention to four examples, two of which are explicit and two of which are implicit. In a description of the relationship between Shoshana and Daniel (chapter 10), Shoshana is likened to that most ancient female archetype, Eve, a comparison that forms part of a web of references throughout the story, beginning with the opening reference to the Garden of Eden and original sin. As is his custom, Berdyczewski alters the biblical story to fit his purposes. According to his version, Eve was created before Adam; she commands him to conquer her, but he is unable to do it because of his servile nature. Shoshana is compared to another biblical character when she first appears in the book (chapter 6): the daughter of Tsur, Kozbi, a Midianite beauty who seduced a prominent Israelite, Zimri the son of Salu (Numbers 25). Zimri's sin with Kozbi caused a terrible plague among the Israelites in the desert, which ended only after Pinḥas the priest killed the two of them. This allusion to the biblical text foreshadows the plague that Shlomo and Shoshana's sin will bring upon the town of Loton, thus deepening the sense of determinism that dominates “In Secret Thunder.”

The story that is told in the Book of Susanna, one of the Apocryphal additions to the Book of Daniel, offers an additional connection with the character of Shoshana. The elders of the congregation lust after the modest and beautiful Susanna and ambush her while she washes, but when she rejects them, they accuse her falsely of sinning with someone else. At her trial, a youth called Daniel stands up and proves her innocence. This story is alluded to by several of the motifs and names in “In Strange Thunder”: the lust of the elders for a young girl; the female beauty that drives men mad; and the union of Shoshana and Daniel. Of course, the two stories are diametrically opposed, since Berdyczewski's Shoshana is a demonic seducer, and Shlomo the Red, the old man whom she seduces, is viewed as a creative and positive figure.

But the most important ancient story that influences “In Secret Thunder,” and the character of Shoshana in particular, is the story of Judah and Tamar (Genesis 38), the most significant example in Jewish sources of a woman who seduces her father-in-law. Berdyczewski showed a keen interest in this story, to the extent of researching a comparison between the characters of Tamar and of Ruth.²⁰ In working on “In Secret Thunder,” Berdyczewski appears to have used not only the biblical source but also later aggadic additions. It is particularly interesting to note the parallel between the erotic encounter in “In Secret Thunder” and Berdyczewski's description of the encounter between Judah and Tamar in Hidden Things and Legends.²¹ In both cases, the figures of the man and the woman are larger than life, the lustful aspect of the woman's character is emphasized, and the encounter between them is described in cosmic terms. At the same time, however, the encounter between Judah and Tamar is pictured in a spirit of divine harmony, while the meeting of Shlomo and Shoshana is described as the victory of Satan over the forces of good.

Both Shlomo the Red and the beautiful Shoshana are rebels who reject the laws of society and religion. Although they must be punished, their sin and their rebellion constitute self-realization and the rejection of the bounds of a mediocre existence. This, in Berdyczewski's opinion, makes them superior to the good, the righteous, and the conventional. According to these criteria, Shoshana is stronger than Shlomo: he is unable to sustain his rebellion and repents, admitting his sin publicly, while she continues to defy heaven and to live by her own laws, until only a biblical punishment, a bolt of lightning, puts an end to her life.

4

Our analysis of the narrative world and principles of characterization in “In Secret Thunder” is fully appropriate to Amos Oz's story “Strange Fire.” Here, too, we have a story that could be considered realistic (and indeed was when it appeared), but whose motivating forces are those of fate and myth. The narrator makes this obvious when he describes the cries of the jackals in the Jerusalem night: “Indeed, the jackals are not part of the story … but how can we drive them out? They are standing in its cellar, turning its wheels.”²² The statement is almost parallel to similar observations by the narrator of “In Secret Thunder”; for example, “The experience dreams its dream and the creator slowly turns the wheels of the machine” (chapter 1).

Oz's narrative world resembles Berdyczewski's in its division between sane, mediocre characters and characters who represent the dark urges, the world of the jackals, especially the bewitching Lily Danenberg. As in Berdyczewski's story, the central act in “Strange Fire” is a destructive erotic seduction, which amounts to a sort of incest since Lily, who seduces Yair Yarden on the eve of his marriage to her daughter, is not only his future mother-in-law, but also his metaphorical mother, as the first wife of his father. The plot was well summarized by Avraham Balaban:

The story develops in two directions. On the one hand, there is a description of the friends Josef Yarden and Doctor Elhanan Kleinberger. Josef is about to marry his son Yair to his ex-wife Lily Danenberg's daughter. He arrives at her house, as previously agreed, to make final the list of guests for the wedding, but finds the door locked. He goes to Dr. Kleinberger to tell him of the unexpected event, and the two spend the evening playing chess and talking. Lily does not wait for Josef Yarden, but goes to his house to talk with Yair. She invites Yair to walk with her in the town, and reveals that she was married to his father for a short time and lusts after Yair. The last chapter finds the two in a copse, which is bounded by the zoo on one side and the border on the other side.²³

