Wednesday

To Terezín (2007)


Cover image: Jack Ross / Cover & Book design: Massey printery



(June 6) To Terezín. Poems & Travelogue by Jack Ross, with an Afterword by Martin Edmond. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132. Auckland: Massey University, 2007. ii + 90 pp.
    Preface (3/07)

    I – New Europe (21/3-3/4/05):

  1. Auckland – Bangkok – Frankfurt (21/3-3/4/05)
  2. Farrell said … (21-22/3/05)
  3. Planet … (10/12/04-1/4/05)
  4. The Apartment (29/3-3/4/05)
  5. John on Prague (26/12/04)
  6. Jana’s Note (15/12/04)
  7. England … (23/3/05)
  8. A legless woman … (13/12-23/3/05)
  9. Matchboxes (22-23/3/05)
  10. Gypsies … (21/12/04-3/4/05)
  11. The Resistance (21/12/04-3/4/05)
  12. Voyeur (21/12/04-5/4/05)
  13. John on computer dating (15/12/04-23/3/05)
  14. Hospitality (31/3-1/4/05)
  15. First Attempt (22-23/3/05)
  16. The Ossuary – Das Beinhaus in Sedlec (18/12/04-23/3/05)
  17. Second Attempt (22-23/3/05)
  18. Black Light Theatre (22/3-2/4/05)
  19. We walked across … (28/12/04)
  20. Composed … (28/12/04)
  21. Signs (28/12/04)
  22. Terezín Memorial (28/12/04)
  23. Ghetto Museum (28/12/04)
  24. Creepsville (28/12/04)
  25. One Day to Go (28/12/04)
  26. Prisoner of Paradise (22-23/3/05)
  27. Prague Novel (29/12/04-31/3/05)
  28. Frankfurt (31/1-31/3/05)

  29. II – The Golem (3-22/4/05):

  30. They’ve (20-22/4/05)
  31. 1 – Heteronyms
  32. If (29/3-3/4/05)
  33. 2 – Matchboxes
  34. Trying to Write (24/2-22/4/05)
  35. 3 – How to be Alone
  36. Tension (11/7/04-21/4/05)
  37. 4 – The Original
  38. Our Lady (1/10/04-21/4/05)
  39. 5 – Europe after the Rains
  40. No (25-26/2/05)
  41. 6 – Nine Great Reasons to Visit Prague
  42. Your Past Life Ghosts (27/10/04)
  43. 7 – Feet of Clay

    Works cited






For John and Jana
- Thanks for everything -





Jack Ross: To Terezín (2007)


Blurb:
Voyeur


Why would you want
to go there?

I think

sometimes
you’ve got to see
the nightmare

for yourself

If the survivors
told me
not to go

I’d stay away






“Your irritation at the disunity is, justifiably or not, 
the effect I intend.”
    (Quoted in Mendelson, 2000, p. 230).


