[In the essay which follows, Kluback discusses Fondane's role as a poet in exile, closely examining the biblical influence on his work.]

In February of 1944, the poet Benjamin Fondane gave the writer Jean Grenier a manuscript, Le Lundi existentiel et le dimanche de l'histoire (Existential Monday and the Sunday of History). Fondane never read the proofs. He was betrayed by his concierge; he was denounced to the Nazis. At the same time, “his sister Linie was arrested by the French police and transported to the camp at Drancy. His friends, Paulhan, Lupasco, Cioran, intervened with the authorities to obtain his release. They succeeded, but they couldn't obtain Linie's freedom. Fondane chose to go with his sister. From Drancy, he sent his wife instructions for an edition of his writings. In May, he was deported to Auschwitz. There was no trace of his sister” (see the “Préface” by Michel Carassou to Le Lundi existentiel et le dimanche de l'histoire).

L'Existence, the volume in which Fondane's essay was to appear, was brought out by Gallimard in 1945. The other essays were those of Albert Camus, Maurice de Gandillac, Étienne Gilson, Jean Grenier, Louis Lavelle, René Le Senne, Bruce Parrain (ibid., 111). This collection of essays revealed a confrontation with Jean Paul Sartre's L'Etre et le Néant (1943) (Being and Nothingness). Fondane played an essential role in the struggle for the understanding of existentialism as a philosophical attitude. He opposed its reduction to epistemological problems. He saw its source and reality in the Bible. Fondane was the poet of biblical existentialism, of the unending conversation between man and God, between the sacred and the profane.

In the poem “Exodus,” Fondane reached the voice of Job. He found his dung heap. He laid bare the misery which had befallen him, those he loved, and the nation which gave him his freedom and inspiration. He wept for France. The Germans in Paris in 1940 were for Fondane a catastrophe. For him, it was more than the end of a way of life. It was the question of survival. In Germany the Jew was declared unfit to be a member of a national community. He could not marry or have sexual relationships with “persons of German blood.” Mankind is fortunate in its ignorance. Pascal once noted that we blaspheme in what we do not know. Ignorance is blasphemy, but how pleasurable it is. How could Fondane survive under an army of occupation bearing “German blood”? Fondane knew that there would be a war. On June 18, 1939, he said farewell to his friend Victoria Ocampo, who was leaving for London and Buenos Aires. He gave her his Rencontres avec Léon Shestov. She recalled that he told her: “‘In case of war, use this manuscript as you feel best. It can be opened. Until then guard it carefully. Thank you.’ … I put the manuscript in my luggage and when I arrived in Buenos Aires, I left it in a drawer. It remained there for several years. I opened it after there was no longer any hope of finding its owner. The monstrous unimaginable reality had occurred. Fondane was right” (“Note de Fondane à Victoria Ocampo,” in Rencontres, 251-52).

Fondane knew what was coming. He saved his manuscript and we have there memoirs of two fascinating figures, both nearly forgotten, both with important and penetrating voices. Both must be heard. We believe it is blasphemy not to hear them. We must return to the poem “Exodus.” We read the poem and we hear:

The trumpet of judgment on this vast day of June—
Yes, I was there, but I didn't hear it!
Deaf! And you did not see it either on that
beautiful day of June lying naked in the wheat fields.
Did you not see running in the fearsome eye of the roads
the large reddish clouds, the unwieldly paralytics
fleeing with their bed and the torrent of hunger, of
thirst and of confusion—while the naked, scarlet
and bald Stupor ate the excrements of the dead?

