Naomi Gordon-Loebl (deputy publisher): I’ve been meaning to read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden for years—ever since I found out that one character says to another, “Now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.” But I happened to finally tackle it the same year that Netflix announced a new adaptation, which means this spring I found myself oddly on-trend in reading a 74-year-old book.
As it turns out, the far more famous passage from East of Eden is a scene in which two characters do a close reading of the story of Cain and Abel. The conversation centers around the question of how much agency we have when it comes to “sin.” And at the heart of that question is a Hebrew word that Steinbeck spells “timshel.” He translates it as “thou mayest.”
I won’t get into the implications of this translation, since that would give too much away. But I will say that “timshel” is often cast as the most important word in the book. At a restaurant a few weeks ago, the man sitting next to me noticed my copy of East of Eden. He asked what I thought of it. Then he revealed that he had a timshel tattoo (!). When I got home and searched online, I discovered that in fact, quite a few people have a timshel tattoo (!!).
Which is a little awkward, because Steinbeck made an error in both the transliteration and the translation of the word. You can read a lengthy scholarly article on the subject here, or, if you’re me, you can ask JC associate editor Maya Rosen, who explained to me that since biblical Hebrew has no independent modal verbs, there is no specific word for “can” or “may.” Rather, “timshol” (not timshel) is the second-person masculine singular form of the verb “rule over”—as in, “thou mayest rule over it.” (Or, depending on who you ask, “can,” or “should,” or “will.”)
Which did make me wonder if all those people know what they actually have tattooed on them.
Linguistic riddles aside, East of Eden captivated me. It had been a long time since I walked home from the subway with an open book in my hands. Apparently Steinbeck received quite a bit of criticism for the novel’s heavy-handed symbolism, and I can see why; it’s a story about good and evil, and it makes no attempt to hide its thesis. But to reduce East of Eden to an allegory would be to miss its real gift. The most important part of this novel is not its most famous word, or the moral conclusion at the end of its 600 pages, but rather the epic, infinitely contradictory, infinitely human world that unfolds along the way.
Alisa Solomon (contributing writer): When Eric Bentley’s 1972 documentary play Are You Now or Have You Ever Been began performances last month, its too-timely alarm was impossible to miss. Assembled verbatim from proceedings of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigation of show business, Bentley’s courtroom drama presents 17 “witnesses” called by the committee between 1947 and 1956, with the expectation that they would confess their own alleged subversive activities—activities that involved First Amendment-protected speech—and to finger others involved alongside them. The play’s title condenses the central question of these hearings: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? Its characters—drawn from more than 100 witnesses called by HUAC in its investigation of alleged Communist infiltration of Hollywood—include defiant refuseniks like Lionel Stander, Arthur Miller, and Paul Robeson, and stool pigeons like Jerome Robbins and Elia Kazan. Many were blacklisted—losing reputation and livelihood—simply for being subpoenaed. Some went to prison for refusing to cooperate.
In our own moment of criminalized protest, the production brought echoes of a shameful period when America squashed dissent in the name of protecting the Constitution. Lately those resonances have become even louder and more ominous. A couple of weeks into the run, protesters at the Prairieland immigrant detention center in Texas were handed draconian, decades-long sentences as “antifa terrorists.” Soon after, a Florida law, passed in April, went into effect, enabling state leaders to designate activist groups as terrorist organizations and to expel state university students who support them. Governor Ron DeSantis wasted no time in tagging the Council on American-Islamic Relations and “antifa”—which is not actually an organization.
By the time I caught the show last night, the mildest opposition to the Trump regime—that is, from the Democratic Party—was being threatened in terms that seemed to come directly from the play. Trump, standing at Mt. Rushmore last week, declared that Communism is currently “the greatest threat to our country, including World War I, World War II, Pearl Harbor or even 9/11,” perpetrated by “illegal immigrants, criminals and everybody that doesn’t want to work.” It was as if he had pulled a 75-year-old Joe McCarthy speech from a file. The modest reforms proposed by democratic socialists—like universal healthcare and affordable housing—are being besmirched, like the labor and anti-racist organizing of the Hollywood lefties of yore, as efforts to overthrow America. “This is not your granddaddy’s Democrat Party,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt declared on Fox News. “This is a full-blown communist revolution.”
Red scare tactics always surge when progressive movements gain ground in the United States. They’re as American as Fourth of July fireworks and their toxic spew. So, as I sat in the theater at City Center, watching director Anna D. Shapiro’s crisp, perfectly paced production featuring a top-notch rotating cast (a new group of guest stars takes over on July 13th) play out on a sleek set (two wooden tables on blue patterned carpet, a cyclorama onto which headlines about the hearings are projected, along with occasional background text that clacks into view with the sound of a typewriter), I couldn’t regard Are You Now as a history play, not when the specter of anticommunism is haunting America.
