Feathers

Foreword

Foreword by Hillel Halkin I am doubly happy to write this foreword to Haim Be’er’s Feathers— in the first place, because it is already a classic of modern Israeli literature , and in the second place, because having translated it into English over twenty years ago, soon after its appearance in Hebrew in 1979, I had long despaired of seeing my translation in print. Why the English Feathers needed to make the rounds of so many publishers before Brandeis University Press had the wisdom to put it out, I can only guess. Perhaps readers at some publishing houses found Haim Be’er’s novel hard to follow in its kaleidoscopic jumps in time, back and forth in the narrator’s memories from his boyhood in the 1950s to his service in an Israeli army burial unit in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Perhaps others found its preoccupation with death, funerals, and physical dissolution morbid. Or suspected its humor, it sometimes being the fate of funny books, as it is of funny people, to make us think they can’t be serious. Perhaps it was difficult to decide whether this humor was dark or light. Feathers are light. But they are subject to gravity. When the winged Daedalus scans the skies for his son Icarus, who has flown too near the sun (the ancient Greek myth is alluded to in this novel), all he sees are scattered feathers on the waves below. High-flying dreams that crash are a central theme of Feathers. They not only motivate the book’s main character, the eccentric Mordecai Leder, whose mad ambition it is to found a utopia based on the theories of the nineteenth-century Viennese Jewish thinker Karl Popper-Lynkeus. They also inspire the family of the narrator, who, as a Jerusalem schoolboy, becomes Leder’s only disciple. Or rather, they inspire his male ancestors, strictly Orthodox Jews with impractical minds and adventurous souls: his father, who periodically disappears from home on botanical expeditions meant to prove that the willow tree of Scripture is in fact the Australian eucalyptus; his grandfather, the indefatigable pursuer of “true biblical blue”; and his great-grandfather, famous for “stalking the Dragon of Time” in the mountains of Jerusalem. The women in the novel fight back. Cynical and angry, they campaign tooth-and-nail to protect their lives, homes, and children from the havoc wreaked by male fantasies. This places Feathers in a long line of comic literature about the two subspecies of the human race, one of which keeps its feet on the ground even as the other has its head in the clouds. Moreover, within a traditional Jewish context the comedy is even grander, for while Judaism, which circumscribes its men even more than its women with endless obligations, does not encourage solo male flights to far horizons, there is one exception to this rule. Although no traditionally raised Orthodox Jewish boy could reasonably dream of growing up to be a sea captain or an Arctic explorer, he could always legitimately aspire to find ways of hastening the coming of the Messiah. Jewish folklore is full of messianic dreamers , such as the legendary kabbalist Joseph de la Reina—who, having literally gone through Hell and high water to capture the archdemon Samael, fails at the last moment to bring about the Redemption because he offers the Fiend a restorative whiff of incense. How tragicomically Jewish to take Satan captive and then feel sorry for him! It is no wonder that, in the often weird annals of utopianism, Jews keep cropping up. In the not so weird annals, too. Those of twentieth-century revolutionary socialism, for example. Or of Zionism, an exclusively Jewish project that has also been associated with powerful messianic and utopian impulses. And now nota bene. Karl Popper-Lynkeus (1838–1921) is today a forgotten figure, although he was well known in his day as a scientist and social theorist. Besides having anticipated Einstein by hypothesizing the mutual convertibility of mass and energy, he published , in 1912, Die allgemeine Naehrpflicht als Loesung der Sozialen Frage, “The General Duty of Nutrition As a Solution to the Social Question”—the Bible of Mordecai Leder’s “Nutrition Army.” Yet why should an Israeli author like Haim Be’er, in plotting his first novel, have chosen to make its main character a devotee of the xii } forgotten Popper-Lynkeus? If Be’er...