(225)

With the sounds of the trumpet the civilization falls, and it has never stopped falling. We watch the misery of man and we are amazed. We are immobile. We return to our own dwellings and we enjoy our moments of pleasure. We are creatures of indifference. We have learned to be indifferent. We have learned to face indifference indifferently, and we are pleased. We think of 1a Stupeur nue, écarlate et chauve, but thinking makes us turn away. How different it would be if we were touched, if we heard the trumpet of judgment and felt that it summoned us, that we were called to give it voice, if we faced it in the streets and on the roads, if we saw the distortion it brought to life. We answered with Cain that we were not our brother's keeper. We have toiled to survive. We have no other obligation. We all need to survive and this need gives us community and order. But we must not go beyond need. The other is not our brother. He is an advantage or a disadvantage. Experience teaches us the one or the other, but theories and ideologies also teach us that there are inferior and superior beings, there are Jews and there are others. This is what the racial state taught us. This is what the racial state teaches us.

Why, why the world, the light, for the
sailor leaning on this boat, the land?
The land on the right, the land on the left
The land behind, the land in front
Why so much land dirtied for the living?

(225-26)

How deeply do we fill our bellies with the despair and pain of existence. There is always a moment of revolt when we want to hang on to the bits of joy and pleasure we find in life. The earth has been soiled and dirtied. We see man turn away from man in suspicion and hatred. We dare not look in each other's eyes. We fear betrayal. We learn to trust only the self, that precious individuality which we keep hidden from all other human beings, from wife and children, from brothers and sisters. If God hears or not, we speak to Him. We don't know. This ignorance is salvation. We want the Divine to hear, and like Job, we set forth our case. No one else will listen to the suffering of our alienation, to our abandonment in a world of indifference. We remember the Stupor which eats the excrements of the dead, and we shudder. We are in exile. There is no refuge, no space we can call our own. We struggle to create in us what we are not given. In the self there is refuge, but that self is poor. It seeks the company of the sick, of the paralytic. The self seeks to be cleansed, but the world wants to seize it and dirty it. The world wants its allegiance. It entices it with the serpent's promises: “You will be like the gods knowing good and evil.” This promise allures us. We want to dominate, to control the good and the evil. Knowing gives us power. We can tell the other what is good and evil. We can punish him for not knowing. Knowledge in our power becomes demonic. It allows us not only to create the racial state, but also the ideological and power state.

Fondane refused to yield to pessimism. Life refuses death. It bears a Job-like defiance. From the dung heap it rejects the clever and rational answers of friends and wife. Life is more than compromise and indifference. It is a search for the just, for the hidden God who must be drawn again into his creation, who has left behind sparks and hidden seeds which must be redeemed. We are pleased to think of these, but we wonder if there is in us that moral substance capable of lifting these seeds to the divine. We wonder, and we turn to belief. There is no other place to go. Fondane cried out:

No, it is not finished!
The heart is panting, this organ of peace
The stomach digests indolently the anguish,
The eye no longer reposes upon itself, and the blood
shows that it is the basic element, the original
flow, the first cry, the voice, the paradise from
which man, having left the sultry dawn of the
transgression, went forth into the heavy stench
of brutal men.

(226)

The world is not finished, but man is exhausted. He has fought too many wars, and he is tired. He prefers, when possible, to watch the battles from a distance as they did in previous ages. There is a lethargy about moral decisions. We learn to postpone them from year to year, hoping that they will go away. We have taught our stomach to digest slowly and quietly. We have witnessed through the generations that the world was formed by brutal men, the children of Cain who vowed to serve the serpent, who moved forth into the heavy stench of incessant struggle. Fondane continued:

We showed our drunken face
It was dead—in the ditch,
It was dead—and we slept exhausted
under the suspicious stars.
We had nothing more to do
nothing to eat, nothing to dream
and the dawn was a dirty river which carried
with it a perished universe.

