New York Times Book Review a Horse Walks Into a Bar
Dominique Nabokov
David Grossman, Jerusalem, 1997
1.
David Grossman's A Horse Walks into a Bar is non funny; in fact information technology might be one of the least funny novels I have ever read. True, it is about an crumbling Israeli stand-up comedian, Dov (aka Dovaleh) Greenstein, and in the course of chronicling his performance i dark at a seedy comedy gild in a small town in State of israel, Grossman includes many examples of his patter. Some of it is of the reassuringly familiar kind, featuring schlemiels and schlimazels, schmendricks and schmucks, assembled in such collections as Michael Krasny's recent anthology of Jewish jokes, Let There Be Laughter.i
"The angel of decease," Dov calls out to 3 law students in his audition, "appears before a lawyer and says his fourth dimension has come. The lawyer starts crying and wailing: 'But I'thousand merely twoscore!' Angel of expiry says, 'Not co-ordinate to your billable hours!'" If that doesn't seem sufficiently ethnic, hither is another in Dov's repertoire that is much closer to the canonical grade:
An Italian, a Frenchman, and a Jew sit in a bar talking near how they pleasance their women. The Frenchman says: "Me, I slather my mademoiselle from head to toe with butter from Normandy, and afterwards she comes she screams for five minutes." The Italian says: "Me, when I bang my signora, get-go of all I spread her whole body from top to bottom with olive oil that I buy in this one village in Sicily, and she keeps screaming for ten minutes after she comes." The Jewish guy's mute. Nothing. The Frenchman and the Italian expect at him: "What about you?" "Me?" says the Jew. "I slather my Golda with schmaltz, and later she comes she screams for an hour." "An hour?" The Frenchman and the Italian tin't believe their ears. "What exactly do you do to her?" "Oh," says the Jew, "I wipe my easily on the curtains."
Simply these jokes, which at least have the pocket-sized virtues of both predictability and bad sense of taste, quickly give way to something deliberately appalling and offensive:
There's an Arab walking down the street adjacent to two settlers in Hebron. Nosotros'll call him Little Ahmed…. All of a sudden they hear an ground forces loudspeaker announcing curfew for Arabs starting in five minutes. The settler takes his burglarize off his shoulder and puts a bullet through Trivial Ahmed'southward caput. The other one is a wee bit surprised: "Holy crap, my holy brother, why'd yous do that?" Holy Blood brother looks at him and goes, "I know where he lives, there's no way he was gonna arrive dwelling house in time."
If we had not realized it already, we know now that Grossman'due south comedian is leading us into a very dark room, where the exit signs are all extinguished.
In Grossman'southward celebrated 2008 novel, To the End of the Land, the heroine Ora wanders in torment beyond the Israeli countryside, refusing to render to her house for fear that there volition be a knock on the door from an officeholder begetting the news that her son, who is serving in the army, has been killed in gainsay. (That tragic fate befell Grossman himself, whose son was killed in Lebanese republic in 2006.) The weight of anxiety is crushing, simply the setting is outdoors, expansive, sunlit.
A Horse Walks into a Bar, past contrast, is unrelentingly claustrophobic. The society is dingy, the crowd restive, the comedian at once manic and uneasy:
Even when he laughs, his wait is calculating and joyless, seeming to monitor the conveyor belt on which the jokes emerge from his mouth.
Some members of the audience get up almost at in one case and head for the door; many others follow as the functioning grinds on; but 1 of them watches as if tied to his seat, and the reader joins him in queasy fascination.
Two weeks earlier this spectator, a retired gauge named Avishai Lazar, received a phone telephone call from the comedian, inviting him to nourish the performance for old times' sake. At commencement the approximate was baffled. Stiff, sober, and still in mourning for the death of his wife, he has no taste for stand up-up comedy and does non acknowledge Dov's merits that they were adolescence friends. But slowly dim memories render, and he forces himself to attend to the caller's urgent request:
"I'm listening," I said.
"I desire you to look at me," he spurted. "I want yous to see me, really see me, and then afterward tell me."
"Tell y'all what?"
"What you saw."
The novel is in consequence a record of what Judge Lazar saw, and it is unbearably bleak. "All nighttime and inconsolable," as the blinded Gloucester says in King Lear.
In both his fiction and nonfiction, Grossman has vehemently inveighed confronting the injustice and folly of the Israeli occupation. Just the darkness here is non primarily political, at least not direct so. The anti-settler "joke" almost Fiddling Ahmed, greeted with an uncomfortable mix of laughter and disapproval, is an exception. The comic has been told by the management to stay away from politics, and for the most part he complies. The violence that A Equus caballus Walks into a Bar explores is more individual and intimate. Its cardinal interest is not the vicious treatment of vulnerable others but the cruelty that wells up within families, circulates like a poison in tight-knit groups, and finally turns inward against the cocky. Grossman's literary kinship here is not with Swift's A Pocket-size Proposal simply rather with Dostoevsky'due south Notes from Underground or Kafka's "The Judgment."
ii.