There is a realistic psychological explanation for Lily Danenberg's unconventional behavior: she herself hints that she is motivated by the desire to have Yair atone for his father's insult to her body. In fact, as Oz said of Berdyczewski, it is neither psychology nor ideology that direct this story, but rather the struggle between primary, strong, and dangerous experiences and secondary, mediocre experiences that are safe and protected even if they are barren and gray. The story manifests this tension at every level, from the construction of the two parallel plots, to the classification of the characters into groups and the construction of the settings. As we have mentioned, the story makes good use of divided Jerusalem's situation prior to 1967, as a town almost completely encircled by hostile but seductive areas. The nocturnal promenade, in which Lily reveals dark family secrets to her intended son-in-law and spreads a web of erotic seduction, begins at the safe and well-lit center of the city and ends in the barren darkness of the border, where strange lights flicker from the other side. This route parallels the process of deterioration and the breach of the rational lines of defense in the hero's mind. Animals play an important role in the description of the setting, as in the contrast of the birds of day to the nocturnal birds, and in the description of the animals imprisoned in the Jerusalem zoo close to the border. It is no coincidence that the story moves toward the zoo and ends there, since the beasts of prey imprisoned in their cages, competing with the jackals screaming in the valley, represent the duality between lust and order, which characterizes Oz's world.

The passage from Berdyczewski's story that forms the epigraph to “Strange Fire” inhabits every part of Oz's story: the enchanted night, the prehistoric experience of nature, wild animals opposed to domestic animals, the connection between love and sin, and finally, the moment of erotic closeness. As in Berdyczewski's story, the crucial moment is implied by analogies to nature, through descriptions of a pair of wolves having intercourse in their cage, cancerlike growths on the rocks, and the cries of the jackals.

Oz's Lily Danenberg has much in common with Berdyczewski's Shoshana. Lily is one of many female figures in Oz's work who serve, like the different incarnations of the beautiful woman in Berdyczewski's work, as a link between this world and the secret depths of lust, madness, and myth. In Oz's work, one can also classify the women on a scale that extends from figures of madness, ecstasy, erotic preying, and mental sickness at one extreme, to angelic, cold, mysterious figures at the other extreme. Roughly generalizing, we can say that the former prevails in his stories and his novels of the sixties, while the latter becomes more common in the later novels. The way in which Oz endows the figure of Lily Danenberg with supernatural powers through parallels and contrasts with other characters brings to mind the construction of the heroine in “In Secret Thunder.” It is apparent that Lily is totally opposite to both Josef Yarden, who is petty and “square” (Lily even hints at “the difference in sexual temperament” that divided them), and to his son Yair. This forms part of a structure that is common to Oz's work, as we mentioned above: the union of a passionate, mysterious, demonic woman and a thoughtful, sane male. The story reveals an especially interesting contrast between Lily and her daughter Dina, who is about to marry Yair Yarden: the contrast of the satanic woman to the angelic woman. Similar to the role of Batya in “In Secret Thunder,” Dina in “Strange Fire” acts as a foil for the erotic-demonic qualities of her female opponent. Dina's mother, therefore, describes her as simple, passive, sensitive, not vicious, and poetic. In the second version of the story, she is even characterized as a soft little girl.²⁴ Other characters in the story, like the giant taxi driver Abu who yearns for Lily in the restaurant, or the madwoman whom Lily and Yair meet in the street, serve to highlight the sexual vitality of Lily.

Berdyczewski uses ancient figures of passionate women to develop the figure of Shoshana; the characterization of Lily carries at least two significant associations with such ancient figures. The first is, of course, Lilith, the Queen of Evil, who is, according to ancient Jewish literature, the evil spirit who attacks women in childbirth, strangles children, and seduces men. The second character is the Queen of Sheba. Lily is explicitly compared to her (in the story's second version) by the taxi driver in the restaurant, who sees Lily and Yair and cries out: “Here is the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon” (p. 130). It is no coincidence, of course, that Jewish folklore connects the Queen of Sheba with Lilith. These parallels are a part of a rich structure of mythological allusions spread throughout the story, as Avraham Balaban has demonstrated, including the myth of the treasure hunt and the myth of the nocturnal journey of the sun under the sea. This mythological infrastructure constitutes another link between the poetics of Oz and Berdyczewski.