(226)

We follow Fondane with anguish and we speak with him. We would like to believe that what he is telling us belongs to a past that will not return, to an individual experience which will fade away as does everything that is individual. Knowledge does not deal with individuals unless it illustrates the general, unless it allows us to draw a more comprehensible conclusion. But Fondane does not fade away. We read him, and we realize that his individuality is a never-ending source of fascination and wonder. In fact, we have always known that individuality is the last moment of truth, its ultimate and original source. Fondane's words spread over the generation. They become more and more truthful as we are willing to face the evil that is latent in this dying universe. The roads are filled with the dead as soon as man has learned the power of the lie. How clearly La Bruyère put forth our intimacy with the lie: “Man is born a liar.” Truth is simple and ingenious. Man seeks the specious and the ornamental.” We have learned to understand man's power over the lie; we realize that it is a natural and an inseparable command. The lie came in man's desire to be like the gods. He believed that this was not only a possibility, but also a reality. He believed the lie. He believed that all was possible. He assumed a divine stance. He assumed divinity. He swam in a river of filth.

We begin to think of the racial state and we are overwhelmed by the depths of its roots. How far back does it go in our history? Perhaps we are wrong. It has no history. It is our contribution to the immense evil that is lodged in our existence. It lives on the new idea put into action, the new policy invented by a government and implemented by a bureaucracy. We listen to words which startle us, we see them printed on Nazi calendars to be read from day to day. These words are: “A people stands and falls according to the greater or lesser worth of its blood-bound racial substance.” These words are written under the picture of an SS officer and a child in a carriage. A lovely calendar, a touching human relationship and a powerful lie. How easily they seem to go with each! We wonder how easily the fruits of civilization go with the evil that emerges in the same civilization. But the battle is not finished. Evil doesn't progress without opposition. The belief in freedom and individuality has also a long and intricate history. It goes back to man's belief in the intellect, to his belief in his uniqueness, to his deep respect for the creative arts, for poetry and poetical thinking. Man listens to his past. He bears his religious tradition. The prophet Job and the Psalmists are always before him. The struggle with evil is not over. We are not assured of victory, but we fight on. There is nothing else for us to do.

The battle is finished but there is still water in the wells. Water! You turn in a vast ballet of living sources, quickly, ever more quickly in the ungraspable water. Into the great open eyes of man your image, immense, flowed away. It left the countryside. Forgive it, Brute!

(227)

The military battle was over. France surrendered. There was only confusion. We try to extricate ourselves from the collapsing images we have always adored, but there is only vertigo. There is nothing to grasp onto. Exile becomes fear and suspicion. We ask: Who will betray whom? Fondane was denounced by his concierge. He refused to wear his yellow armband. He proclaimed that he was French and needed none. Propaganda Minister Goebbels had told him and the world something else. At a party rally in 1938, he said: “Our starting is not the individual, and we do not subscribe to the view that one should feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty or clothe the naked—those are not our objectives. Our objectives are entirely different. They can be put most crisply in the sentence: We must have a healthy people in order to prevail in the world” (M. Burleigh and W. Wippermann, The Racial State Germany, 1933-1945, 1992, 69). Is this the immense image which flowed into our eyes, the one that was so precisely described and then ignored?

It was the one which sent forth armies of conquest, which found imitators and created dictators among all peoples. It was an attractive image compared to the decadent liberalism of the Anglo-Saxons who believed, like the philosopher John S. Mill, that the individual was sacrosanct. The other message given by Goebbels would take on many faces and dwell in many peoples. It became a living ideology with many forms.

There was devastation in the countryside. People fled from the Germans. They feared the invading armies and their destruction. Fondane spoke of the crying alarm clock and the silence which greeted it:

The alarm clock sounded in thousands of
empty homes, the wheat had ripened, wildly,
far from the sight of the farmer.
No one went into the fields
No one went to school
No one went to church
and the night fell suddenly.
But the nightingales sang
all the same!
It was an old romance
of a time when the world existed.

(227)

Fondane's tragic epic is of little interest to the philosopher in search of epistemological riddles, who remains fascinated by the intricacies of Hegel's speculations and the ideal of pure knowledge freed from every taint of subjective coloring. Fondane, like his friend and mentor Shestov, put the audacious questions before us. These were the questions which Dostoyevsky raised in his novels when he took us into the souls of criminals and revealed a criminality which permeated every level of human existence. Our concern is not with the reasonable and rational man. It is with the outraged, the passionate, the humble, the believer in the impossible who, like his God, believes everything is possible.

