"Spare, Original, and Strange": The Religious Atheism of Hugh Nissenson

Hugh Nissenson is a novelist of immense talent whose linguistic craftsmanship, aesthetic vision, and religious sensibilities set him apart from other Jewish American writers. Yet, while his work receives critical acclaim¹ and he has drawn a devoted cadre of readers, he is not well known, occupying the dreaded "mid-list" niche. He might not be as prolific as some others, but at the same time his books have been translated into Danish, Finnish, French, and Italian. And his work is published in major English-speaking countries, that is to say Australia and England. Why, then, all the interest? What attracts critics is Nissenson's utilization of archaic mythic paradigms, his focus on the failed quest for redemption, and his originality. His novels transcend traditional genres mixing prose, poetry, diary entries, journals, and original drawings. Gerald Manley Hopkins, a poet whom the novelist admires, captures the essence of Nissenson's own oeuvre in the felicitous phrase: "spare, original, and strange."

In what follows, I first focus primarily on Nissenson as a religious writer, analyzing selected short stories illustrative of his richly complex spiritual position. When discussing the author's novels, I distinguish between his most recent, The Days of Awe, and the earlier works. After commenting on the author's aesthetic vision, I turn next to his innovation as a novelist noting his use of language and the relationship between modernism and post-Holocaust sensitivity. I conclude by offering a reflection on the author's place in Jewish and American literature.

Nissenson as a Religious Writer

Nissenson—whose name in Danish means "son of the elf"—was born in Brooklyn in 1933. His father was a "deeply, although eclectically, observant Jew," and his mother was an atheist. Nissenson reports that his childhood imagination was suffused with Bible stories told by his father. "I became obsessed," reports the author, "with his obsession with God and his belief that the Jews were the Chosen People." Later, although he rejected his father's worldview on the intellectual plane, the echo of the believer's voice pursued him: "[t]he conflict between belief and unbelief became the source of inspiration in all of [his] work."² This conflict is temporal and spatial including pre-, Holocaust, and post-Holocaust, and extending through different geographical areas: Europe, Israel, and America. Furthermore, in Nissenson's work this dilemma is not limited to only Jewish protagonists. It also includes Christian and pagan figures.

Following his graduation from Swarthmore, Nissenson went to Stanford as a Wallace Stegner Literary Fellow. He also spent a brief period of time as a copy boy at the New York Times. The author achieved initial public recognition upon receiving the Edward Lewis Wallant Memorial Prize for his first short story book, A Pile of Stones[Scribner's 1966]. This was followed two years later by a journal, Notes From the Frontier[Dial_Press], based on his time on an Israeli kibbutz. A second short story collection, In the Reign of Peace [Farrar, Straus & Giroux], appeared two years after the journal. An anthology, The Elephant and My Jewish_Problem_[Harper & Row], was published in 1988. His four novels are: My Own_Ground [Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976]; The Tree of Life [Perennial Library, 1985], a finalist for the National Book Award and the Penn-Faulkner Award, and one of the ten best contemporary historical novels as voted by the Wall Street Journal; The Song of the Earth [Algonquin, 2001]; and The Days of Awe [Sourcebooks, Landmark, 2005]. An Italian Ph.D. dissertation on Nissenson's literary universe appeared in 2006.

The author cites three traumatic events which collectively inform his distinctive religious or, better, mythic vision. His introduction to the Holocaust occurred when at age twelve he viewed newsreels containing haunting images of the death camps. Further, he remembers photos and newsreels of Hitler; once he and his parents listened to one of the tyrant's raving speeches on the radio. Hitler, he attests, "dogged my childhood." The second event was the death from breast cancer at age thirty-one of his mother's close friend. Nissenson comments, "I hate the idea that a just and loving God allows cells to metastasize and men to make gas chambers."³ The third event is defined by an exchange between Nissenson and a Catholic priest. Following the Jerusalem trial of Adolph Eichmann, which the novelist covered as a twenty-eight-year-old journalist, the priest told him, "Nothing about the war—not even the murder of children—shakes my faith." Nissenson retorts, "It cost me mine."⁴

