Еврейский вопрос

[i_eron]

Я впервые услышал о Ховарде Джейкобсоне 13 октября, когда стало известно, что его роман "Финклерский вопрос" получил премию Букера за 2010 год. А назавтра эта книга уже ждала в моём MP3-плеере - чудеса технологии, век instant gratification. Но прослушать её я решился только в марте - она пропустила вперёд одну за другой целых 33 аудиокнижки (не считая нескольких бумажных и электронных).

Тинейджером я читал и перечитывал 12 томов Лиона Фейхтвангера, ради его истории не меньше, чем ради его евреев. Постепенно до меня дошло, что его тон разговора о евреях вызывает у меня дискомфорт и раздражение, а симпатия к автору переросла в отвращение. Гадкая сентиментальность, сомнительная этика, одинаковые герои - будто времена не меняются, или его в них интересует только одно. Неловко нарисованные персонажи, как декорации к еврейскому вопросу, а не живые люди. Только один из них продолжает держать меня за душу, да и тот нееврей.

С тех пор у меня сложности с авторами, пишущими на еврейские темы. Их герои понятны и узнаваемы - обычно лучше, чем, скажем, индийские. И тон автора тоже слышен отчётливо. Но так же понятны и их разнообразные неврозы и перегибы. Еврейские темы и так трудные, зачем мне ещё перенимать чужой дискомфорт?

Поэтому я читал позорно мало таких авторов, и пока не нашёл ни одного по-настоящему подходящего. Филип Рот слишком помпезный, Вуди Аллен слишком смешной (он, собственно, не писатель), всякие "жанровые" Фэй Келлерман или Харлан Кобен - слишком плохие. В последние годы я, с большими надеждами, прочёл семь книг Майкла Шейбона. Он хорошо и интересно пишет, я буду и дальше его читать. Но, как бы это сказать, мне нравится общаться с писателями, которые умнее меня, а не, э-э, иногда умнее.

И вот, пожалуйста, Ховард Джейкобсон. Он пишет про евреев, по-еврейски, даже само это надоевшее слово у него чуть ли не по два раза на строчку. Про нахальных евреев, про печальных евреев, про злых евреев, про счастливых евреев, про традиционных евреев, про современных евреев и про подражателей евреев. Про отношение английских евреев к Израилю, от злобного до восторженного, и про анти-семитов (как же без них?). Он пишет интересно, забавно, умно и честно. Но, самое главное, его читать - комфортно:

    Treslove, who has always dreamed, dreams that he is beckoned to a death chamber. The room is dark and smells. Not of death but food. The remains of lamb chops which have been left out too long. To be precise it is the sweet smell of lamb fat he can smell. Strange, because he recalls Libor saying that he could never bear to eat lamb as a consequence of adopting as a childhood pet a lamb which had nibbled grass in a field behind his house in Bohemia. 'Baaa,' the lamb had said to little Libor. And 'Baaa,' little Libor had said back. Once you've conversed with a lamb you can't eat it, Libor had explained. Same with any other animal.
    In his dream, Treslove wonders what St Francis found to eat.

Джулиан Треслов - главный герой книжки Джейкобсона. Сэм Финклер - это его друг детства, первый еврей, с которым он столкнулся. Про себя Треслов называет евреев финклерами, и с детства всё пытается понять их штучки:

    It was to Finkler that Treslove had gone running in high excitement after he'd had his future told on holiday in Barcelona. Treslove and Finkler were sharing a room. 'Do you know anyone called Juno?' Treslove asked.
'J'you know Juno?' Finkler replied, making inexplicable J noises between his teeth.
Treslove didn't get it.
'J'you know Juno? Is that what you're asking me?'
Treslove still didn't get it. So Finkler wrote it down. D'Jew know Jewno?
Treslove shrugged. 'Is that supposed to be funny?'
'It is to me,' Finkler said. 'But please yourself.'
'Is it funny for a Jew to write the word Jew? Is that what's funny?'
'Forget it,' Finkler said. 'You wouldn't understand.'
'Why wouldn't I understand? If I wrote Non-Jew don't know what Jew know I'd be able to tell you what's funny about it.'
'There's nothing funny about it.'
'Exactly. Non-Jews don't find it hilarious to see the word Non-Jew. We aren't amazed by the written fact of our identity.'
'And d'Jew know why that is?' Finkler asked.
'Go fuck yourself,' Treslove told him.
'And that's Non-Jew humour, is it?'

В 49 лет он вдруг обнаруживает, что переживает из-за своего нееврейства и решает, что он будет евреем.