Solitude is no longer possible
It yields its nipples and it gives us to suck the
bitter milk of existence.

(228)

This bitter milk was not only given to us by invading armies which come in every century and in every decade, it was given to Cain by the Divine and through him to all men. We believe that it is the Divine who wanted us to eat this fruit, to gorge ourselves with it. What other fruit could we have eaten? God brought injustice to Job, and we wonder if the restoration made to him truly belonged to his tale or if it was not placed in the text to appease our need for the just God. Moses never abandoned the people and showed them the Holy Land. But we wonder if we needed to be told about Moses' loyalty to soothe our souls. We wonder about the philosophers who speak about happiness, who speak of the new ages which knowledge will bring us. We wonder about the social justice that will be embodied in our lives. We think of the Messiah who embodies a deeper and more extensive reality of reason and justice. We have eaten too much of the “bitter milk of existence” to take seriously these hopes. We must have the strength to offer our souls to God and seek His redemption, but how is this possible without God's grace? We listen to Fondane. He tells us:

Cease your insolent cries which keep death away like the fire keeps away the wolves, there where desire grates on our teeth, where thirst awakens us more powerfully than hunger and where man turns himself against himself and cries, … where the night crumbles like stale breads which we feed to the sacred swallows.

(228)

We read eagerly with Fondane. We try to participate in the images which he evokes. His poem is an epic of images. This is what we expect from the poet. Reality takes form in imagery. It is molded and shaped there. The reality that is there must be evoked. It must find its expression in words. It has to be drawn forth from a shapeless existence. This is the miracle of words, creating feelings and the infinite variety of imagery. The text of existence is given. It yearns for interpretation. It can be played to innumerable tunes. Fondane revealed not only what he experienced, but what lay quietly and abandoned in experience, the silent suffering, the inaudible pain, the dreadful degeneration and distortion of the human reality. We suck “the bitter milk of existence,” and it changes our body, our sensitivity, our thinking. It changes our being. We envision the words coming forth, we hear the tonality within them, and we are driven from verse to verse. We cannot stop. The words lead us to the soul of the poet. This soul is our companion. The name is dissolved in it. Fondane is no longer a heap of words which appealed both to our intellect and our feelings. He is a soul attempting to make sense of nonsense, attempting to form that epic path which evil has assumed, forcing us to enter this confrontation with destruction and degeneration. Fondane led us from shape to shape. He revealed the forms that evil assumes. This is the poetic journey. But how far can it go? We are never sure. The poem ends but never concludes. It will be read and reread, listened to again and again. Each of its voices startles us, and we discover that there is in us a myriad of responses, each revealing another aspect of the self, a mysterious and infinite possibility. The listening is never finished. We stop and hope that it might go away, but the words come again and we hear them faithfully.

That they burn us or they nail us, that
it be chance or misfortune, do
you want it to be our rape?
It is the human song.

(230)

This is the song we hear in our civilization, amidst the greatness of our universal science and the nobility of our moral code. This is the song we hear remembering that Moses was given the Decalogue. This song we sing with joy and study. We believe that these commandments are the moral foundations of civilized life. We never deny this, but we have learned to look upon murder and rape, ethnic cleansing and indiscriminate destruction with selectivity and indifference. We have learned to call it a song of humanity, a song we cannot change. We watch the man become the rhinoceros and we despair. The song does not go away. It is always there, near and around us. It is the siren of our lives.

I sleep but my heart is awake
Who has touched my heart
Naked in its sleep,
already covered by rumor
It is the voice of my beloved
She calls to me, and I am startled
Her hand holds the sword,
my entrails are shaken by it.

(231)

We remember the voices which filled our lives before this evil descended upon us. We remember them with an unimaginable intensity, with a sensitivity which shakes our being. Only in the midst of suffering do we hear the words of Job, of the Psalmist, of Jeremiah. We hear the agony which is evoked by the evil which fills our existence. Remembrances bring their agony. We are separated from our beloved, and we yearn to hear that voice again, to listen to its tonality and to feel the stirrings within ourselves.