The author describes himself as a religious novelist. "All of my work," he states, "one way or another, has to do with the major themes of religion: What are we, is there a god, what is our relationship to this god. The religious impulse is something that has interested me all of my life."⁵ But exactly what does he mean by "religion" in an age of death camps and gas chambers whose existence, to say the least, constitutes a massive credibility crisis for the traditional Jewish view of a covenanting God who imbues history with a purpose? And if, in the words of the second century talmudic heretic Elisha ben Avuyah, "Let din ve-let dayyan"—There is neither Judgment nor Judge—exactly what is there? Nissenson's Notes From the Frontier encapsulates this quandary in citing the query of Nat, an Israeli schoolteacher who exclaims, "Is it possible to create a humane civilization without (God)? That's the question."

All of Nissenson's subsequent writing, which can be defined by two major stages,⁶ is an attempt to articulate a response to Nat's question utilizing events from biblical, rabbinic, and modern Jewish history, Jewish messianic speculation, and Jewish mysticism. For example, the fratricidal conflict of Cain and Abel, as well as the antagonism between Isaac and Ishmael—or at least between Sarah and Hagar, comprise the mythic framework for his short story "The Well" which views the Arab / Israeli conflict through the intricate prism of water rights.⁷ "Forcing the End," another short story, retells the saga of Yohanan ben Zakkai who was smuggled out of a besieged Jerusalem in a coffin after the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 C.E. Ben Zakkai established the first rabbinic academy in Yavneh, thereby preserving Judaism. Nissenson's retelling, however, ends not in renewal but in murder.⁸

Cynthia Ozick once told him, "Hugh, you're not an atheist, but somebody who's made a religion out of atheism! It's a metaphor for you."⁹ Ozick's observation, while typically astute, in my view misses the development of Nisenson's own literary—and personal—quest for a plausible explanation of theodicy and the apparent triumph of evil. On the one hand, he offers a tragic vision of life lived without the traditional possibility of redemption. His novels and short stories trace the author's own movement from ambivalence about the possibility of faith in a transcendent deity to a denial of this belief. In its stead, Nissenson's work offers an alternative vision. In My Own Ground, a devouring earth mother figure metaphorically supplants the figure of an absent, weak, or indifferent transcendent sky god.

On the other hand, Nissenson refuses despair. God may not be love. The deity may not even be. However, a meaning and purpose in life continues to be possible. A relationship of love between people may reveal, in an echo of Martin Buber's position, the sanctity of the ordinary. In other words, for Nissenson, there is no transcendence in the religious sense of the word. But there is a possibility of discovering meaning—if not salvation—in recognizing the fact that the search for a religiously unanchored morality—all that can be hoped for after Auschwitz—is not only attainable but necessary. Nissenson's work attests that while the Holocaust bears witness to the triumph of evil, hope still exists. I will have more to say about this matter in the conclusion.

Nissenson's concern with theodicy is akin to that of both the nineteenth century poet Hopkins and Richard L. Rubenstsein, the contemporary theologian of culture who proclaimed the death of God after Auschwitz. Hopkins, a convert from the Anglican faith to Roman Catholicism, studied to become a Jesuit. A gifted poet, he was deeply moved by the sinking of the German ship Deutschland in 1875. One hundred and fifty-seven people were lost in the incident, among them five Franciscan nuns. His subsequent poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland, which he dedicates to the memory of the nuns, seeks to reconcile God's majesty and the millennial question of why bad things happen to good people. The first part of his work is a paean to the divinity of Jesus Christ. The second part deals with the loss of the nuns whom Hopkins compares to the martyred and risen Christ. Hopkins, who writes in "spare, original, and strange" verse, adopts what the sociologist Peter Berger describes as "religious masochism" embedded in the Jobian position: "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him." God's glory and majesty, in other words, are inviolate. This is precisely the position Nissenson's work rejects.

