Out of Brownsville: Encounters with Nobel Laureates and Other Jewish Writers

Melvin Jules Bukiet etc.

108 Melvin Jules Bukiet, etc. Ido not know Melvin Jules Bukiet very well, though I have met him twice, and we published his story “The Library of Moloch” in the Norton Anthology. The tale, practically allegorical, involves a librarian who compulsively tapes and collects oral testimonies by thousands of survivors of the Shoah, in his own selfish search for life’s meaning. Bukiet himself is a son of survivors. The library goes up in flames when the collector drowses off and drops an ash from his cigarette on some inflammable stuff. Certainly a cautionary tale, told with great feeling for the survivors’ stories, and great wryness about the academic Holocaust industry. But that is ancillary to my bringing him into my story. The four editors of the Anthology agreed that this was a first-rate piece, original, intellectually significant, a good read well done. Another post-Holocaust tale, also by the son of survivors, was up for consideration, too, about a character who becomes catatonic in an elevator, which to him is transformed into one of the cattle-cars used to transport Jews to the death camps. I had met the author at a Jewish literary conference and liked him, and the story (well enough). The others thought it was too mechanical, forced by an idea, arbitrary, etc. And we had already accepted Bukiet’s piece. One of my colleagues was on the fence, and 109 I thought another could be persuaded to come around and accept—after all, two about this horrendous subject would not be too much. But then a funny thing happened on the way to acceptance: a campaign was launched by friends of this author, also an editor of a Jewish publication, writing letters to us about why we should accept his story. That did it—no one wanted that kind of pressure, log-rolling, or whatever, and we all got our dander up, and that was that. Another cautionary tale, if not about a truly important subject. Bukiet, Mark Mirsky, Charles Bernstein (also in the Anthology) and I did a panel of readings together in D.C. at a Jewish Center, flogging the Anthology, and I got to hear Bernstein read one of his language poems, where words and their combinations, and how they were read, rather than essential meanings were the chief concern. It was a tour de force, a string of lines from many other writers that was scintillating. I also learned that he was the son of another kind of survivor: his father was the Hollywood and television writer blacklisted in the McCarthy era, whose story became the basis for the role Woody Allen played in The Front. One of Allen’s few, if any other, overtly political films, and a terrific one. But Bukiet is in these narratives for one more, to me, interesting experience. He is a friend of two of my favorite young writers, intellectuals, friends. Val Vinokurov appeared at our door in Amherst one day, shortly after he began his freshman year at Amherst College. He looked like a yeshiva bocher, jet-black crop of lank hair and long sideburns. He was, indeed, very religious at the time, and had won a prize Melvin Jules Bukiet, etc. 110 for a poem about the new Holocaust Memorial statue in Miami Beach—a long, green hand pointing to the sky, with apparently human figures clinging to the fingers, one of the worst Holocaust memorials I have ever seen. But it had been seen in the local newspaper by a poet we knew and had published in MR and she had suggested he come to see us. The first time in all my life a kid had actually done that. And so Val became a member of our family. He had been brought from Moscow as a five-year-old by his mother, leaving the physician father, and brought up in the very Jewish Miami Beach and its school system. Another young person had also been brought to Miami (not the Beach) at a young age, by her Haitian parents after several years of her Protestant minister father’s exile in Fontainebleau. She, Rose Réjouis, went to a Miami high school, deep in the Haitian neighborhood. Neither would have met the other in a million years. But a recruiter for Amherst College had the wit to bring these two promising young people to Amherst...