5

Common features, such as contrasting characters and the mythic dimensions of female figures, that are found in “Strange Fire” and in “In Secret Thunder” form part of a wider connection between Amos Oz's early stories and Berdyczewski's works. Amos Oz is the most prominent heir to “the Berdyczewski style” in Hebrew literature. By this we are referring to what Gershon Shaked calls the expressionist romance, whose main feature is the construction of the narrative environment as a projection of the self and a reincarnation of mythical motifs, rather than a representation of a given reality. From this point of view, the movement from Berdyczewski to Oz constitutes one of several traditions in twentieth-century Hebrew literature. These traditions include the lyrical narrative tradition of Uri Nissan Gnessin, the realistic satiric grotesque of Mendele Mocher Seforim, the surrealistic-allegorical style developed by S.Y. Agnon, and the confessional-narrative tradition whose foundations were laid by Joseph Hayyim Brenner.

The influence of “the Berdyczewski style,” however, is apparent mainly in the first half of Oz's work, from the beginning of the sixties until the middle of the seventies. The border can be drawn, it seems, in the novel Laga‘at bamayim laga‘at baruaḥ (Touch the Water, Touch the Wind, 1973), which is Oz's boldest attempt at symbolic-fantastic writing. From then on, his writing reflects a progressive abandonment of this mode, as it grows closer to realism, suggesting a “reconciliation” and acceptance of things as they are, without abandoning the religious urge that accompanies all his work. Several signs mark the change that begins in the middle of the seventies. In 1975, Oz rewrote Where the Jackals Howl, and toned down its melodramatic nature in favor of a more realistic, concrete, detailed version. In 1977, he published his first story for youth, “Sumchi,” a text full of nostalgia and humor. Irony and humor form a part of his literary output from that point on. The collection of sketches Po vesham be’erets Yisra’el bistav 1982 (A Journey in Israel, Autumn 1982), which depicts a society torn by extreme tensions, concludes with the wish “to limit oneself and to give up the numerous messianic dreams,” because “we may now have to go slowly, … to abandon the messianic redemption in favor of small gradual improvements.” To provide an illustration of a secular, sane, and sober way of life, which would resolve the distress of Israeli existence, Oz describes the town of Ashdod in the epilogue. He sees it as a town without the charm of Paris or Vienna; “that is what is available and it does not represent the splendid realization of the vision of the prophets and the vision of the generations … but represents a ‘mansize’ town.”

Traces of the call for reconciliation and reevaluation that Oz expresses in his essays are apparent in his fiction of the eighties and early nineties. In the five novels that he wrote in this period—Menuḥah nekhonah (A Perfect Peace, 1982), Qufsa sheḥorah (Black Box, 1987), Lada‘at ishah (Knowing a Woman, 1989), Hamatsav hashelishi (The Third Condition, 1991) and Al tagidi lailah (Don't Pronounce It Night, 1994)—he depicts situations involving blurring oppositions and calming storms; he leaves tense extremes and searches for the synthesis of compromises and an acceptance of reality.²⁵ This change in direction forced Oz to distance himself from the Berdyczewski formula and to adopt other sources of inspiration. In recent years, Oz immersed himself in the writing of Agnon and even published detailed analyses of several stories that reflect his own literary positions.²⁶ Although the hero of the novel The Third Condition quotes a key sentence from Berdyczewski's essay “Setirah uvinyan” (“Destruction and Construction”) about the preference for the lone Jew over abstract Judaism, his humanistic, peaceful interpretation of this phrase accords with his dovish political opinions rather than the Berdyczewski spirit. The use of direct citation in The Third Condition distances it from the cited original, which no longer permeates Oz's fiction but lies next to the fiction like a foreign object.

The fact that Amos Oz needed Berdyczewski as a source of inspiration for himself as a writer sheds light not only on Oz's works. It also shows us how modern and adventurous a writer Berdyczewski is, and should direct our attention anew to a strong and stormy literary phenomenon.

Notes

1. The quotations are from Frischmann's letters to Berdyczewski of May 10 and 15, 1900. See: Moznayim 7 (1938): 558, 560.

2. Bialik's letter to Ravnitzky, 27 Adar I, 5660 [1900] in Igrot Bialik [Bialik's letters], 5 vols. (Tel Aviv, 1938), 1:135.

3. In the later version (1977), he added another story, “‘Al ha’adama hara‘ah hazo” [On this evil land], which is set in biblical times and whose hero is Jephthah the Giladite.

4. “On Realism in Art and Literature” [Hebrew], Hotam 2, 25 (Feb. 16, 1966): 16-17.

5. For place of publication, see note above.

6. Gershon Shaked recently emphasized the continued influence of the “Berdyczewski style” in the writing of several Israeli authors, especially Amos Oz. See his book Hasiporet ha‘ivrit 1880-1980 [Hebrew fiction 1880-1980] (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1988), 3:250-51.