Rubenstein, in contradistinction to the American Protestant theologians Thomas J.J. Altizer and William Hamilton, who, over forty years ago, celebrated the death of God as the freeing of humanity from the constraints of religion, mourns this death which for him is a fact of culture serving as a code phrase indicating the breakdown of all ethical, moral, and theological authority in the wake of the Shoah. The world, attests Rubenstein, is "functionally godless."¹⁰ "No cold blooded contemporary David," he writes, "need worry about a modern Nathan the prophet proclaiming the ultimacy of God's law."¹¹ Post-Holocaust humanity, attests Rubenstein, lives in a "cold, silent, unfeeling universe."¹² Prophetic Judaism, with its statements of hope and optimism, he asserts, has been superseded by the tradition's priestly dimension which emphasizes rituals, especially life-cycle events.

Short Stories

Nissenson's protagonists, for their part, are deeply pained over their inability to believe in a transcendent deity who vanquishes evil, yet they are struck by a deep sense of the power of holiness. Three short stories, all set in Israel, illustrate this point. In "The Throne of Good," which takes place in Mandate Palestine, Dr. Spitzer, the narrator, is called to assist a seriously ill youth who is a Holocaust survivor.¹³ The boy had killed a Lithuanian "man hunter" during an uprising when he was thirteen, the age at which a male child in the Jewish tradition becomes a man. The Hagganah, the Jewish underground, brings him to the fledgling Jewish State and is hiding him prior to sending him on an assassination mission. Dr. Spitzer discovers the lad is missing and wonders with alarm, "Is it conceivable that any good can come of it?" Earlier in the story, the narrator quotes the Besht, founder of eighteenth century Hasidism: "Evil is only the throne of good." Nissenson's story invites the reader to contemplate the ambiguous fate of a world in which violence and murder are viewed as stepping stones to good.

"Lamentations" takes place in the aftermath of Israel's Six Day War.¹⁴ Ilana is pregnant by Uri, who was killed in the war. She confides to their friend Yigael her plan to wed Uri posthumously in a military cemetery. The three are secularists who have little use for the piety of European Jews. Ilana and Yigael are seated in a coffee house on the eve of Tisha b'Av, a day of mourning and fasting for the pious, which commemorates the date on which tradition records the two destructions of the Jerusalem Temple. Their crippled waiter, a religious Jew and a Holocaust survivor, tells Yigael to pay the bill quickly so he can get to the synagogue. Yigael supposed that the waiter's "yellowish bloodshot eyes had seen in the heaps of naked corpses the will of God." Yet, passing the synagogue a short time later, he hears an old man chant the traditional lament: "Zion spreadeth forth her hands, and there is none to comfort her…" "Yigael," writes Nissenson, was "astonished by the tears that welled up in his eyes." The secular Israeli, deeply moved by the lament, laments his own inability to believe.

"The Blessing" deals with the suffering and death of the innocent.¹⁵ Yitshaak's eight–year-old son dies of cancer. Although grief stricken, the father refuses to attend his son's funeral the next day because he cannot accept the implicit message of the traditional prayer, Baruch Dayyan Emeth—"Blessed art Thou O Lord our God who art the true judge in Israel"—recited upon hearing of evil tidings. The father refuses belief in a God who allows children to die. The boy's aunt Esther and Rabbi Levinsky, the local religious leader, are both Holocaust survivors. Their faith has been tested and deepened by their experience during the Shoah. Their struggle differs from that of Yitshaak. They do not seek to accept the suffering of the innocents during the Holocaust. Instead, he realizes, they seek to sanctify that suffering. Esther's faith is a complex matter. She remembers thinking in Bergen-Belsen, "Ah, curse Him, curse Him, and have done with it." Still, she concludes, "one must live." Her position identifies life with faith, however sorely tested.