My Sister, my Friend open me
Let my heart, O let my heart be joyful
my Sister, My Friend, be open to me
I bring a basket of dew.

(231)

What greater tenderness and love could Fondane bring her? But Linie is gone. Fondane has lost her and longs for her voice, for a presence he knows he will no longer have. Linie is gone. She has been taken to Auschwitz. Their love has been torn asunder, and there is no healing. Is this what evil means, a tearing asunder of love, a tear has been made that cannot be repaired? The Germans tore apart the deepest human feelings. They brought the plague of racism, and it found fertile soil in Fondane's France. It brought destruction to the Jews, to Fondane's people, to his family and to his work and his life. Only the distant voices of his beloved could open his soul which was now silent, but could still create images. His soul never rested. He searched unendingly for a hope that never came. He found only death.

My Sister, my Friend look for me
let my heart, O that my heart be joyful
I am here, I am everywhere
like the fluff of dandelion.
O, daughters of Jerusalem!
If you see my beloved
Don't tell her—or tell only in a faint whisper—
that we have seen bleed a wood strawberry
But the guards said: “Enough chatter!
Sing us a song of Zion!
Sing, Jew, sing.”

(232-33)

The call goes forth to the daughters of Israel. Fondane remembered his people. His remembrance became his repentance, his Teshuva, his turning back to the tradition he had forgotten, to a responsibility he had lost. This turning back was all that was left. It went beyond country, beyond work. Fondane brought it into poetry. There it would live in his words, his images, and his rhythms. In the flight from pursuers, he had found a spiritual refuge. He found the God he had forgotten. This is not only Fondane's exodus, it is the exodus of every man who suddenly realizes that the forgotten God is also forgotten responsibility, forgotten repentance, forgotten remembrance. Our minds are flooded by the pain of these forgotten values, but we will learn to sing again, to hear the songs of the past, to weep with the people at the rivers of Babylon.

The daughters of Israel are asked to sing, but about what are they to sing? Evil lies spread through the land and the chorus replied to a request for a song:

How do you want us to sing in a strange land? Does evil no longer have a face? Are the chains not broken? Has justice come? Has the time of the just come? Have I voice in my throat, have I tongue in my mouth, and has God written Mercy on the depths of our nights?

(233)

Fondane called forth to God all the questions men have uttered for ages. It is the abandonment which plagues man, and this is more severe and painful in times of suffering and destruction. In our age, it became tortuous. Evil assumed new dimensions of reality. It spread with machine and weapon to every aspect of lie and harvested millions of souls, greater heaps of death than were ever before seen. About what can the daughters of Israel sing? Are their voices yet to be heard? They sing, but their sounds and words have become silence. There is silence everywhere. God has retreated from the universe. Man is alone. From the voice of God, creation came forth, and the angels sang joyously. Creation no longer hears this voice. It follows the course of necessity.

Let Him come and let Him say to Me: “Sing!”
But can I sing against Him?
I would dance like a flame
But can I dance on His body?
Can the man for whom God is the enemy sing?
Can we sing in the storm, in the sand, in
the throat of the desert?

Let Him leave to the grain of wheat a chance to ripen, may the grasshopper be able to consume its own song, may the blackbird have this set table and around the cloth his simple little eyes are like light fluff, let the harvest be heavy in mother's hands, let his wife be smooth on her powerful belly, let peace be a fresh torrent in his fatigue, and there is the world gorging itself again with song.

(233-34)

If God does anything, let him leave us a few signs of life. We no longer expect the justice and the just. We no longer ask for them. We need only a few traces and signs that life will continue. We need only the simplest traces of life, the smoothness of skin, the ripening of a harvest, the selling of a table. The sweep of evil has reduced radically our desires, our hopes for songs and spiritual pleasures. We have little left and we want these songs and pleasures to remain. We want life and not death.