    And she wasn't even sure he liked Jews as much as he claimed to. She didn't doubt his affection for her. He slept inside her skin and kissed her with gratitude the minute he awoke. But she couldn't be the all-in-all Jewess to him he wanted. For a start she wasn't, at least in her own view, anything like Jewish enough. She didn't open her eyes to the world and say Hello, here comes another Jewish day, which she had a feeling was what Julian wanted her to say and hoped he would soon start saying on his own behalf. Hello, here comes another Jewish day, except that . . .
    The 'except that' was half the stuff she tried on his insistence to initiate him into. 'I want the ritual,' he had told her, 'I want the family, I want the day-to-day tick-tock of the Jewish clock,' but he was no sooner given it than he backed away. She had taken him to synagogue - not, of course, the synagogue next door where they prayed in PLO scarves - and he hadn't liked it. 'All they do is thank God for creating them,' he complained. 'But what's the point of being created if all you do with your life is thank God for it?'
    She had taken him to Jewish weddings and engagements and bar mitzvahs but he hadn't liked those either. 'Not serious enough,' was his complaint.
'You want them to be thanking God more?'
'Maybe.'
'You are hard to please, Julian.'
'That's because I'm Jewish,' he said.
And though he raved like a madman about Jewish family and Jewish warmth, the moment she introduced him to her family, he fell silent in their company - Libor excepted - and behaved as though he hated them, which he assured her he didn't, and generally embarrassed her by his lack of - well, warmth.
'I'm shy,' he said. 'I am abashed by the vitality.'
'I thought you liked the vitality.'
'I love the vitality. I just can't do it. I'm too nebbishy.'
She kissed him. She was always kissing him. 'A nebbish doesn't know he's a nebbish,' she said. 'You aren't a nebbish.'
He kissed her back. 'See how subtle that is,' he said. ' "A nebbish doesn't know he's a nebbish." It's too sophisticated for me. You're all too quick on your feet.'
'Have to be,' she said. 'You never know when you might be packing your bags.'
'I'll carry them. That's my role. I'm the schlepper. Or doesn't a schlepper know he's schlepper?'
'Oh, a schlepper knows he's a schlepper all right. Unlike a nebbish, a schlepper is defined by his knowledge of himself.'

Оба они - и Треслов, желающий быть евреем, и Финклер, стыдящийся своего еврейства, вызывают мало симпатии и много раздражения. Но смеющийся автор, выглядывающий из-за них - как раз наоборот.

Между делом Джейкобсон замечательно показывает свой любимый Лондон и англичан. А ещё он забавно издевается над моей любимой БиБиСи:

    'He passed the BBC, an institution for which he had once worked and cherished idealistic hopes but which he now hated to an irrational degree. Had it been rational he would have taken steps not to pass the building as often as he did. Under his breath he cursed it feebly - 'Shitheap,' he said.
    'A nursery malediction.
    'That was exactly what he hated about the BBC: it had infantilised him. 'Auntie', the nation called the Corporation, fondly. But aunties are equivocal figures of affection, wicked and unreliable, pretending love only so long as they are short of love themselves, and then off. The BBC, Treslove believed, made addicts of those who listened to it, reducing them to a state of inane dependence. As it did those it employed. Only worse in the case of those it employed - handcuffing them in promotions and conceit, disabling them from any other life. Treslove himself a case in point. Though not promoted, only disabled.
    'There were cranes up around the building, as high and unsteady as the moon. That would be a shapely fate, he thought: as in my beginning, so in my end - a BBC crane dashing my brains out. Theshitheap. He could hear the tearing of his skull, like the earth's skin opening in a disaster movie. But then life was a disaster movie in which lovely women died, one after another. He quickened his pace. A tree reared up at him. Swerving, he almost walked into a fallen road mender's sign. DANGER. His shins ached with the imagined collision. Tonight even his soul shook with apprehension.

или:

'Only if she's not one of those smug leftists,' Libor had said.
'Libor!'
'I can say it,' he said. 'I'm Czech. I've seen what leftists do. And they're all smug leftists at the BBC. Especially the women. Jewish women the worst. It's their preferred channel of apostasy. Half the girls Malkie grew up with disappeared into the BBC. They lost their sense of the ridiculous and she lost them.'
He could say 'Jewish women the worst', too. He was one of the allowed.

Евреи Джейкобсона постоянно спорят - они не перестают даже после смерти:

    'The thing with my husband,' she wrote, as if to a divorce lawyer, though Finkler himself was the addressee, 'is that he thinks he has jumped the Jewish fence his father put around him, but he still sees everything from a WHOLLY Jewish point of view, including the Jews who disappoint him. Wherever he looks, in Jerusalem or Stamford Hill or Elstree, he sees Jews living no better than anybody else. And because they are not exceptionally good, it follows - to his extremist Jewish logic - that they are exceptionally bad! Just like the conventional Jews he scorns to spite his father, my husband adheres with arrogance to the principle that Jews either exist to be "a light unto the nations" (Isaiah 42: 6) or don't deserve to exist at all.'
    Finkler cried a couple more times. Not because of what his wife had charged him with, but because of the childlike conscientiousness of her Bible citations. He could see her bent over the page, concentrating. Perhaps reaching for a Bible to be sure she had cited Isaiah correctly. It made him think of her as a little girl at Sunday school, reading about the Jews with a pencil in her mouth, not knowing that one day she would marry and give her life to one, and become a Jew herself, though not in the eyes of Orthodox Jews like his father. And maybe not even in the eyes of Finkler either.