Yithaak, however, unlike the Holocaust survivors, cannot accept submission to the will of God. Even Esther's confession that "one must struggle [to accept] every day," does not help. He listens as Esther finishes reciting the evening prayer which acknowledges God who "arranges in order the stars in the firmament according to His will," and blesses God "who brings on the evening twilight. Amen." The story, much in the manner of "Lamentations," ends with the protagonist weeping. He gestures toward the sky where, "from horizon to horizon, countless stars were shining, arranged in a vast, quiescent and eternal order that Esther had blessed, and from which he was excluded by the tumult in his rebellious heart." Yitzhaak suffers doubly; he has lost his young son, and he has also lost the possibility of spiritual succor.

The Novels

Nissenson's novels represent the second stage of his spiritual journey. Their respective protagonists confront the ubiquitous power of evil without recourse to belief in a covenanting God. As the author once told an interviewer, "We made the covenant with ourselves. There is nothing but that." Ironically, however, Nissenson's protagonists, emerge as theologians in the sense that Rubenstein defines that vocation. Rubenstein contends that the task of the theologian is "dissonance reduction," that is, seeking to narrow the gap between divine promise of redemption and the sheer counter-evidence of historical events. When this gap can no longer be bridged, traditional notions of deity and faith come under radical assault. Moreover, Nissenson employs rites and symbols from archaic and non-western religious traditions to emphasize the universality of the aspirations and limitations of the human condition and its struggle against evil.

My Own Ground is written as a memoir by Jacob Brody, a Jewish man in his sixties, reflecting on his coming of age as a fifteen-year-old immigrant on New York's Lower East Side. Brody recalls the teeming, chaotic, and torturous way of life confronting Jewish immigrants in 1912, torn between following the strictures of the ancestral faith and the seductions of their new homeland. Jacob is involved in a struggle for the soul of Hannele Isaacs, the daughter of Rabbi Isaacs, who is a kabbalist and a seer. He envisions the Holocaust which awaits the Jewish people. Hannele is raped by Schlifka, a Jewish pimp from Russia, and commits suicide. Nissenson employs sexual violence to illustrate the Jewish situation under Nazi persecution and murder. One of the novel's other characters, Roman Osipovich Kagan, is a Jewish Marxist who states that, "From the perspective of history the individual doesn't mean a damn thing." Nissenson modeled Kagan after Leon Trotsky who lived in exile for a time in the Bronx.¹⁶ Nissenson's portrayal of the Lower East Side is stark and realistic, unburdened by maudlin sentimentality, thus matching the views propagated by the novel.

On the level of archetype, the struggle between Jacob and Schlifka instantiates the mythic battle between Jacob and Esau. Further, Shlifka tells Jake that the "root of his soul"—a concept taken from Jewish mystical thought—is the mythical Og who was purported to have had a thousand wives. Mrs. Tauber, Jake's pregnant landlady, embodies a cannibal Earth Mother. Jake, like his mythic forebear Jacob, has a dream. But it is different from that of the Biblical Jacob whose vision is salvific with angels ascending and descending a ladder connecting heaven and earth. Jake Brody's dream deals with a devouring earth goddess. He envisions Mrs. Tauber giving birth. Immediately after putting the infant to her breast, she begins consuming him, biting off first his thumb, which she chews and swallows, and then proceeding to his second and third fingers. Jake awakens and is comforted by his still pregnant landlady. Asked what's wrong with the human heart, Brody responds cryptically, "I wish I knew."

My Own Ground is a radical novel, exposing both the false gods of Marxism and sexual excess on the one hand, while, on the other hand, repudiating the validity of traditional Jewish belief in redemption and in a covenanting God. Brody is drifting alone in a sea of uncharted waters which threaten to drown traditional Judaism and its teachings about the purpose of life and the meaning of death. Anomie is the condition of modernity.

