{"id":417222,"date":"2019-03-15T11:03:50","date_gmt":"2019-03-15T15:03:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/?p=417222"},"modified":"2019-03-15T11:24:42","modified_gmt":"2019-03-15T15:24:42","slug":"joshua-cohen-on-jakov-lind-author-of-the-month","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2019\/03\/15\/joshua-cohen-on-jakov-lind-author-of-the-month\/","title":{"rendered":"Joshua Cohen on Jakov Lind [Author of the Month]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our featured author of the month is Jakov Lind, an author whose biography, as you’ll read below, is absolutely fascinating. To celebrate his work, we’re offering 30% off on\u00a0<\/em>Landscape in Concrete<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Ergo<\/a>\u00a0all month\u2014just use the code LIND at checkout.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Joshua Cohen<\/em><\/a> (The Book of Numbers, Witz) wrote an amazing introduction for ou<\/em>r\u00a0edition of <\/em>Landscape in Concrete.\u00a0Given the sales history, I’m 160% certain that the vast majority of you have never read this. Do it! Do it now! Give me this one thing! Because after you read this? You’re going to want to read the book.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Which, brings me to today’s mini-schedule. Later today I’ll post excerpts from\u00a0<\/em>Landscape in Concrete\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>Ergo.\u00a0And assuming it’s OK with NYRB,\u00a0<\/em>I’ll run a bit from\u00a0<\/em>Soul of Wood<\/a>\u00a0next week. (The only [?] author that NYRB and Open Letter have in common?) <\/em><\/p>\n

Read Jakov Lind!\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

[Ed. Note: I\u00a0love\u00a0that cover. That’s peak Open Letter design right there. Now on to the intro!]<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cJakov <\/span>Lind<\/span>\u201d was a pseudonym <\/span>for a man without a name. According to the rolls of a host of long-since defunct regimes, \u201cLind\u201d was once known as Jakov Chaklan, Palestinian Jew (this was back when you could be one of those), and before that he was Jan Gerrit Overbeek, Dutch bargehand, which was the Nazi-era identity of Heinz Landwirth, Viennese. The author of Landscape in Concrete<\/em>\u2014and also of the stories of Soul of Wood<\/em>, the novel Ergo<\/em>, two other novels, another collection of stories, an Israeli travelogue, three memoirs, numerous stage and radio plays, and occasional poetry\u2014might have been all of these people, and he might have been none. This is not meant \u201cdeconstructively,\u201d however, or in a spirit of relativism. What\u2019s being asserted here, at the beginning, is trauma. Is not knowing what to call one\u2019s self. Is not having a private name for one\u2019s self.<\/p>\n

Landwirth was born in 1927, the year of the first trans-Atlantic telephone call, the year that television was first publicly demonstrated. Lindbergh flew to Paris; Trotsky was ousted from the Communist Party. This was not long after the collapse of the monarchy\u2014the Austro-Hungarian Empire\u2019s dissolution, through the first of the wars, from a relatively unified official culture, German-speaking, German-writing, into a smattering of countries impoverished with insular nationalisms. The author\u2019s closest affinities lay here, with the ideal Habsburgs in their tubercular, war-wounded death throes; his childhood ailment is the Proustian languor, the mourning of a past always near, strangely distant, unlived and yet, lost: \u201cIf I\u2019m sick I vomit broken china and golden frames,\u201d he writes in the first volume of his autobiographical trilogy. \u201cWhat, if not handmade in the nineteenth century, is my Middle European soul?\u201d<\/p>\n

