The Singer on the Shore: Essays 1991–2004 (review)

Gabriel Josipovici, who has had a lifelong connection with the University of Sussex, is a prolific and polymathic author of fiction, non-fiction, criticism, and plays for both radio and the stage. He has also written a most moving memoir, A Life (2001), which celebrates the life of his mother, the poet and translator Sasha Rabinovitch. Her story of survival and emigration is "indeed a very Jewish story. But . . . also . . . a story of the twentieth century": born in Egypt, she survived the Holocaust, and died "in a public ward in Brighton hospital."¹ A Life contains, in deeply personal terms, important themes that run throughout Josipovici's work: memory and forgetting.

The eminent postmodernist German critic Monica Fludernik, writing in the only monograph on Josipovici published to date, Echoes and Mirrorings: Gabriel Josipovici's Creative Oeuvre, regards him as "a major British author who has been at the forefront of avant-garde writing both in the realm of fiction and drama." Fludernik believes that Josipovici, influenced considerably by the writings of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, "joined hands with them in the attempt to extend the language of drama." On the other hand, in his fiction and other writings, he "may well be considered a Modernist postmodernist or a postmodern Modernist, combining epistemological and ontological questioning, juxtaposing Bauhaus minimalism with the postmodern exuberance of echoes, repetitions, mirrorings, and interbraidings that recirculate a finite set of elements."²

These qualities are evident in The Singer on the Shore with its wonderful and apposite poetic title. This is a collection of nineteen of Josipovici's essays, "nearly all written in response to specific requests," including those from "publishers to write introductions to works they knew" that Josipovici "admired" (ix). For example, Josipovici's prefatory introductions to works by his close friend, the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld (b. 1923), form part of Josipovici's "Aharon Appelfeld: Three Novels and a Tribute" (211–53), also given as a lecture in June 2001 at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

A further indication of Josipovici's interests is revealed in "Andrzej Jackowski: Reveries of Dispossession" (254–59). Of Polish origins, Jackowski (b. 1947) spent the first eleven years of his life in a refugee camp—an experience that continues to haunt him. Josipovici's powerful catalog introduction comments on Jackowski's works, including "Refuge/Refugee," "The Tower of Copernicus," "The Burying," and "Patience and Anxiety," color plates of which are included in the book. Movingly, Josipovici writes: "For him who starts with nothing and expects nothing, who accepts weakness and vulnerability, who has learned to live with the facts that even trees do not last for ever—for such a person everything is always possible" (259).

One essay, "Vibrant Spaces" (25–45), reflects the range of Josipovici's intertextuality. There are many reflections on Proust scattered throughout The Singer on the Shore and the essay takes as its point of departure Proust's "great essay on reading, 'Journées de lecture'" (25), and continues with insights into A la recherché du temps perdu. A move from Proust into the Hebrew Bible is adroitly accomplished by such a prescient observation as the following:

Though Proust, in a way typical of assimilated Jews at the end of the nineteenth century, talks only about the New Testament, what he has to say is particularly illuminating about the Hebrew Bible. For one of the most striking things about the biblical Hebrew is its use of parataxis.

(29)

There then follow paragraphs drawing "attention to the pausal or paratextual element in biblical syntax" (36) with examples from Ruth 4:13 and Genesis 1:2–3, interspersed with references to Proust and Flaubert (29–36). The remainder of Josipovici's essay focuses on various "waves" from the Hebrew Scripture paying attention to passages from "2 Samuel 18–19, the narrative of David's discovery of the death in battle of his beloved son, Absalom" (37–40). Josipovici then moves to "Moses' first encounter with God...