Jake, as stated earlier, is only one of many Nissenson protagonists dealing with theodicy. The Tree of Life, which won the Ohion Honor Award for the best book about Ohio History, is written as a journal/ledger kept by Thomas Keene who lives on the Ohio frontier in the early nineteenth century. He is a Harvard trained Congregational minister who, like Jake, deals with the question of evil befalling good people. The minister, robbed of his faith by the death of his wife, renounces the resurrected Christ. Hovering over Keene's personal angst is the simmering tension between Native Americans and white settlers. Aesthetically, the novel integrates original drawings, poetry, and narrative prose. It took the author seven years to complete. In addition to making the drawings, he spent a great deal of time doing research. He relates that he went to Ohio where he "learned to fire replicas of flintlock rifles, to throw a tomahawk," went on a hunt, "walked on snowshoes," and "dressed in buckskin."¹⁷

The problematic nature of faith in the face of evil occupies a central role in the novel. Fanny is a widow who initially spurns Keene's marriage proposal because he is an unbeliever. However, after witnessing a Native American war party torture and murder her best friend, Fanny loses her own faith and asks Tom to "help me live without Jesus." Murderous acts are of course committed by both sides. It is interesting at this point to note the Italian critic Mario Materassi's suggestion of "disturbing analogies between the experience of the American pioneers…and that of the Zionists on the Israeli kibbutz."¹⁸ He thematically links "Thomas Keene's West and the state of Israel," pointing to the "tormented relationships between populations boasting diverse and adversarial rights to the land…, the quest, not always fortuitous, for a system of coexistence that justifies the acts of both sides." Perhaps most revealing is his observation that Nissenson places "existential paradigms" crucial to contemporary Judaism into non-Jewish worlds.¹⁹ It is worth noting that when Keene is asked to speak at a Methodist funeral, he does so both in English and in Hebrew. Nissenson writes the first line of the prayer utilizing Hebrew letters.

The Tree of Life is an archaic and enduring symbol in the history of religions. Such trees appear in the tales of the Middle East, in India, and throughout Central Asia. In Norse mythology, this tree is called Yggdrasill. The Hebrew Bible speaks of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. Later, Judaism compares the Torah itself to a Tree of Life" (Etz Hayyim). These trees may be seen as an "image of the world," a pole supporting the sky, affording a means of communication between heaven and earth, and as an axis mundi, point of contact between the two spheres.

Nissenson adds to the richness of this symbol in a highly original way. Keene envisions a great horned owl's nest in a tree. Baby owls are nesting in the rotting corpse of a duck which their mother has brought them to eat. For the American Indians, the horned owl represented death itself. Nissenson's retelling of old myths results in a new awareness of the relationship between life and death. For him, "death and life, creation and destruction are part of the same process."²⁰ Further, Nissenson draws this tree of life growing out of the head of John Chapman, a literary embodiment of Johnny Appleseed, with whom Keene has several conversations, and who is a devotee of Emmanuel Swedenborg's mysticism which emphasized visions, love, and wisdom. For Nissenson, however, holiness comes from within and does not depend on a transcendent divine referent.

The Song of the Earth takes place in an America of the future. John Firth Baker, the protagonist, born in 2037, is the world's first successful genetically engineered manual artist or, in the author's novel vocabulary, an "arsogenic metamorph." Moreover, Nissenson invents a new religion, Gaianism, which centers around Gaia, a pagan [Greek] goddess who was believed to be the embodiment of earth. In the novel, her devotees are also called Gynarchists who war against phallocratic terrorists. Nissenson attests that this book—like all his works—is about the "religious impulse, the mythic impulse, the idea was irresistible to me to reintroduce the great goddess and worship of the great goddess in a new form."²¹ Structurally, the novel is an imagined biography of Baker replete with journal entries and computer files which comprise a cacophony of voices rather than a single narrative. The novel is enriched by forty-seven original illustrations, including one of the hermaphrodite John Firth Baker as a terrifying Mother Earth figure. Nissenson's book concludes with "Baker's Dozen," thirteen exquisite color paintings. The Song of the Earth also contains poetry composed by several of the novel's characters.

