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7 The Variants of Dis-assimilation THE ABSOLUTE IMPASSE As an apotheosis of his meta-theater, the inventor of sociodrama and metaFreudian psychoanalysis, Jacob Levi Moreno, used the scenario of the traditional Seder. In the Seder, all is ritual improvisation, for from the beginning the invitation is given out: "Whoever is hungry, let him come and eat, and whoever feels the need, let him come and celebrate the Passover !" and anyone may suddenly enter, the Friend, the Stranger, the Messiah , but also Amalek, absolute evil. And, a little later, as though to bring out the quality of the unexpected, "the door is opened"-the door through which the Awaited One may enter, but also the Unawaited One, the "anti," disrupting the magic of the evening with the calumny of ritual murder, as Heinrich Heine imagined in his Rabbi of Bacharach. It is a door, also, through which someone, instead of entering, can suddenly leave and slip away into the night, as Israel Zangwill imagined in his Had Gadya. The French version of Zangwill's Had Gadya was published for the first time by Charles Peguy in his Cahiers de La Quinzaine in 1904. Neither the date nor the place of publication were fortuitous. At that time, one was still in the midst of the Dreyfus Affair in which Charles Peguy had played so important a role next to his friend Bernard Lazare, who had just died, and in which also, Israel Zangwill had played so important a role next to his friend Theodor Herzl, who had just died. Bernard Lazare and Theodor Herzl were two Jews who returned to the Jewish hearth through the half-open door of the Seder. They were two victims of the "anti" whom the magnetic attraction of the Seder helped to convince that the assimilation of the Jew is impossible. The anonymous hero of Zangwill's Had Gadya was the Jew for whom dis-assimilation was impossible. This lost child also wanted to go home. Disappointed, disillusioned, battered, and exhausted by the outside world in which he had vainly sought to obtain everything that a man can, the door to the Jewish world opened to him at the moment when, in the House of his 99 100 FROM DENIAL TO REAFFIRMATION Father, his father began the curious recitation with which the Seder ends: Had Gadya, Had Gadya! And it was through this song which, from a single little kid bought by my father for two zuzim leads to the Justice of the Holy One, Blessed be He-a sure, necessary, absolute justice, and yet flouted, trampled on, betrayed (0 Dreyfus, 0 Zola, 0 Pharaoh, 0 Auschwitz!)-it was through this song that the consciousness of the returning son divested itself. It divested itself of all that it had gathered in the world outside and yet was sure that it could no longer find anything within. This dialectic of without and within stifled this lost Jew until he reached an absolute impasse . Within, it was too late to return, unless it was to gather in the "meta" of an ancient song, as old as the Jews themselves, the painful impression that in the Father's House there is room enough for everyone except oneself. Without, there was no longer anything to be found except death-a plunge into the waters of a Venetian canal where the scene unwound : But as he sank for the last time, the mystery of the night and the stars and death mingled with a strange whirl of childish memories instinct with the wonder of life, and the immemorial Hebrew words of the dying Jew beat outwards to his gurgling throat: 'Hear, 0 Israel ' ... Through the open doorway floated down the last words of the hymn and the service ... Had Gadya! Had Gadya! ... Nine years later, Charles Peguy published in these same Cahiers de La Quinzaine the first poems of Edmond Fleg's cycle Ecoute, Israel. Here we have a thesis and antithesis centering on the six "immemorial words" of the Shema Israel: the thesis of the Jew to whom the "anti" of the Dreyfus Affair had restored the "meta" of his Jewish specificity, withdrawing him from assimilation, and the antithesis of the Jew whom the failure of assimilation leads to suicide. TOO LATE: HEINRICH HEINE People have wondered what Zangwill's prototype was for his Had Gadya. There were so many visionaries of the Shoa at the beginning of the twentieth century that Zangwill, who died in 1926, may possibly, like...

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