I remember the start fourth dimension I read "The Judgment." It was the winter of 1964, and I was a student at Cambridge University, living in a small room in a building that had been erected in the seventeenth century and that seemed to have had merely a few modest renovations since that time. (Where are the showers, I asked when I get-go arrived, and was told that the higher terms were only half-dozen weeks long.) There were gas fireplaces, operated by putting 6-pence pieces into a slot, so at least the rooms did not become intolerably cold, particularly if you drew the heavy outer door closed—it was called "sporting the oak"—and created a kind of hermetic seal. A risky method, of class, since it was an obvious invitation—to which some depressed students succumbed near every year—to commit suicide by turning on the gas and leaving information technology unlit.
On one of those dour English language afternoons when it begins to abound dark around 3:00 and the air current seems to come directly from the steppes, I saturday past the burn down and read what was my first Kafka story (every bit it happened, it was the story he regarded as his breakthrough). I found it utterly baffling. A dutiful son, recently engaged, helps his aged, infirm begetter into bed and tucks him in. "Am I well covered up?" the male parent asks, and the son reassures him that he is.
"'No!' cried his begetter, cut short the answer, threw the blankets off with a strength that sent them all flying in a moment and sprang erect in bed…. "Yous wanted to comprehend me up, I know, my young sprig, but I'm far from being covered up yet.'"
The male parent reveals that he has long been lying in wait, until the terrible moment of judgment: "I sentence you now to death past drowning!" The son rushes down the stairs, out the front door, across the road, and toward the railing of a bridge. "Dear parents, I have ever loved you, all the same," he cries, equally he lets himself drop.
I could not, for the life of me, understand what was going on. I think throwing the book down in puzzlement and cloy. Then hours after, with my mind elsewhere, I felt a strange commotion, every bit if someone had violently plucked a cord within me. The agitation, I realized at one time, had to do with the story, though zippo had become any clearer to me, except for the presence in it of a weird current of laughter.
This current flows into A Horse Walks into a Bar. It makes itself felt at one time in the comic's strange penchant for cocky-punishment. "Practise you lot actually desire to laugh?" he asks his audience. "And so he scolds himself: 'What a stupid-ass question! Helloooo! It's a stand-upward show! Practise you withal not get that? Putz!' He gives his forehead a loud, unfathomably powerful smack." The guess is taken ashamed by what he perceives in the accident as "a leakage of murky information that belonged somewhere completely dissimilar."
During the evening more and more such information leaks out through the same acts of violence directed inwards, until, near the evidence's climax, Dov strikes himself again and over again with his fists:
The spectacle looks like a fight between at least two men. Within the cyclone of limbs and expressions I recognize the eyebrow that has passed over his confront more than once tonight: he is uniting with his abuser. Beating himself with another human'southward easily.
When the audience has finally drifted away, leaving only the comic standing by the judge'south table, the whole ghastly sequence concludes with a direct innuendo to "The Judgment": "I sentence you now to expiry past drowning!" Dov says, "so holds the flask upward over his head and drizzles the terminal few drops on himself." No suicidal leap from the span, but the novel stages a comparable act of self-destruction, and in the course of doing and then, information technology enters into the Kafka-zone where tragedy and comedy are braided together.
3.
The phenomenon of Jewish sense of humor is so central to modern life and so familiar in American popular civilisation from Groucho Marx to Woody Allen that information technology is easy to overlook the bounding main of sorrow on which information technology is built. That sorrow was not simply an expression of the long history of exile following the devastation of the temple in Jerusalem in lxx CE, simply also an antiquity of the Christian communities among whom the dispersed and caught Jews found themselves. That is, Jews were supposed to be miserable; that had to be the inescapable consequence of their failure to recognize Jesus as the Messiah and their stubborn refusal to convert. Some were permitted to survive and were even granted protection by the pope and other European grandees, only but on condition that they remain unhappy.
Hence the endless beating and spitting and insulting; the grotesque accusations followed about inevitably past execution or massacre; the sudden confiscations of holding and wealth; the badges, restrictions, and other rituals of humiliation. It was only in 1646 that an English language md, Thomas Browne, ventured to refute the widespread belief in the foetor Judaicius, the stink that all Jewish males were said to emit, and merely in 1668 that Jews were no longer compelled to race naked down the Corso in Rome during Carnival. As recently as late-eighteenth-century Frankfurt, even the most elderly and respected Jews still had to stride off the sidewalk and bow deeply at the approach of whatever Christian.
What was expected from such people, at least in public, was not laughter but lament. "That quondam tune—do you however know it?" asked Heinrich Heine in his long poem "Jehuda ben Halevy."
How it starts with elegiac
Whining, bustling like a kettle
That is seething on the hearth?
Long has information technology been seething in me—
For a grand years. Black sorrow! 2
But Heine, built-in in 1797 to a wealthy Jewish family unit that had converted to Lutheranism, was non interested in continuing the collective weeping. Embracing radical politics and the Napoleonic promise of emancipation, he discovered on the far side of grief and oppression a strain of laughter, often sharply satirical, that he mastered and bequeathed to posterity.