Jeannette, Baker's mother, has been artificially inseminated by Frederick Plowman, a scientist living in Japan. She has trouble expressing love, and, following her suicide, John reflects that he "resented being loved not for myself but for what I could do," that is to say, his art. For his mother, Baker "was a means to an end." Plowman rejects him as he does the other two arsogenic metamorphs whom he created. Baker, who is gay, undergoes gender reassignment, grows breasts, and is referred to as a "she-he." He initially seeks to attain Gaia consciousness, that is, achieve a personal connection between himself and "our living Mother World" by becoming the slave of the hermaphrodite Sri Billie Lee Mookerjee. Baker, like his literary predecessors Jake Brody and Thomas Keene, renounces religion, abandoning Gaianism. He chooses instead to pursue his own religion, Art, for which he has been genetically programmed. Baker is murdered at age nineteen by a fellow arsogenic metamorph. The novel's scenes of sexual activity focus on gays and lesbians. Violence permeates the work in several ways: the struggle between Gynarchists, whose motto is "Feminize the Humin Race!" and the phallocrats; the violent death of the three genetically programmed artists; the suicides of Baker's mother and grandmother; the poisoning of earth's atmosphere through global warming; and human control of evolution itself which does further violence to nature.

Both Jeannette Baker and her son are inheritors of the Shoah's indelible legacy. She had begun work on a Ph.D. dissertation concerning the artist Charlotte Solomon murdered in the Shoah, focusing on Solomon's distinctive painting "Life? Or Theater?" which combined picture and text. John Firth Baker continued his mother's work only in visual form. Nissenson's novel projects the horror of holocaustal legacy into an imagined American future whereas noted, violence and hatred still prevail. Yet, even in Baker's bleak painting, "A Message for the Living from the Dead," a human skeleton hand and arm point to a one word message on the gravestone: "Rejoice."

The potent power of this message is fully realized in Nissenson's most recent novel The Days of Awe, which is Nissenson's most overtly Jewish novel.²² The title refers to the ten days of repentance—yomim noraim—between Rosh HaShannah and Yom Kippur, the Day of Judgment, the most solemn day in the Jewish liturgical calendar, The author told me that he is most proud of the fact that it is a love story, whereas his earlier works are primarily about violence.²³ The novel aims to celebrate a happy marriage, although fate intervenes in a devastating way. The Days of Awe tells several stories as it moves from diseases of aging, cancer and heart attacks, to fatalities caused by the disease of terrorism. Artie and Johanna Rubin, married forty years, witness their circle of friends ravaged by fatal illness. The novel also deals with the heritage of evil as it impacts the life of a Holocaust survivor-poet suffering from Alzheimer's, violence in Israel and the victims of the 9/11 mass murder. The Rubins volunteer to help after the attack. By novel's end, Johanna has succumbed to her second heart attack.

The Days of Awe also reflects Nissenson's strong fascination with the mythic. Artie, a secular Jew and—as his name implies—an artist, is obsessed by Old Norse mythology, especially Odin, the warrior God. Like the mythic Orpheus who descends to the underworld to rescue Eurydice in Greek mythology, Odin journeys to the underworld where he meets Hel, the Queen of the dead. This grotesque figure tells him that although he will rise from the dead this time, he will return to earth, but is fated—like humans—to die. Nissenson's terrifying digital image of Odin heightens the effect of the tale. The Norse myth also speaks of the world tree (Yggdrasil) which, as noted earlier, is the focus of The Tree of Life. Linking the mythic world of The Days of Awe to the universal nature of the human condition, Johanna Rubin—like Odin—dies, is reborn (she is resuscitated after her first heart attack), and dies again. Nissenson also introduces Navaho ceremonial art and the anthropologist Claude Levi Strauss's research on primitive masks underscoring the common human fears and anxieties which transcend cultures and times.