Евреи вообще склонны к обсессиям (одни дискуссии "Общества Пристыженных Евреев" о своём названии чего стоят). Они повторяют свои аргументы снова и снова, без конца, у них ведь даже ритуал такой:

If the answers to his questions amounted to anything it was that this story had to be told and retold - 'The more one speaks about the departure from Egypt the better,' he read. Which wasn't, if he understood the matter correctly, remotely Finkler's position. 'Oh, here we go, Holocaust, Holocaust,' he heard Finkler saying. So would he say the same about Passover? 'Oh, here we go, Exodus, Exodus . . .'
Treslove liked the idea of telling and retelling. It suited his obsessive personality. Further proof, if further proof were needed . . .

Евреи нервничают. Даже, если это не ясно с первого взгляда, их взгляд на жизнь, их политические убеждения (самые разные) - всегда результат той или иной реакции на разные травмы и внешнее давление. Кажется, они специально ищут повод понервничать:

He had begun to wake to the old sense of absurd loss again. Searching for the acute disappointment he felt and locating it in a sporting catastrophe: a tennis player he didn't care about losing to another tennis player he had never heard of; the English cricket team being defeated by an innings and several hundred runs on the Indian subcontinent; a football match, any football match, ending in a gross injustice; even a golfer losing his nerve on the final hole - golf a game he neither played nor followed.
It wasn't that sport allowed him to deflect his melancholy; sport spoke for his melancholy. Its vanity of expectation was his vanity of expectation.
He had discerned something Jewish in this, an avid reaching after setback and frustration, like supporting Tottenham Hotspur as some of Hephzibah's Jewish friends did, but now he was not so sure.

Значит, не случайно и я болею всю жизнь именно за Тоттенхэм ("ещё одно доказательство, если нужны ещё доказательства..."). Добавлю, что не только болеть за них - еврейское занятие, но и сам клуб ведёт себя, как типичный джейкобсоновский еврей - талантливый, экстравагантный и нахально-нескромный, вызывает попеременно восторг и стыд, но никогда не безразличие.

Я думаю, что евреи - особенные, и это очевидно. Но русские, индийцы, англичане - тоже особенные. В этом нет ничего особенного.

Мне кажется, что для еврея нелепо отрицать, что многие его черты, положительные и отрицательные, характерны и для многих других евреев. Что он - продукт еврейской истории и несёт на себе её печать. Попытки побега от этого делают его беднее и нервнее. Но зацикливаться на своём еврействе - ничем не лучше. Человек может быть одновременно евреем, мужем, папой, болельщиком, "ботаником", специалистом узкого профиля и дилетантом - широкого. Да, еврейский аспект - вероятно, шире и важнее, чем футбольный. Но те, для кого он единственный - тоже бедные.

Говорят, что у Израиля нет внешней политики, только внутренняя. Те, кто хотят оправдать Израиль, часто говорят, как будто убеждая самих израильтян (а то и самих себя), а не кого-то ещё. Ещё бы - ведь они не стараются услышать мнения, с которыми спорят. Это ведь "чужие" мнения:

    The community Jews were no match for her. Which wasn't saying much. They'd have been no match for a clown like Kugle. Had they been the only speakers they'd still have contrived to lose the debate. They confounded themselves. Finkler sighed as they went through routines that had been tired when he first heard them from his father thirty or more years before - how tiny Israel was, how long-standing were Jewish claims to the land, how few of the Palestinians were truly indigenous, how Israel had offered the world but every effort at peacemaking had been rebuffed by the Arabs, how much more necessary than ever a secure Israel was in a world in which anti-Semitism was on the increase . . .
    Why didn't they hire him to write their scripts? He could have won it for them. You win by understanding something of what the other side thinks, and they understood nothing.

Автор не раскрывает рецепта прямо. Но, помните, из первой цитаты: "После того, как вы пообщались с барашком, вы не можете его съесть." Только вот общаться по-настоящему - это ещё и слушать барашка, не только себя.

Слово "культура" на иврите происходит из слова "много". Культуры должно быть много, иначе это не культура, а так, колорит. Отрезать от себя любую часть своей культуры - неправильно и жаль. Строить границы между разными "культурами" - тоже. Мне кажется, что то, что происходит теперь в мире, это не "противостояние культур", а противостояние культуры и безкультурья.

Отвергать идишкайт, как это сделали в Израиле - неправильно. Но еврейский мир Восточной Европы уничтожен, его больше нет. Герои Шолом-Алейхема - замечательные, но они из XIX века. Признавать свою связь с ними - правильно. Строить их из себя - клоунада, не меньшая, чем делать вид, что они не имеют к нам отношения.

Евреи XXI века отличаются от евреев XIX века. Это нормально. Евреи XIX века отличались от евреев XVII. Бессмысленно отвергать прошлое и бессмысленно делать вид, что оно никуда не делось. Сложностей и так хватает, эскейпизм не поможет - ни туда, ни сюда. Хорошо бы просто принять настоящее с комфортом. Вот книжку Ховарда Джейкобсона, например.

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question (2010) - 9/10