© Oliver B. Pollak
RICHMOND, California — The measurement of time changes after you retire. You do not have to go to work, and you can do pretty much what you want to do within financial and physical limits. The change of direction can be dramatic. Do not confuse sleeping late with depression, but exhaustion from staying up till 1:00 am binging on tv, catching up on newspapers, sending insomnia emails, looking up people from a half century ago, reading a book you have been deferring and give up on again, following through with ‘to do’s,’ bucket lists, and pursuing new stimulations, inspirations and muses. You have the benefit of the long view, several decades. 15 or 25 years ago feels like yesterday. The perspective of age, the long haul, is not quite the longue durée. You can take fragments, chards from the past, and attempt to put them together as a whole.
In the Spring 2018 issue of the Jewish Review of Books, now in its 9th year, Liam Hoare writes from Vienna about Patrick Modiano, the 2014 Nobel Literature awardee and the second Jewish Frenchman so honored. Henri Bergson preceded him in 1927. Bergson lived from 1859 to 1941. Modiano was born in 1945 two months after WWII ended. I read Modiano while writing the life of Elmo Shaver, a Southern California French teacher, who summered in Paris from the mid-1930s to 1990. Modiano’s oeuvre searched for Second World War French lost, disappeared and displaced Jewish children.
The Nobel Prize, established in 1901, was interrupted by the two world wars. My ears perk up when I hear the radio announce the Nobel, Man Booker, Pulitzer, and National Book Awards. I recognize names and may have read something by them. It’s a qualitatively different frisson than Academy Awards, Golden Globes, Grammys or Tonys.
I read many books published before my birth, authors of which unbeknownst to me had Nobels: Rudyard Kipling (1907), George Bernard Shaw (1925), Henri Bergson (1927), and Thomas Mann (1929). In hindsight their work stood above the crowd, as outstanding contributions to literature. Not simply a good read, fun and entertaining, their sensibilities are captivating, engaging, compelling, inspiring, gratifying. They converge in a search for meaning, identity, and freedom. By 1970 past and future Nobel awareness increased.
I read for pleasure, because of book buzz, reviews, or colleagues recommendations. The Cold War demanded reading Boris Pasternak (1958) and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn (1970). A self-respecting American Jew read Saul Bellow (1976) and Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978). I read for research background for Germany in the 1930s, mid-century France, and colonial Southern Africa.
There are 15 Jewish literature laureates, one each from Germany, Soviet Union, Israel, Sweden, Austria, Hungary, South Africa, two each for France and UK, and four Americans. Mann and Lessing married Jews, Bergson favored Catholicism. Five authors were unfamiliar to me: Paul Johann Ludwig Heyse, Nelly Sachs, Elias Canetti, Imre Kertész, and Elfriede Jelinek. Fourteen women received the prize, five in this century.
We lived in Zimbabwe in the early 1970s. Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer were background reading. I acquired first editions of The Grass is Singing (1950) and This Was the Old Chief’s Country (1951) for a dime at a garage sale in Salisbury, ‘Rhodesia.’ We corresponded about African Labor and I learned never to trust a novelist’s account even when they say they are telling the truth. My small indefatigable voice supported her Nobel worthiness.
We were in London in March 1999 when the first London International Festival of Literature was inaugurated. Among the luminous attendees were Margaret Atwood, Joseph Heller, Simon Schama, Blake Morrison, Antonio Fraser, Armistead Maupin, Jan Morris, and Doris Lessing.
There were ten programs at the Monday 7 o’clock hour including “Two Nobels and a Legend: Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka (1986) & Derek Walcott (1992)” for L12.50, and “The Index conversations: Nadine Gordimer (1991), Edward Said and David Grossman,” a South African, Palestinian and Israeli for L9. I marked up the 34-page program. My calendar and memory do not recollect attending.
I heard that Lessing won the Nobel in 2007, around 5 am on NPR. She was cited for her groundbreaking major innovative work The Golden Notebook (1962). Shock and awe, I had not read it and did not own it. I quickly got on line, filled in my collection and got a copy of her Stockholm investiture program. Karen and I curated “The Nobility of Doris Lessing” an exhibition of her work, at the University of Nebraska Library.
Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel, Canada and I would have been happy with Leonard Cohen. Laureates occupy my bookshelves and record rack. My current nominee is Haruki Murakami.
The Nobel is currently beset with some scandal. Jews proudly claim 201 prizes out of 892, or 22.5%. I suspect some non-Jewish recipients had Jewish spouses. The online Telegraph published “10 Great Writers Snubbed by the Nobel Prize.” It included Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf married to a Jew, James Joyce’s, think Ulysses without Dublin Jews Leonard and Molly Bloom, and Primo Levi. The average age for the Literature Nobel recipient is 65, the Jews who received it were almost 73, and those snubbed were 60.
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Oliver B. Pollak is a freelance writer in Richmond. He may be contacted via oliver.pollak@sdjewishworld.com