It is not the throat which sings
It is not the hand which gives shape
It is not the foot which decides what
route we will take
It is not the spirit which discovers in the old
linen chest—sprinkled with lavender—the
ancient laws of the earth!
When we embrace a form it is the breath
of the glassmaker trampling over the demons of the air,
when we sing, it is that someone wearied
by some enormous travel entering our houses,
asleep in our bread, smiling in our salt.
But how can a house sing without light in it,
a farm without a horse in the stable?
It is the grasses along the roads,
It is the grasses for the heart,
Our feet have swollen along the ways
Have, have pity on these poor nettles
which do not cease to cry: “Where is their God?
There is no God!”

(234)

God has been with his people. He covenanted with His people, with those who were present and with those to come. His presence was with Moses, but now it is no longer. We no longer understand. We cry out with the Psalmist: “Why hast thou cast me off, O Lord, why dost thou hide thy face from me? … Thy burning fury has swept over me, thy onslaughts have put me to silence; all the day long they surge round me like a flood, they engulf me in a moment.” (88)

Fondane was engulfed. The world of poetry and literary criticism was crushed. Nothing but the burnt smell of ashes rose from them. Yet the poet wrote. Did the world have to know what he felt, what fears and despairs filled his soul? Would men change hearing his words? Men heard the teachings of Moses and nothing changed. When Moses, at the age of 120, knew that he would shortly die, he spoke sublime words, perhaps the most powerful and devastating words he ever spoke. He said before the elders of the tribes: “For I know that after my death you will take to degrading practices and turn aside from the ways which I told you to follow, and in days to come, disaster will come upon you because you are doing what is wrong in the eyes of the Lord and so provoking him to anger” (Deut., 31:29-30). The words of farewell were sad and condemning, but Moses had no others. We wonder if others existed and if they did, whether Moses could have chosen them.

Fondane asked God for help. He appealed to Him:

Break our chains—Those which tie us to this earth. To every soil. Which puts its barefooted leg upon us, the Master of life, and the song will fill our mouth, a handful of strawberries will be in our mouths and we will sing the song of Zion, ancient Zion, the beloved!

(234)

The poet sang like the Psalmist. He had taken David's harp, and he sang painful love songs of God and Israel. He sang them with an intensity as deep, and perhaps deeper, than David could ever have imagined. Fondane stood in the midst of an evil never envisioned by humankind, an evil which could only have been brought about by God. This was not an evil of a serpent, a being who commanded man's attraction to a demonic knowledge, but an evil which came from the divine majesty, an evil which was the divine itself.

We can now write histories. We detail this evil in every death camp, in every village and state. The heaps of books illustrate our failure to comprehend evil. We never understand the ways of God. We write histories and memoirs. We reveal the effects of His will, but this will remain a mystery. Our question will always be: Where is the God of Israel, the God of humankind? We will reply: God's not to be found. He is beyond the question and beyond the answer. We are mocked by our question and become folly, but we search nevertheless for an answer. The Psalmist asked: “Why should the nations ask Where is their God?” There is no answer for the nations, there is only that inexplicable faith in a God for whom everything is possible, who makes a mockery of our questions, who makes us into historians and storytellers. There is nothing else for us to do.

Fondane was a storyteller. He told us of this evil which was brought upon us. We read on and on in his poem, and we realize how deeply separated we are from any knowledge of God, how foolishly wonderful are our words, how beautifully we reveal the mockery of our existence, how magnificently harmonious are our words, and how chaotic the world we describe.

The guards spit upon our voice and they turn away angrily toward their gifted priest;—If God existed for them, would they still be in exile? Was he not buried under the walls of their crumbling temple, long ago grand, today a refuge for lizards? Tell them the truth, as it is fitting for the priest, without useless pomp and frenzy! And the priest unleashed his voice.