The work published under the name Jakov Lind has its deepest roots in a land\u2014in a landscape, a Landschaft\u2014that doesn\u2019t exist, in a time that had disappeared a decade before the author\u2019s birth. There\u2019s a reason that Middle Europe isn\u2019t a name featured on maps, since it can be anything, anywhere, in the mind. The Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal tells us that Mitteleuropa ends at the last Empire train station (which would mark that terminus in Lviv, now in Ukraine); Thomas Mann once proclaimed that Germany was wherever he was\u2014a delusional, denying hope whose reification would have exiled the capital of the neighboring Reich, if temporarily, to Pacific Palisades, California. Lind offers a description of his impossible habitus in the second of his two German novels, Ergo<\/em>, originally published as Eine bessere Welt (A Better World<\/em>): \u201cA town made of Liptauer cream cheese, Lipizzaner horses and Lilliputians of roast chicken, bauernschmaus, liver dumplings and liver sausage, a rhyme, a phrase, a proverb and perhaps not even that but only a waistline, a shoe size, a collar size, a hat size and perhaps not even that but only the family vault of Maria Theresa and Franz Josef and the children Kalifati, Ruebezahl, Krampus, and Nikolo Christkindl and Andreas Hofer, who died of scarlet fever, whooping cough, measles, chicken pox and Basedow\u2019s disease.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Before we go any further, it should be said that Lind\u2019s autobiographies, written in English in London, are the only sources for information about Lind, and also about Landwirth, Overbeek, Chaklan, et al. How reliable they are depends exclusively on one\u2019s sense of humor.) His father, their father, \u201cwas a Viennese businessman without much business in the world. Half Luftmensch and half duke.\u201d A traveling salesman, Simon \u201cclaimed to be selling\u00a0underwear to nuns.\u201d Patrimony lay in Galicia, far over the Tatra Mountains in Poland, which would make Landwirth p\u00e8re a true Viennese. By contrast, the portrait of the author\u2019s mother, Rosa n\u00e9e Birnbaum, is hazier; she \u201chad no money, four children, and no help in a three-room flat.\u201d She was known as \u201cthe Saint. The Good One. The Strong One. The Patient One.\u201d The marriage was relatively happy; Landwirth was mothered by sisters\u2014he would always be surrounded by women.<\/p>\n

The author\u2019s war departs from this domesticity, never regained. With Hitler returning to annex his homeland, Landwirth was sent to the Netherlands on a Kindertransport, along with a sister (Ditta). His parents managed to make it to Palestine, where their ship, refused port by the British, was bombed by the Haganah. Landwirth boarded for a time at a Zionist farming school in Gouda, desultorily training for his own resettlement. When that school was shuttered amid Nazi occupation, Landwirth went underground (1943 marks the end of his formal education). Angered by the complacency of the Dutch Jews, who, he thought, were just waiting for their deportations east, Landwirth purchased appropriate papers and became Jan Overbeek; the young Dutchman explained his native German by claiming an Austrian mother, which was \u201ctrue.\u201d As Overbeek, the author found work on a barge, plying the Rhine from the Hook of Holland down to the Ruhr Valley\u2014one of the most postcard-perfect parts of the Reich. On furlough, Overbeek contracted the clap from a prostitute, and was ordered to a sanatorium to recover. There, he was recruited by a scientist-soldier to serve as a personal courier in an office attached to Das Metallurgische Forschungsinstitut des Reichsluftfahrtministeriums<\/em>, \u201cThe Institute for Metallurgical Research of the Imperial Ministry of Air Traffic.\u201d When Allied bombs are\u00a0falling even by day, and Berlin\u2019s being threatened, what\u2019s a Jew passing under false papers to do? Overbeek mimicked a Nazi. It\u2019s unconscious, Lind tells us; one nods and obeys, one adapts.\u00a0Overbeek had no way of knowing that this Nazi scientist, who refused to allow Overbeek any contact with friends (and certainly not with any female friends), was spying on the Reich\u2019s nuclear program, making reports on the progress of the Cyclotron to the British.<\/p>\n

In summation: A Viennese teenager turned Dutch bargeworker turned employee of the German military machine, Overbeek was also an unwitting accomplice to espionage. \u201cI liked Berlin. My job was hardly strenuous. I had to take some letters to certain officials in the Air Ministry on Friedrichstrasse. I delivered my letters in large brown envelopes, turned about, and said good-bye.\u201d<\/p>\n

