Through exile, Judaism gains another weight as a regenerating valence, something like a stable, residual magnetism with new vibrations. In exile, Fondane extends himself in a typically Judaic cry and call to awakening and universal brotherhood in the face of the cataclysm; Celan gathers himself into himself and into the neurotic imagination of memory.
Old and new accents strengthen the Jewishness of peregrination. Their distant star, “the grandfather between the flames of the Sabbath candlesticks praying: ‘let my right hand forget her skill! / If I do not remember you, / let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth / if ever I take thee in vain, O Jerusalem!’” This is how Fundoianu / Fondane evokes the diaspora of the exiles: “The soldier in the marshes of Masada / makes himself a fatherland / unflinching/against all the barbs in the wire / toward me / he came / with wakened name / hand wakened, for ever / from that which couldn’t be buried,” with his eyes set on the new Jerusalem. Lyric expression becomes, in one, the almost biblical invocation of a prophet, treated to violence and vulnerable, while in the other it is a continuous, fragmented undertone aspiring to the tumult of silence where the whispers and groans of the banished ghetto may occasionally be deciphered, sacrificed, and codified into an almost cabalistic austerity of language.
Both refusing the limiting label Jewish poet, Celan and Fondane remain poets of the languages in which they wrote: the German poet and the Romanian-French poet, each the most expressive of Jewishness in the first half of the twentieth century: the ferocious, bloody anti-Jewish half that gave them birth, inspired them, and killed them.
Belonging to the literature to which they added and were added, and thus to the world, they form a singular, revelatory, and urgent imprint at once Jewish, lyric, and universal.
There they are in the mountains beyond the mountains of posterity: Gross the Great, tall and ardent, with long hair and dreams taken by the wind, rash, contradictory, and contrarian, with rapid changes of humor, vital, full of verve, rebellious, wrinkled, and rugged, and little Klein, short, delicate, fragile, enclosed in silences, in premature and persistent melancholy, a charming pilgrim and fugitive from the pages of Trakl and Rilke.
How would the dialogue unfold between the voluble, frenetic Fondane and the silent Celan who had walked through Paris a whole night long with Zbigniew Herbert without either one letting out a word in agreement, which they both considered sublime? It’s hard to know if in the meeting “in the hereafter” our interlocutors would continue to be the same or the opposite of those they had been — or completely beyond our poor earthly imaginations. What we know is that suddenly the crutches — the staves — of those blinded by tragedy had grown silent, stilled. The same for the stones around them. The Jew has before his eyes, or rather beneath his gaze, a veil that does not impede his sight but which keeps it from being only sight, without, however, impeding “the always radical immediacy of sight,” to quote Jean-Pierre Lefebvre. Complete peace and quiet in the mountains: the phantoms are alive and walk on beside each other as they had never done in life.
Still, too, was the stone. And still too was the mountain wherein they walked, the one and the other.
So it was quiet, quiet up there in the mountains. But it was not quiet for long, because when a Jew comes along and meets another, silence cannot last, even in the mountains. Because the Jew and nature are strangers to each other, have always been and still are today, even here.
So there they are, the cousins. On the left, the turk’s cap lily blooms, blooms wild, blooms like nowhere else. And on the right, cornsalad, and dianthus superbus, the maiden-pink, not far off. But they, those cousins, have no eyes, but a veil hanging in front of them, no, not in front, behind them, a moveable veil. No sooner does an image enter than it gets caught in the web, and a thread starts spinning, spinning itself around the image, a veil-thread; spins itself around the image and begets a child, half image, half veil.
Poor lily, poor corn-salad. So there they stand, the cousins on a road in the mountains, the stick silent, the stones silent, and the silence no silence at all. No word has come to an end and no phrase, it is nothing but a pause, an empty space between the words, a blank — you see all the syllables stand around, waiting. They are tongue and mouth as before, these two, and over their eyes there hangs a veil, and you, poor flowers, are not even there, are not blooming, you do not exist, and July is not July.
The windbags!
They would have so much to say! Everything that Gross had endured and foresaw and burned and everything that Klein had lived through, and foresaw and took upon himself, gripped in the claw of guilty memory. Each would remember his Shulamith—“hair of ash” evoked by Celan and her “red” bloodied hair by Fondane — and the black milk of the condemned and survivors in Death Tango, as Death Fugue was called in a Romanian translation of 1947, and the ashen snow under the pyre of Fondanian verse, the wine and blood in the lyric of each. And definitely I
tcani (pronounced Itscan), “the border to the world” (“A Itzkani voici un post — frontière dans le monde,” Fondane had written), the small town in Bukovina not far from Celan’s Cern
uti. Itcani was only 3 kilometres from Burdujeni, the small Moldavian town itself bordering on Romanian Moldova and not further from Iasi than from Herta, both belonging to Fondane’s world and his poetry.
Whatever you say though, in the time after, the post-time, all this is just babble, chat, the shamelessness of the palaverers who insult the silence, the supreme, single, absolute definitive silence that only itself might be capable of measuring up to the annihilation of the wanderers.
There are no more words, effectively, and those that there are don’t reach the intangible horror — its poisoned and glacial, tenebrous, hypnotic magic. Gross and Klein know this. Yet they must speak; the cousins have met for this reason. This is the way of the Jew, even when nothing remains to him but the ultimate crumbs of words, crumbs, fractures, interrupted whispers, indistinct codified moans, he still needs a Thou, to whom he may address his muteness. It is a feature of the first, infantile landscape of Bukovina and Herta where “The girls await in the dirty alley deepening / the silence that falls every evening / and the peace and quiet in long molding things./In houses of the simple, Yiddish springs”—there but also in the allegro of Little Oriental Paris, as Bucharest was called, as well as in Paris the great herself, City of Lights, with those one thousand incomparable nights and the suave Seine of the drowned.
About all these things … at least they might speak about all these things if it were still possible to speak, if there might still exist words that the death before death and the death after hadn’t silenced.
The windbags! Even now, when their tongues stumble dumbly against their teeth and their lips won’t round themselves, they have something to say to each other. All right then, let them talk …