7. Yitsḥak Betsal’el, “Literature from Main Street to Suburbia” [Hebrew], Hakol katuv basefer (Tel Aviv, 1969), p. 91.

8. A summary of Oz's speech was quoted in a report on the memorial meeting for Berdyczewski that appeared in Davar (Dec. 3, 1965).

9. See “Amos Oz Talks about M. J. Berdyczewski's Stories” [Hebrew], ‘Alei-Siaḥ 3 (1976): 52-68.

10. Amos Oz, “A Man Is the Sum of His Sins and of the Fire Locked in His Bones” [Hebrew], Be’or hatekhelet ha‘azah [Under this blazing light] (Tel Aviv, 1979), pp. 30-36.

11. For more detail see Nurit Govrin, “Micha Josef Berdyczewski and the Zionist Idea” [Hebrew], Devash misela [Honey from the rock] (Tel Aviv, 1989), pp. 13-37.

12. Gershon Shaked, “The Ambusher Sits in the Room” [Hebrew], Gal ḥadash basiporet ha‘ivrit [A new wave in Hebrew fiction] (Tel Aviv, 1971), p. 181. The ideas were developed in scholarly research by the younger scholars writing about Amos Oz. See Nurit Gertz, Amos Oz; monographia [Amos Oz; monograph] (Tel Aviv, 1980); Avraham Balaban, Bein el leḥayya [Between God and beast] (Tel Aviv, 1986).

13. Berdyczewski's story was first published in Hatequfah 9 (1920-21): 7-40. Oz's story was first published in Moznayim 18 (1963-64): 39-53.

14. Micha Josef Berdyczewski, “Strange Fire” [Hebrew], Tsefunot ve’agadot (Tel Aviv, 1956), p. 174.

15. Kol sipurei M. J. Berdyczewski [Complete stories of M. J. Berdyczewski] (Tel Aviv, 1951), p. 13. All future references to Berdyczewski's stories will be based on this text. The paragraph includes the sentence “Man is the sum of his sins and of the fire locked in his bones,” which Amos Oz afterward used as a title for his essay on Berdyczewski, which we discussed.

16. Gershon Shaked, “The Cut-off Terebinth (on ‘In Secret Thunder’ by M. J. Berdyczewski)” [Hebrew], Lelo motsa [Dead End] (Tel Aviv, 1973), pp. 33-53.

17. See Dan Almagor, “Father-Figures and Key Situations in Berdyczewski's Stories” [Hebrew], in: Nurit Govrin, ed., Micha Josef Berdyczewski—mivḥar ma’amrei biqoret ‘al yetsirato hasipurit [Micha Josef Berdyczewski—A selection of critical essays on his fiction) (Tel Aviv, 1973), pp. 224-45.

18. On the duality of the woman in Berdyczewski and Oz's works from a different point of view, see Nehama Aschkenasy, “Women and the Double in Modern Hebrew Literature: Berdyczewski/Agnon, Oz/Yehoshua,” Prooftexts 8 (1988): 113-28.

19. A detailed examination of the numerous references and the early remnants in “In Secret Thunder” is to be found in Herzl and Balfour Hakak's article “In Secret Thunder and Secrets Revealed” [Hebrew], in their book Pirqei Berdyczewski [Myth and tradition in the literary work of Micha Josef Berdyczewski] (Jerusalem, 1975), pp. 23-131.

20. Micha Josef Berdyczewski, “Tamar and Ruth” [Hebrew], Ginze Micha Josef 2 (1986): 13-17.

21. Micha Josef Berdyczewski, “The Young Lion” [Hebrew], Tsefunot ve’aggadot (Tel Aviv, 1956), pp. 63-64.

22. The quotations are from the first version of the story: Artsot hatan (Ramat-Gan, 1965), pp. 148-74.

23. Avraham Balaban, El halashon umimena [Toward language and beyond] (Tel Aviv, 1988), p. 48. A detailed analysis of important aspects of the story may be found on pp. 47-58; see also his previous book (n. 12), pp. 85-87, 142-50.

24. Amos Oz, “Strange Fire” [Hebrew], Artsot hatan, rev. ed. (Tel Aviv, 1980), p. 128.

25. On the compromise and balance of opposed elements in A Perfect Peace, see Haya Hoffman, “The Extremes and the Golden Mean” [Hebrew], Dapim lemeḥqar besifrut 3 (1986): 199-208. Avraham Balaban documented a similar process in Black Box in his book Toward Language and Beyond, pp. 163-96. For a discussion of this phenomenon in his novel The Third Condition, see my article “Fima Waiting for a Miracle” [Hebrew], Ha’arets (Feb. 15, 1991).

26. Amos Oz, Shetiqat hashamayim: Agnon mishtomem ‘al elohim [The silence of heaven: Agnon's fear of God] (Jerusalem, 1993).