So W. H. Auden to one of the first critics of The Sea and 
the Mirror (1944), his wartime verse commentary on Shakespeare’s 
The Tempest. More specifically, Edward Mendelson, the poet’s 
literary executor and most astute interpreter, responded in this 
way to criticism of the discordant moment in the poem when Caliban 
addresses the audience in the urbane, prosy accents of Henry James.
Despite the artifice of Caliban’s voice, he embodies everything that is not artifice. The id is one name for him; he identifies himself at one point as Eros, son of Venus; and Auden identified him … as the allegorical figure of ‘the Prick.’ (Mendelson, 2000, pp. 230-31).
Auden himself went on to explain: “Since Caliban is inarticulate, he has to borrow, from Ariel, the most artificial style possible.” The most natural style for talking about the horrors of Nazi oppression during the Second World War has come to be the clipped, gnomic phrases of Paul Celan or Nellie Sachs – both camp survivors who managed thus to refute Adorno’s famous dictum that “writing lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Whatever the possibilities for Celan and Sachs, it seems (to say the least) rather presumptuous to attempt to walk in their footsteps so many decades later. When I first went to Prague, at the end of 2004, I certainly had in mind the possibility of writing something about it. I didn’t feel exactly committed to the idea, as there’s a certain danger in visiting countries merely to write about them. I was, however, keen to remain open to the possibilities of the place. My subject declared itself pretty early on in the inability of (at least some) of my hosts to understand my motives in wanting to visit Theresienstadt. This led me to question why it had become so important to me to go there, and (especially) what I hoped to find there to justify the effort. It was so difficult for me to find answers to their questions that I realised I had inadvertently struck a personal nerve. What I had in mind, at that early stage, was an essay discussing that visit as well as my feelings about the “holocaust industry” (so-called). I’d been very impressed by the quality of the Montana Estate essay series edited by Lloyd Jones and published by Four Winds Press, and my intention was to discipline my observations into something which could be shrunk into that small compass. The notes for the essay soon began to take the form of short verses, though – a process I found myself unable (or unwilling) to resist. The essay turned into of a commentary on these verses. This raised its own problems of genre-labelling. Both of the poetry publishers I approached with the completed ms. complained that their readers would find it difficult to categorise. One, in fact, reproached me with a lack of boldness in insisting on justifying myself in prose rather than simply letting the poems speak for themselves. She may well have been right. In any case, I’m left with my own version of Auden’s defence to justify the rather unusual and unclassifiable form of this book. Rightly or wrongly, it was my intention to emphasise the discontinuity between the two sections. What I want most to say is concealed in the gap between them. Readers, so far, have tended to prefer the swift movement of the verses in Part One, and to feel a little bewildered by the rather Jamesian periphrases of the essay sections of Part Two. The fact that the poems do sound so “natural” should give you pause, though, especially when you consider their subject matter. It’s fatally easy for writers to subdue recalcitrant material technically without ever engaging, or getting their readers to engage, with its more jagged and irreconcilable aspects. My book, the only “Prague novel” (see below, p. 46) I’ll ever write, now finds its place in a series of monographs published by the School of Social and Cultural Studies where I work – a school which includes Anthropology, English, History, Linguistics, Māori, Media Studies, Politics, Sociology, Social Work and Social Policy among its areas of expertise. This seems to me a pleasing symmetry. My problem was to write “naturally” and approachably about one of the most unnatural acts of modern times – without a distinct personal axe to grind and with full awareness of my temerity in doing so. If the result seems smooth, seamless and entirely self-justifying then I will have failed. My interest is more in the questions I raise than in the answers I’ve attempted to provide. – Jack Ross, Massey Albany


(3/2007)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 5-6.

Notes:
  • All inline citations (in APA style) are keyed to the Works cited list at the end of the book.





I

New Europe


(21/3-3/4/05)







Catwoman
Halle Berry
Sharon Stone

Sharon’s
great stone face
gapes down

at us
Something there
that I can’t read

not yet
not cramped into
three feet of seat

six feet of air


(21/3-3/4/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 9.







You should go to
Theresienstadt
while you’re there

in Prague
I nodded
hardly knowing

what he meant
The idea
somehow

took root


(21-22/3/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 10.







of the huge faces
under your
granite stare

Why keep it a secret?
That’s who’s
under there?

Stop using Beauline
and your face
disintegrates

Like living
marble
I can’t feel

a thing


(10/12/04-1/4/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 11.






Český Krumlov (South Bohemia)
Photograph: Jack Ross (December, 2004)


Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.


– W. H. Auden, “Brussels in Winter” (Auden, 1991, p. 178).







an ex-brothel
(four doors
off one

corridor)
faces
the local

police-station
The combination
is their

street address


(29/3-3/4/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 13.







Too much smoking
Too much spitting
Too much graffiti

Too much dogshit in the streets


(26/12/04)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 14.







JACK –
also the landlord
Olda

is coming this morning
to have a look
at the leaking toilet

and 2 radiators
in our bedroom
that do not heat

Sorry
I forgot
to tell you

Have a nice day


(15/12/04)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 15.






Strahov Monastery: Symbolical Map of Europe as a Virgin (1592)
Photograph: Stanislav Némec


VAMPIRES WANTED
for serious magazine article
Call 0131 477 2404
Before 12th January


– Westport Books, Edinburgh







is the chip
on Europe’s shoulder
Bohemia

the heart


(23/3/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 17.







climbs off the tram
up by the castle
shoes

strapped to her hands


(13/12-23/3/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 18.