As \u201cthe German Empire was disintegrating faster than any empire before it,\u201d what were Overbeek\u2019s thoughts? \u201cMy mind was on girls and how to find them. How to find them first and how to find a place to take them to.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1945, amid debellatio<\/em>, the author was off to the Netherlands again, then to France, hoping to make his European escape. Palestine was the idea, but thanks to another forged passport (reading Jakov Chaklan, Palestinian)\u2014and to his manifold languages, all stamped with an accent that seemed to be Dutch\u2014British Intelligence, then controlling the French border, refused to believe that he was a Jew. At Maubeuge, Chaklan dropped his pants\u2014his circumcision was, apparently, convincing. He took passage to Haifa, only to find his father ill, his mother dead, his sisters miraculously grown up. A kibbutz drove him crazy, as did the religious, and so, with his name forever converted, if not his soul, he eventually, reluctantly, vagabonded his way to London. (With Lind, flux was the norm: wandering, fleeing, life lived as a sort of refugee-tourism; before settling in London, amid \u00e9migr\u00e9-rich Hampstead, alongside the likes of Erich Fried and Elias Canetti, Lind crisscrossed the Continent: Vienna, Copenhagen, Paris. Occupations: in Palestine, beach photographer, fruit picker, air-traffic controller; in Europe, acting student, actor, private detective, journalist, literary and film agent, husband and father. First wife: Ida; second wife: Faith.)<\/p>\n

London was also where the writing began\u2014drafts initially intended, according to Lind, less for the proof that is publication than as an experiment, an interrogation accomplished on paper. Though he\u2019d been writing fragments for years\u2014beginning diaries then abandoning them when the poetry became too personal and the philosophy muddled in language\u2014could Lind write fiction, could he write fiction that was truer than fact and in German, the murderers\u2019 tongue?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Which brings us to Landscape in Concrete<\/em> (Landschaft in Beton<\/em>, 1963), Lind\u2019s second published book and the novel that cemented his reputation after the freak, international success of the great, short-form Soul of Wood<\/em>. Landscape<\/em> concerns one Gauthier Bachmann of Duisburg-on-the-Rhine, an aspiring gold- and silversmith, and an oafish sergeant in the German army. The setting is Eastertide, 1944. As the book opens, Bachmann\u2019s just been released, or has escaped, from a sanitarium at Oppeln (known as Opole, in Poland), where he\u2019d been recovering from a humiliating defeat at Voroshenko, a Soviet forest in which his entire regiment is said to have drowned in the mud\u2014763 of them dead in the first five minutes of battle, as he tells it once, or within three hours, as he tells it another time, in October 1941.<\/p>\n

Lind\u2019s novel narrates Bachmann\u2019s pitiful attempts to rejoin that Second Hessian Infantry Regiment, Eighth Battalion, or, failing that, to join any detachment that would have him and his formidable size (six-foot-two, three-hundred pounds; he\u2019s often described as a bear) and talents (Bachmann is in possession of the gold star for marksmanship; for \u201cshooting twelve Russian monkeys off a roof\u201d at Stalino, today Donetsk, in Ukraine).<\/p>\n

Bachmann\u2019s picaresque takes him through the Ardennes (which turn out to be his ancestral region; his forebears had been Flemish), then to arctic Narvik, Norway, and finally back to Germany, to his original station in Honnef, all the while being fooled, manipulated, used, debased. As obedient and as loyal as a golem, intending only to serve, Bachmann acts as an impromptu executioner for a Norwegian madman, the former schoolteacher and current war profiteer (and double agent), Hjalmar Halftan. As Bachmann the soldier becomes Bachmann the multiple murderer, the absurd is reasserted. Criminality is only a question of context; after all, the Holocaust was legal, as are most wars. Individual hypocrisy is institutionalized as public chaos, through the total perversion of language: \u201cLet me be a simple, normal, intelligent human being,\u201d Bachmann says. \u201cThat\u2019s plenty.\u201d<\/p>\n