Artie seeks to resolve the tension between being a cultural and a religious Jew. He and Johanna are both secular. He recalls that for his Bar Mitzvah his mother gave him a copy of Bullfinch's Mythology which she hoped would serve as an "antidote" to the Torah. The situation is complex. On the one hand, he is not a believer in religious Judaism. His daughter married outside the faith, and he is only a twice a year Jew, that is, attends synagogue on Rosh HaShannah and on Yom Kippur. But two events reveal the hold of Jewish myth on Artie's psyche. He wants his grandson circumcised. Further, after Johanna's first heart attack he is obsessed with the notion that if he failed to recite in Hebrew the prayer "Blessed be the One who gives life to the dead" (Baruch Mekhayei hameitim) and put on tefilin (phylacteries), tallis, and yarmulke daily, his wife would die. When she does succumb, Artie—like Yitzhaak in "The Blessing"—refuses to say Kaddish, a prayer which praises God. "The god in me," attests Artie, "is dead."

In a scene reminiscent of Roth's "Eli the Fanatic," Johanna, after witnessing Artie garbed in his ritual regalia, tells him that she is "counting the days till (he sees) a psychologist." The fault line between religion and culture is, however, no laughing matter. Johanna is alarmed that after forty years they seem to be drifting apart. She implores Artie, "Don't let God come between us." She believes that her husband is "whoring after false gods." The Days of Awe is also a generational novel. Leslie, Artie and Johanna's daughter, is her mother's business partner and loves her parents deeply. However, she has, as noted, married a non-Jew. Moreover, her attachment to the State of Israel is weak or nebulous. It is family rather than mythic attachments; Jews as Chosen and the land of Israel as promised, that Leslie values.

The 9/11 terror attack illustrates the effect that evil can have on people of faith, both Jews and Christians. Sutton is a Christian who works in the World Trade Center. He is late for work the morning of 9/11 but arrives in time to see scenes of pure horror such as a burned head on the roof of a car. Like Thomas Keene, Sutton no longer believes. He is convinced that heaven is "a myth made up to sucker people into behaving themselves on earth." Unlike Keene, however, Sutton exclaims, "I beg God to help me in my unbelief." Sutton has neither the succor of religion nor the love of his ex-girlfriend to help him confront evil. But religion does play a role as a bulwark against evil and as an explanation for theodicy in the person of Nissenson's Rabbi Klugman. The rabbi tells a congregant who loses his wife that he himself lost his faith upon hearing his mother, dying of bone cancer, scream out in unbearable pain as he sat on the edge of her bed. The rabbi is able to work through his doubt by reciting Psalm Fifty-One, "A broken spirit is the acceptable sacrifice to God." Klugman is Nissenson's most theologically optimistic character.

Aesthetic vision

Materassi writes that Nissenson "is one of those few of today's writers, American or otherwise, whose work, beyond the semantic resonance of individual texts, gives the overall feeling that, even with all its pain, life is worth living."²⁴ I hasten to add, however, that this life differs in kind from that which preceded the Holocaust. It reflects a post-Holocaust sensibility suffused with the reality of violence, an intimate acquaintance with death, and a recognition of the malignant power of evil. Moreover, for the author's protagonists, God is not, in the Buberian sense, in eclipse. The deity has ceased to exist except as an ineluctable dimension of the Jewish and Christian mythic sensibility.

Earlier in this paper I asked what is left in Nissenson's work after his reunciation of the religious vision. His protagonists, Jake Brody, Thomas Keene, and John Firth Baker renounce messianic hope, the risen Christ, and Gaianism. Artie Rubin, for his part, believes that he may have had a genuine religious experience. Counter intuitively, however, all of these figures, save Baker, also renounce nihilism and the apocalypse. In a world suffused by violence, genocide, and terrorism, Nissenson's protagonists uncouple holiness from God; they derive solace from everyday life. Odin's poem, which concludes The Days of Awe, articulates the author's view:

"Rejoice in these things at nightfall:Another Day lived,Your beloved's loveA burning torchIce crossedDry boots,Ale drunk"²⁵.