Golem t-shirts
Golem playing-cards
matchboxes

Jewish cemetery
the tourist paths
marked out with string

small pebbles
by the headstones
Rabbi Löw

creator of
the Golem
Bored curators

tossing coins


(22-23/3/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 19.






Paul Polansky: Living Through It Twice (1998)
Photograph: Karel Cudlín


During President Havel’s reign, over
2,000 Gypsies have been attacked by
Czech skinheads.


– Paul Polansky, “Postcard from Prague”
(Polansky, 1998, p. 12).







are thieves
dishonest from birth
You have to see

the way they live
to believe it
The parents refuse

to send their kids
to school
Nothing can be done

for them
When they move in
everyone else

moves out


(21/12/04-3/4/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 21.







The trouble started
early in my stay
What would you like to see

in Prague?
The castle
The Charles bridge

the Jewish quarter
Theresienstadt
(Terezín

in Czech)
Why would you want
to go there?

I tried some explanations
heard so much about it
seen the films

read books
some friends had
mentioned it

before I left


(21/12/04-3/4/05)

Publications:
  • "Launch Invitation!" The Imaginary Museum (31/5/07).
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 22.







Why would you want
to go there?
I think

sometimes
you’ve got to see
the nightmare

for yourself


If the survivors
told me
not to go

I’d stay away


(21/12/04-5/4/05)

Publications:
  • "Launch Invitation!" The Imaginary Museum (31/5/07).
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 23.






Matyasz Braun: Bethlehem Sculptures (Jičín)
Photograph: Jack Ross (December, 2004)


we know nothing and we are in the deepest night

– Georges Bataille, Madame Edwarda
(Bataille, 2004, p. 318).







Always include a photo
sell yourself
include a list

of things that interest
you
reply in more

than one line
don’t send
a picture

of your cock


(15/12/04-23/3/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 25.







Carp gasp
in plastic tubs
for Christmas

dinner


(31/3-1/4/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 26.







Our trip to North Bohemia
Lost in the labyrinth
of Jičín

going round in circles
The detour
to the forest

to see statues
in the snow
Braun’s Bethlehem

The suspiciously long lunch


(22-23/3/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 27.






Ossuary Chapel of all Saints (Sedlec)
Photograph: Jack Ross (December, 2004)


righteousness is immortal

– Wisdom of Solomon 1, 15
[Old Testament Apocrypha]







Adults
Erwachsene
You are entering

a pious space
Conserve
 please

respekt to the dead
Do not touch
the bones

Do not enter
outside the reserved
place

THANK YOU FOR YOUR VISIT


(18/12/04-23/3/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 29.







Getting snow tyres
for the car
west of Prague

No, if anything
it’s harder
to get there

from here
Press on
the pressure point

because it hurts


(22-23/3/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 30.







Dinner
with Jana’s sister
and brother-in-law

He
wanted to come
with us

She
would not let
the subject drop

Why do you want to go?
Why would you want to dwell
on all that suffering?

Another tack:
Why don’t we all go?
What time are you leaving?

That’s not convenient
Finally John turned
This isn’t going to work

We were glad
of it next day
It’s not the place

for scenes


(22/3-2/4/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 31.






Matyasz Braun: Bethlehem Sculptures (Jičín)
Photograph: Jack Ross (December, 2004)


Omit to transmit my name to the ages

– Robert Desnos, “Infinitif”
(Quoted in Bataille, 2004, p. lxxxii).