Besides the na\u00efve, Nazi-Svejk Bachmann, and the \u201cangekok\u201d Halftan (who, it\u2019s noted, has the same first name as the president of the Reichsbank), essential characters include: Xaver Schnotz, a poisoner and army deserter; Peter von G\u00f6ritz, a predatorily homosexual Major; the Elshoved family of Norse nobles; and Helga Okolek, Bachmann\u2019s Behemoth girlfriend, \u201cAryan\u201d but with a Slavic surname. Supporting appearances are made by a lesbian gynecologist-landlady (murdered) and a Bulgarian Gypsy violinist (arrested).<\/p>\n

As Bachmann marches east at novel\u2019s end to rejoin his regiment at the front\u2014after it\u2019s officially ruled that he is, in fact, not insane and will not be discharged, as he\u2019d suspected, as he\u2019d feared\u2014Lind\u2019s landscape is momentarily barren (\u201cThe sun hovers red and flat in the sky, unwilling either to rise or to set.\u201d) and the only thing that can be said with any certainty is that its author survived.<\/p>\n

The book\u2019s closing section concerns an air-raid, and makes glancing mention of Rhenish barge-life, a scene of near-autobiography representative of Lind\u2019s style (and, typically, Ralph Manheim\u2019s translation is a marvel):<\/p>\n

\n

In the grass by the river bank [Bachmann] opened his coat and tunic, pushed up his sweater and undid two shirt buttons. He wanted to feel his heart with his fingers. The heat of the day lay heavy, like too much tenderness, over the gray and green colors of the Rhine. The ticking he heard was the engine of a barge. Then with wide-open eyes he saw more barges floating through the mist that rose from the water. They\u2019re carrying fuel to hell and stones for the wall of the city of the dead. Desertion leads to a quarry. Branches growing out of the clouds. Schnotz says: Your turn will come. What\u2019s written on the barges? Basel, Rotterdam. Aha! Secret names of the gates to the other world. Cement, stones, sand. A giant is carrying them through the water on his shoulders, wading step by step through the mud. A fool. Who told him to do that? If he\u2019d pick up the cargo and throw it all overboard, and if the other giants did the same, we\u2019d all be saved. The chunks of red meat would be cleared away. The crime can be discovered any day. What then? Upstream and downstream they go, day after day like galley slaves, they would have the power to sweep away the danger. Only the giants are strong enough. I\u2019m one of them. When it is all put under the concrete and the sun shines fiercely on it, nobody\u2019ll know any more what\u2019s underneath. The corpus delicti will be gone. Nothing is more dangerous than sitting still. I\u2019m shoving off.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A word about style, then we\u2019ll shove off.<\/p>\n

One\u2019s war became one\u2019s writing. If the Holocaust is to be regarded as a perfection of Europe\u2014technologically speaking, especially\u2014then the writing of the Holocaust might represent a perfection of European culture: Accounts of the tragedy have almost always been technically sterile, stylistically orderly, factual. Classical, Apollonian, to a fault. Elie Wiesel\u2019s memoirs, to take as example the most popular, have found, within the camps, amid the gas chambers and ovens, an order to obey the logic of humanistic experience. Wiesel\u2019s sentences and paragraphs tried, and still try, to impose reason\u2014a reason derived from a reverence of tradition, of continuity, in the face of diabolical incoherence. His works are resultantly direct, in-line, accounted-for; nowhere has Wiesel allowed evil to invade the flesh of his French prose. Hell is the subject, then, and not the object. But Lind\u2019s war was not survived in a camp. There was no Appell<\/em> for Lind, no line-ups, no count-offs; there was no order in his survival, and so no order in his prose. His writing is disorganized, ungrammatical (Lind\u2019s German was brilliant but, in every respect, adolescent). His war was riven with evasions and impersonations, and so, too, is his fictional landscape. He is the one Jewish novelist of the Holocaust who, in a major European language, expressed the Holocaust not through language, but in language. As language.<\/em> (One has to read in Yiddish to find anything comparable.) To be sure, this was aestheticizing horror. To be sure, this is what writers do. Or are supposed to do.<\/p>\n