It is a laughter that echoed throughout German-Jewish culture, extending into the cabaret scene of the 1920s, and that found its equivalent as well in the less assimilated Yiddish world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In I.L. Peretz'due south "Bontsha the Silent," the heavenly host, including both angelic defender and prosecutor, contemplate the unending meekness of the deceased Bontsha, who had never once throughout his miserable life protested his cruel fate. His outcries, the heavenly judge tells him, could have brought down the whole world, but he refused to complain, and at present in Paradise his sublime silence will be rewarded with absolutely annihilation he chooses to take. Subsequently a moment, Bontsha asks if he could have a hot roll with fresh butter every morning time. A terrible silence falls on the great hall. "Then the silence is shattered. The prosecutor laughs aloud, a bitter laugh."3
Grossman's Dov is the king of the biting laugh. He directs it out toward the members of his audience, peculiarly the most vulnerable amongst them. And so he turns information technology even more ferociously back upon himself, using it as a sharp instrument to burrow ever deeper into the wreck of his life. He announces as the centerpiece of his comic routine "My fiiiiirrst funeraaaaaal!"
When the crowd laughs, he curses them. What follows is an unbearably sad account of a damaged babyhood, each painful, discontinuous detail emerging in mad disorder, twisted together with one-half-told jokes and crude insults, bursts of cocky-compassion and cocky-loathing. Dov's father Hezkel was a barber, impatient and short-tempered, barely property things together, veering from ane hare-brained scheme to some other in gild to back up his married woman and small son. His female parent Sarah was a Holocaust survivor, haunted past the horrors she had endured, incapable of the simplest household tasks, perpetually disoriented, an object of pity and ridicule. "Always with her caput downward," Dov recalls, "and the schmatte over her face up and so no one could come across her, God forbid, rapidly aslope the walls and fences so no one would snitch on her to God and He'd find out she existed."
Petty Dovaleh used to run across his mother at the jitney stop when she came from her shift at the munitions factory in guild to keep her from getting lost on the way dwelling house. It was then that he learned to walk on his hands, he tells the audience, since, when he did and so, "no ane noticed her, see?" And when they reached home—before his father'south return put an end to the fun—he continued his comic performance: "I spent my whole life trying to brand her laugh."
Though the friendship between Dov and Gauge Avishai Lazar dated from this flow in their lives—they both went to the same math tutor every afternoon for a year—the immature Avishai knew aught about Dov's mentally unstable mother, or about the beatings he routinely received from his male parent, or nigh the hazing he endured almost daily at schoolhouse. The boy—a good thespian—seemed to him sunny and optimistic. Simply somewhat subsequently did Avishai glimpse something seriously incorrect in his friend's life, something disturbing enough to account for the fact that the adult Avishai had entirely blocked all witting recollection of their childhood friendship.
What he witnessed happened when they were fourteen years old, during a school trip to a armed services-style youth military camp in the south. They were in the same tent when Avishai saw Dov brutally and viciously bullied by their laughing platoon mates. The future approximate did cypher to finish the unspeakably cruel treatment of his friend:
Nosotros fabricated no sign of mutual recognition. Fifty-fifty as photo negatives of ourselves, nosotros were completely in sync. His scream had frozen in my throat, or so I felt. I held my head upwards high, looked away, and walked out, even so hearing their cackles.
The repressed memory of this tranquility, cowardly expose comes back to the judge in the course of the comic's excruciating business relationship of receiving the news of the death of 1 of his parents. Dov's story of his "kickoff funeral" is a suspenseful bout de force. It is the climax of the novel'southward strategic weaving together of manic sense of humour and tears. Grossman'due south cunning is to make the revelation mutual: that is, Dov had asked the gauge "to run into me, really meet me," but in the course of doing so, the judge sees himself. And information technology is but then that the novel can let itself to close with a tiny gesture of tenderness: "'How nigh y'all let me take y'all abode?' I propose. He thinks for a moment. Shrugs again. 'If you insist.'"
four.
I had a childhood friend—let me call him Alan—who was brought up in a Jewish former-historic period home where his father was the director. At that place were distinct advantages to this unusual upbringing, since Alan, an exceptionally sensitive and precocious child, was surrounded in upshot by doting grandparents who showered upon him their ceaseless honey and attention. But there was, of form, a meaning downside: these bobbies and zadies kept dying on him, i afterwards some other.
For some years Alan and I lost track of each other, but then nosotros found ourselves together in college. I day he phoned me to tell me he had merely received terrible news: his father, nonetheless quite young, had died suddenly of a heart attack. He was going to return to Boston for the funeral, he said, and I offered to drive him back.
I had had at this bespeak in my life virtually no feel of death; he had had all as well much. Perhaps this fact, along with David Grossman's searing and poignant novel, can aid to explicate what remains otherwise very strange to me well-nigh this drive: namely, that we spent the entire time singing and telling jokes.
Source: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/04/20/david-grossman-king-of-bitter-laugh/
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