(235)

The drama belongs not only to man. It does not follow only the fate embodied in Moses' farewell. The drama belongs also to God. If we lose ourselves in one drama, we forget the other, but both must be remembered. We do not believe that man alone brings evil into the world. God brings evil into it. The evil belongs to Him. Man does evil deeds. God Himself has an evil dimension. This is beyond explanation. We can only state the reality and draw the consequences which are possible for us. Fondane asked us to listen to the priest.

This place given to the weeds,
to the desolations of the salt,
many forces have woven this Nothing …
The altar damp with solitude, its coarse
linen withers, the least moving spirit
touches its presence, this mass which was
dense, this space which was time,
Leprous walls! Filthy cloth! Walk of lamentations
Demons from an obscure agape
No longer sensitive to the soul in your Zion
What tear in the eye of the stones
and what milk in these vipers
sing the perpetuity with an absence that is seen
everywhere and whose structure is eternity?

(235-36)

Many would have us believe that the tradition has died, that the ruins of the temple are the ruins of the soul. The lizards now creep upon the walls indifferent to their past glory. People have died; people have faded away. Is this not the fate of Israel? Will this fate not carry with it the faiths of Western civilization? The demise of the oldest will carry with it the younger and the youngest. The survival of the walls of the temple are symbolic of survival itself. Fondane caused us to see in Israel's destiny that of a whole civilization. But it is not only the faiths which are threatened, the culture of European civilization is in mortal danger. What is secular and what is sacred lose their differentiation. Suddenly, they merge into a whole that is threatened by an evil which longs to devour one after the other. The vastness of this demonic power causes us to look to God and cry out: My God, My God why hast thou abandoned us? Why hast thou brought injustice into the world? These are the questions we will never answer. “You may listen and listen, but you will not understand, you may look and look again, you will never know” (Isa. 6:9-10).

Over and over again, we hear the eternal cry, How long, O Lord? Fondane, like his ancestors, repeated it with his own peculiar intensity. He repeated it for mankind who have yearned for the Messiah, for a new earth and a new heaven, who have surrendered their hopes that greater social justice can redeem this world, who hold dearly to Isaiah's words: “For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth. Former things shall no longer be remembered, nor shall they be called to mind” (Isa. 65:17-18). The poet is captured by his questions.

Where is your justice?
Where is your pity?
Under the drippings of the solstice
which fill you with friendship,
Your mouth without language
puts forth a deaf harangue!
The eye reflects but does not see the Time
which goes beyond its shadows. Shade,
peace in your inward being! Only what
increases endures.

(236)

There is a mournful silence covering the living. The evil is great and widespread and God is hidden. Speech is not heard, sight is not seen. There is a melancholic web covering the world which the poet struggled to comprehend, knowing that there was no comprehension.

In the tissues of your stone, where is this living God who dined with a prayer and lunched with nothingness, with the Fall consented to by the angels of anarchy, with the destruction wished for since the beginning of humankind, has he fled from its sight to the dry and worm-eaten secrecy?

(236)

New gods have come forth, gods from ancient myths and dreams. These are the gods to which men now turn, and which they worship with frenzy and joy. Moloch has returned absorbing the children, those of the present, those of the past. He is the god who takes from us the memories of our history. He forces us to write new histories, those which fit the ideas and ideals of the state. In his presence we are cleansed of the past, and we are reborn in the present as his priests ordain the present to be. Moloch accepts the sacrifice of nations. The new god takes our children, teaches them traditions and myths. He shows them the ways of idolatry. He teaches them to forget the God of Israel and to build again magnificent temples to the ancient gods who have lain tranquilly in their graves waiting to be reawakened and given their honored place. Fondane witnessed this reawakening of the new gods. His poem cuts out against them, struggling to bring forth the God of Israel who lies in His abandonment. He is the hidden God who has brought injustice upon us and yet loves His creation. We must learn to hope and long for this hidden God. That is all that is left to us. Without Him, we return to Moloch. Moloch awaits our return. He doesn't wait in vain.