The Labyrinth of Exile: A Life of Theodor Herzl (review)

Volume 9, No.2 Winter 1991 75 profound relationship between the two forces: "this neo-nationalism seems to me no nobler than the Balkan spirit which ravages Europe today. The eternal duel between Judaism and Nationalism is the drama of Jewish history ." Not until Orwell will the English-speaking world produce so clear a statement of political realities. Udelson has made me want to read Zangwill's canon from beginning to end; in this regard, Dreamer ofthe Ghetto is a biographer 's dream come true. Melvyn New Department of English University of Florida The Labyrinth of Exile: A Life ofTheodor Herzl, by Ernst Pawel. New York: Farrer, Strauss & Giroux, 1989. 539 pp. $30.00. Given all that has been made available about Theodor Herzl by historians and biographers writing about him and Zionism over the last several decades, it is hardly the case that Ernst Pawel's The Labyrinth ofExile: A Life of Theodor Henl can be said either to fill a real need or to satisfy a keen desire to know more about or understand better Herzl and his career. To make a significant contribution to the difficult because hybrid art of biography, however , is not something that is done frequently. By giving us this book on Herzl within a few years of his intellectually exciting and beautifully written study of Kafka, The Nightmare ofReason, Pawel has established himself as one of the premier biographers writing today in this country. Like most of the legion of writers on Herzl, such as Alexander Bein, whose 1934 Theodor Hen! Pawel generously acknowledges having drawn on extensively, he puts to considerable, excellent use Herzl's diaries. They give us a very full and detailed account of how and when Herzl discovered in himself the "Great Idea," of Zionism as the one meaningful response to the overwhelming reality of European antisemitism in the 1890s. A surprisingly uncomplex human being, Herzl is so transparent about his motives, feelings, emotional states, and attitudes as to make the task of the biographer-as-psychologist a relatively easy one. It is certainly a far less challenging (and even less interesting) undertaking than when the biographer's subject is Franz Kafka, or Sigmund Freud. Pawel's ability to get inside whomever he deals with, and to do so unobtrusively and without interposing his own moral and political judgments between his subject and the reader, is one of his real strengths as a biographer. More than anything, though, what endows his Herzl book-and it is true as well of the Kafka biography-with its strength and its capacity to "make it 76 SHOFAR new" is the supple and expressive style that creates an almost perfect fit with the people and places of the bygone era about which he writes. Without ever giving in to the nostalgic, the sentimental, or the romantic, and without falling into that more commonly Jewish trap of the lugubrious, Pawel uses his style to recapture the texture and the tone, the atmosphere and the mood of all those European and Near Eastern cities which provided the background for Herzl's movements between 1895 and 1905 when he toiled ceaselessly toward the end of creating a Jewish state. There were, of course, all those who labored as hard as Herzl in the Zionist cause, men like Max Nordau, David Wolfssohn, Martin Buber, Ahad Ha-Am, and Chaim Weizmann. Pawel, while doing justice to these men, never loses sight of the fact that no one of them, except possibly Weizmann, was indispensable to the creation of that Zionism out of which came the State of Israel. Theodor Herzl was indispensable, Pawel makes clear. In a book that deals appropriately with political and social ideas, tells wonderful stories, offers us something like a travelogue, and presents us with dozens of compelling figures who once thronged the world stage, Theodor Herzl is permitted to dominate because he was the indispensable man. Pawel's concluding sentences represent a perfect distillation of the measured , muted, sober and sobering appraisal both of how far Zionism has come thanks largely to that indispensable man, and of how much further its most meaningful product, Israel, still has to go. "By sheer force of...