The audience seemed to concur. We all groaned at those who named names—though with sympathy as we watched actor Larry Parks gradually broken down over a grueling day of questioning. And we burst into applause for those who ridicule the three-man team of investigators—for instance, when they remind Stander of the committee’s duty to “investigate reports regarding subversive activities in the United States,” and he readily agrees. “I have knowledge of subversive action!,” he offers, amiably. “I know of a group of fanatics who are trying to undermine the Constitution of the United States by depriving artists of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without due process of law! I can cite instances! I can tell names. I am one of the first victims, if you are interested. A group of ex-[German American, pro-Nazi] Bundists, America Firsters, and antisemites, people who hate everybody, Negroes, minority groups, and most likely themselves.” (In his introduction to the published script, Bentley likens Stander to a “New York Jewish comedian.”)
Even more stirringly, the play ends with Robeson. An investigator tells him: “You are here because you are promoting the Communist cause.” Robeson rejoins, “I am here because I am opposing the neo-Fascist cause. Jefferson could be sitting here, and Frederick Douglass could be sitting here, and Eugene Debs could be sitting here.”
Nowadays, many of us could be, too.
Mitch Abidor (contributing writer): It’s thanks to my friend Abe’s interest in Jewish left-wing schismatics that I was led to finally, 56 years after its publication, read the great—no, the greatest—epic of the American left, Harvey Swados’ Standing Fast. Abe is researching the Shachtmanites, a Trotskyist split from other Trotskyite splits, of which Swados was a member. This is a tale of anti-Stalinist Marxists standing fast in their belief that the working class is the bearer of revolutionary hopes and will ultimately bring about a real socialist revolution; that the Communist Party is a servant of Stalin and a brake on real working-class struggles; that those who have been won over to the Communists can be converted to Max Shachtman’s sectarian Trotskyism; and that no matter how difficult things might be, there’s always a silver lining. Victory is inevitable.
Perhaps only Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battleso accurately, so insightfully, and so sympathetically yet critically describes life on the assembly line, the picket line, the party meeting, and the union hall for dedicated men and women as they strive to leave their personal interests and lives behind in order to devote themselves body and soul to the revolution. The meetings, the ideological discussions, the splits, the solidarity, and the backstabbing that are endemic to all left-wing movements are here.
There are many Jews in Standing Fast, but also some non-Jewish whites and Blacks. In good Trotskyist style, everyone receives a party name upon joining the novel’s New Party, a stand-in here for Shachtman’s actual Workers Party. The characters come from across the country, but Swados has a special affinity for the Jews among them, and his transcription of New York Jewish speech approaches that of the great master of it, Richard Price. Swados takes us into the activists’ homes as well as their workplaces, and we can see and almost smell these homes of people who have given up all hope or desire for success in order to ensure the better tomorrow that they are certain will come.
The epic sweep of the novel takes us from the 1930s to the 1970s, placing the characters in the midst of the highs and lows of those decades. The revolutionary wave of the Depression years doesn’t appear; the Hitler-Stalin pact doesn’t bring them the wave of disaffected Communists they expect; serving as GIs in World War II doesn’t lead to their organizing the workers in the ranks for the revolution that their ideology dictates will inevitably follow the war. The postwar years see the workers’ increasingly enamored of the benefits of American life and unwilling to risk anything for any struggle that doesn’t get them something in the immediate present, while McCarthyism brings panic and isolation.
The characters evolve or devolve, as time passes, with some of them successfully selling out to become TV stars or consultants. Like the actual people this roman à clef is based on, some become disabused ex- and anti-Marxist intellectuals. Some feel they threw their lives away. Others stand fast. Swados’ genius is that the evolution of the characters is in keeping with the personality and tastes that first made them revolutionaries. Swados was something of a seer. He foresaw that the working class would be the spearhead of the far right. The tragedy of the Depression-era left is brilliantly and movingly personalized and detailed.
Standing Fast, though set in the distant past, is a necessary book. There is no complacency in it about the legitimacy of the dreams of socialists or the failings of both moral compromise and moral purity. It’s a book that demands to be read by the readers of this magazine. It is out of print, though available in ebook format. Secondhand copies are out there, though they are often expensive (ed. note from David Klion, who is also reading up on Shachtmanites: Tell me about it). I’ve politicked with the most likely publisher to bring it back, but due to problems with Swados’ heirs, I’ve been told this won’t ever happen. It’s never a bad thing to haunt secondhand bookstores. I recommend you make finding and then reading Standing Fast your task. It will be a highlight of your reading and political life.
Weekly Parshah Commentary
Parshat Matot-Masei from Raphael Magarik
This week’s double parshah, Matot-Masei, concludes the Book of Bamidbar. The Israelites, condemned to wander in the wilderness for 40 years, are nearing the end of those peregrinations. God instructs Moses to write down the Israelites’ journeys: a long, plodding itinerary, containing such scintillating recollections as, “they set out from Rithmah and encamped at Rimmon-perez; they set out from Rimmon-perez and encamped at Libnah; they set out from Libnah and encamped at Rissah.”