My generation (I was born in 1980) is the last to know the survivors of the Holocaust, to know them as grandparents, as great-uncles, and -aunts. I know them as rigid, parsimonious. Frightened. They are old, but they seem to have always been old. They count the matches in matchboxes, save teabags for second and third steeps. They raised families, they continue to raise grandchildren and great-grandchildren, as if to replace the dead. Lind was not like them. He could never settle down; he abandoned women, divorced wives. He scraped by, drank, smoked cigarettes, marijuana. Psychological treatment intended to exorcise wartime memory included LSD experiments intravenously perpetrated by a certain Dr. Ling; this was in an era when no English-language magazine or newspaper could refer to London without calling it \u201cSwinging London,\u201d the latter 1960s. Macho, mustachioed Lind was garrulous, and, once published, famous. He summered in Mallorca, negotiated unsuccessfully with Hollywood. When in New York he stayed at the Chelsea Hotel. How many survivors were also hippies? How do you say \u201chippie\u201d in German? Hippie<\/em>. (Though \u201cflowerchildren\u201d sounds more menacing, archaic: Blumenkinder<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Not all translations are so perfect, however. Lind writing in English, which he did from 1969, was yet another \u201cLind\u201d\u2014displaced from German, distant from its slangs, forced to the cooler imagination of what was his fourth fluent language (German, Dutch, Hebrew, English). If the enduring Soul of Wood<\/em> was the beginning, Ergo<\/em> marked the end of his fictional promise, and only memoir could follow, written in a knowing, polished version of what London\u2019s German-speaking \u201cexpatriates\u201d called \u201cEmigranto\u201d\u2014what Lind once referred to as \u201cDENGLISH oder ANGLO DEUTSCH.\u201d Counting My Steps<\/em>, Numbers<\/em>, and Crossing<\/em> were those memoirs. The other, slighter, novels were Travels to the Enu<\/em> and The Inventor<\/em>, which went almost unreviewed. In the 1990s Lind got sick; good friends and editors died by the year. Before Open Letter decided to bring them back into print, the only available English-language copies of Lind\u2019s novels were used: $1 each, over the Internet; two memoirs I purchased for that sum at Manhattan\u2019s Strand bookshop had even been autographed (\u201cTo Albert,\u201d \u201cTo Alfred\u201d).<\/p>\n

A draft of this introduction was written as an essay for The Forward<\/em>, intended to mark Lind\u2019s 80th birthday; it was published a week before his death. Three or four people (older, huskily-voiced women) phoned me after that, telling me how kind Lind was to them in New York, how funny he was, how they regretted they \u201cnever got around to reading his novels.\u201d But fiction followed by fact that must, in turn, be followed by silence, disappearance, neglect, and regret is a reduction we readers cannot accept, or allow\u2014though that might have been the daily-felt fate of the writer. \u201cJakov Lind\u201d doesn\u2019t just deserve to be read; he\u2019s necessary, both in the vicissitudes of his life and, too, in the work he created. His books are a late bloom of the European Jewish landscape, straining sunward through the concealing concrete.<\/p>\n

Joshua Cohen<\/p>\n

12\/2008<\/p>\n

Brooklyn, NY<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our featured author of the month is Jakov Lind, an author whose biography, as you’ll read below, is absolutely fascinating. To celebrate his work, we’re offering 30% off on\u00a0Landscape in Concrete\u00a0and\u00a0Ergo\u00a0all month\u2014just use the code LIND at checkout.\u00a0 Joshua Cohen (The Book of Numbers, Witz) wrote an amazing introduction for our\u00a0edition of Landscape in Concrete.\u00a0Given […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":292,"featured_media":416452,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[68252,16786,68452],"class_list":["post-417222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","tag-author-of-the-month","tag-jakov-lind","tag-josua-cohen"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/292"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417222"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417222\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":417252,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417222\/revisions\/417252"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/416452"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}