Nissenson's Innovation as a novelist and his use of language

Nissenson views himself as a modernist who simultaneously responds to the legacy of evil left in the wake of the Holocaust. He takes seriously Ezra Pound's admonition to "make it new."²⁶ Consequently, he is an innovator who does creative things with the form that he has inherited. Nissenson himself attests that his objective is to "push the form of the novel in ways that are new." He told an interviewer, "I wanted to make beautiful things,…beautiful artifacts, out of my words."²⁷ He rightly contends that My Own Ground was his last conventional novel. Since then, as we have seen, his subsequent novels have conflated a variety of genres. Moreover, the lack of traditionally defined chapters, the switching of narrative voice (Nissenson refers to himself as a ventriloquist), the integration of e-mails, phone messages, digital art, and dialogue—especially in The Days of Awe [for which the author attests he dropped his ventriloquist role], which Cynthia Ozick observes is like "eavesdropping on life"²⁸—confirm again that the work of this novelist is "spare, original, and strange."

The Holocaust casts a giant shadow over humanity in Nissenson's work. I concur with Materassi's insightful suggestion that for Nissenson, "writing takes the place of God, who perished at Auschwitz. Modernism suggests that, through language, order is accessible."²⁹ Consequently, belief in God is supplanted by a type of faith in the possibility that writing can impose a form of order on the inchoate theological morass left in the wake of Holocaust wrought devastation. Nissenson's hope is that his writing "gives readers a new aesthetic experience."³⁰

Nissenson's place in Jewish and American literature

Hugh Nissenson occupies a distinctive place in both Jewish and American literature. His novels dramatize various dimensions of the American experience whether they be viewed through a Jewish (My Own Ground, The Days of Awe), Protestant (My Own Ground), or pagan (The Song of the Earth) lens. The author, nearing seventy-five, is presently at work on a new novel dealing with the Puritan experience in America and the comprehensive, suffocating, and destructive role religion plays in the Puritan worldview. No matter the perspective, the author states that his "major infatuation…is the American language."³¹ He makes no distinction between his Jewish and American identities as a writer. Or better, he sees a confluence between these identities, "fascinated" that "America continues to be deeply influenced by the Jewish bible and its messianic message."³²

Nissenson is exquisitely aware that one pays a price for not joining in the "industrialization" of literature. His novels are the very antithesis of the formulaic models which all too often capture public attention. He spends a great deal of time in research and in creating the drawings and poetry that accompany and enrich his works. Consequently, although not as prolific a writer as many of his contemporaries, what he has written is of great consequence. In this context, it is worth recalling that much of Hopkins' fame was achieved posthumously, although I hasten to add that Nissenson's achievements have not had to wait for that inevitable event. Of course, there is no way of telling for certain what his place will be in Jewish American literature. Cynthia Ozick contends that he is like Melville who, at the end of his life, was reduced to writing without acclaim. However, she also believes that Nissenson's work is utterly original.³³ At the end of the day, I believe that Nissenson would not mind occupying the same niche in American cultural life as that of Herman Melville.

But the situation is complex. Increasing numbers of American Jews view themselves as secular. What forms will their adherence to Judaism assume? What appears transgressive today may become the norm tomorrow. Religion itself has become a deeply private, rather than corporate experience. The writings of Hugh Nissenson eschew the steadfastness of the Jewish tradition found in the works of Cynthia Ozick, the satirical portraiture of Philip Roth, the intellectualism of Saul Bellow, and the morality-seeking protagonists of Bernard Malamud. In their place, he offers a mythic perspective which, while unlikely to supplant the Judaic sky god, may possibly serve as a marker for those seeking aesthetic meaning in the face of evil, without recourse to theological sentimentality.