Oddly, Ashkenazi tradition specifies that this section be read in a distinctive, elevated trope. Why the extra pomp for the biblical equivalent of someone scrolling through endless photos from their road trip through Kansas? Even more puzzling, many of these campsites were never mentioned previously. Not a few, like “Rimmon-perez,” are hapax legomena, terms that appear exactly once in the entire biblical corpus. In fact, according to the medieval Andalusian commentator Abraham ibn Ezra, the scriptural story skips from the first to the fortieth year, relating “no event or prophecy” from the middle 38. What happenings at these places, too insignificant to mention when they occurred, retrospectively justify their being name-checked?
Drawing on an earlier midrash, Rashi answers with a parable. A ruler took their sick child to a distant place to heal. When they were returning, the parent began to recount their experiences, saying to the child: “Here we slept, here we were cold, here you had a headache.” The parent, it seems, is overcome by a retrospective rush of sentiment as they remember the journey—and so it is with God. Sure, as per ibn Ezra, there was “no prophecy or event” during the 38 years. But there was life and relationship: resting, catching cold, illness, and care. When the Torah records our foundational laws and narratives, it skips that stuff. But when God, Moses, and Israel are reminiscing together like old friends, they might savor these quotidian, unremarkable details. Indeed, it is precisely the memories’ irrelevance to a general audience that signals their private meaning. The message for later readers (that is, us) is the lack of a decipherable message—an overheard tenderness, irreducible to homiletics, heretical to paraphrase.
Yet even as Rashi answers one question, he creates another: The parable describes a back-and-forth journey—one way to get medical care, and the other to return home—while the Israelites’ journey is linear, moving from Egypt to Canaan. When do Israel and God retrace their steps? The answer lies in the biblical verse in which Moses describes the Israelites’ wanderings, which I translate in all its literal awkwardness: “Moses wrote their starting-points to their journeys as directed by God, and here are their journeys to their starting places.” The text’s repetition flips the order: starting places to journeys, then the opposite. From that inversion, the parable imagines God rewinding through the wilderness journeys and dictating a travelogue. The parable’s voyage out is literal, but its return is literary, the stuff of ink and parchment rather than of feet and tents.
Whenever I teach this midrash, someone invariably corrects me. They insist that the first leg in the parable represents Jacob and his family’s passage from Canaan to Egypt, while the second leg represents the Israelites’ return from Egypt to the Promised Land. This “correction” is mistaken, because it ignores the fact that the biblical verse quoted is about a single journey and the act of writing it down, not two journeys, and because the Israelites do not take the same route back to Canaan that their ancestors did from it. But I understand the temptation. First, the two trips in the suggestion neatly parallel the pair in the parable, avoiding the confusing trick by which we pass from real to written journeys. And substantively, one hears the language of return and almost involuntarily assimilates it to the grand biblical plot of restoration to the Land.
The misreading thus clarifies the parable’s actual, counterintuitive radicalism. Moses finds the journey’s end by writing every step of the road, rather than by reaching the land. And so the parable’s refusal to assign the scriptural text an actionable moral feels like a desire to linger in the wilderness and not to move on to what comes next: In Devarim, Moses delivers a series of hortatory lectures, to prepare for Joshua’s war of conquest. Uncorking a cliche, in the hopes that it might breathe and deepen, we might say that the parable teaches us that it is not the destination, it is the journey—or if you prefer, not the homeland, but the text. Both the itinerary’s curious emptiness and the parable’s weird, meta-literary move (that is, shifting from a real to a recorded journey) register the affinity between an unrooted, wandering sensibility and a certain literaryformalism. For sometimes, the text takes a recursive, pervasive interest in its own structure and composition, at the expense of its ostensible purpose. (Most simply, diaspora and literature are linked by the pun that constitutes this book, the echo between “midbar,” or “wilderness,” and “davar,” or “word,” which both share the Hebrew root “d-b-r.”) The parable is gesturing toward the strange theology of exiles forgetting to return, of scriptures declining to instruct, of rulers who secretly cede their crowns to writers.
Among literary theorists, formalism often gets a bad rap as apolitical, or even conservative: Just the text, never mind about messy, contentious history. But reading this midrashic parable today, one sees how an interest in form might be yoked to sharp, diasporic critique. One encounters, to borrow English professor Susan Wolfson’s term, an “activist formalism,” an aesthetic abstrusity with polemical bite. For as the text insists on its own prerogatives, refusing to be merely a vestibule to the Promised Land, it reminds us of truths about our Torah so fundamental it is incredible that they need recollecting: that the Law was given in the wilderness; that neither the Pentateuch nor its prophet reach the destination; that our world remains unredeemed, messianic fantasies of homecoming notwithstanding; that we are still living in those four looping and eccentric decades; and that consequently, we had better learn to cherish the wandering.
Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents; his book,Fictions of God, is out now.
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