We walked across the moat and through the walls into the town, then went through the museum, first. It’s good and well-arranged. There are children’s drawings and poems on the lower floor, more detailed information up above. Characteristic Czech curator women banging and bustling around the whole time. We were the first visitors for the day. The parking area – huge – was completely deserted when we turned up. Everything looked closed. But it wasn’t. The exit from the upper gallery of the museum was covered with shiny metal. I don’t know if this was intentional, but it had the effect of showing you yourself, as if in a mirror, when you turned back to look. Around lunchtime we tried to find something to eat. No luck. Finally we found a grocery. It was a bitterly chilly day, with flakes of snow coming down. The cooling cabinet was warm. My coke was completely flat, as if it had been frozen and then thawed out again. The bottle-tops looked a bit deformed, as if they’d been tampered with. The bread was stale. We walked to the Small Fortress, the Gestapo prison, outside the main walls. A truly Apocalyptic site. There’s a museum there, too, superb and well-appointed, but we only came to it after walking along a tunnel running half a kilometre through the walls (unconsciously our steps took on the rhythm of a jackbooted march).   We simply wandered, and somehow everything revealed itself to us. The pitiful bunks and tables, the wash hand stands, the low-roofed bunker chambers – and the cells.
Ici mourut Le Poète et résistant Français Robert DESNOS le 8 Juin 1945
It horrified me to see the place where Robert Desnos was killed. I honestly had no idea. There are some beautiful statues and memorials there – all anonymous (a half-naked kneeling woman with bound hands and a shrouded face in front of the museum). Some bozo was having an exhibition in one of the cells. John remarked, as we walked on, that taking snapshots there would just seem wrong. One could perhaps photograph the place, but only after studying it thoroughly. I agree. In retrospect, I’m glad I neglected to bring my camera – what could a few pictures convey of the atmosphere of that place? The cemetery outside is beautiful, well-tended and well laid-out. The whole town is dead, actually: the people who live there ghosts. Paradoxically, the impression given by the various museums was vitality – the will to live. The children’s magazines, the daily theatricals and discussions, the escape attempts, the selfless acts of courage and help given to the helpless – above all, the children’s drawings.


(28/12/04)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 33-34.






Dora Zdekauerová: Princess & Dragon (1944)
Photograph: Židovské museum v Praze (2004)


It wasn’t physical strength that kept them on their feet but something greater

Vedern Children’s Magazine, Terezín (April 9, 1943)







in Terezín
Viktor Ullmann’s
opera

The Emperor of Atlantis
was never publicly
performed

The Emperor
sounded
too much like

you-know-who


(28/12/04)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 36.







One German
photographs another
under the sign

ARBEIT MACHT FREI 
They chatter
and laugh

Later
in the museum
we see a photo

Five Gestapo officers
underneath
ARBEIT MACHT FREI 

a cringing dog


(28/12/04)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 37.






Matyasz Braun: Bethlehem Sculptures (Jičín)
Photograph: Jack Ross (December, 2004)


As if a poet wrote his greatest poem in disappearing ink

– Milan Kundera, L’Ignorance
(Kundera, 2003, p. 168).







No refunds
even if you don’t
see everything

There must have been requests


(28/12/04)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 39.







At the end
of the display
a silver-painted

mirror wall


(28/12/04)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 40.







The inhabitants
(there are very few)
glare at us

They know
what we’re thinking
They know

what we’ve come to see
How could you live there?
said John

as we drove out again


(28/12/04)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 41.






Matyasz Braun: Bethlehem Sculptures (Jičín)
Photograph: Jack Ross (December, 2004)


I’m alive as long as I’m creating

– Terezín Ghetto Museum







Stressed, said John
There’s something on my mind
and I don’t know what it is

Work?
Yeah, work
He didn’t sound

convinced


(28/12/04)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 43.







Fat Kurt
Gerron
made his name

in slapstick
starred with
Marlene Dietrich

(The Blue Angel)
sang
the shark has pretty teeth

dear
for Bert Brecht
escaped

to France
ahead of Hitler
had a chance to go

to Hollywood
but missed it
They sent him

to the camps
Theresienstadt
the model ghetto

made him shoot their film
(The actors all went east
within two weeks)

They killed him too


(22-23/3/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 44.







Jana’s mother asked
if I’d found anything
to write about in Prague?

I had to answer, yes
Jana’s sister asked
if I was in the habit

of writing funny stories
about people
that I met

I told her
that my books
were rather morbid

which seemed
to reassure her
They asked to see

a copy
when it appears
My Prague novel

To Terezín


(29/12/04-31/3/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 45.






Steigenberger Airport Hotel (Frankfurt)
Photograph: Jack Ross (January, 2005)




passport stamped
by the last clerk
in line

walk through 
the deserted
customs post

no signs 
no directions
running hard

along steel corridors
up flights and flights
of stairs

locked doors
on every
level

one gave out
on a vast airfield
heaped with snow

almost lost it then
tears streaking
my cheeks

asked cleaners
security guards
closed kiosks

everyone alive
in this empty
long-past-midnight

echoing barn
of a mega-
airport

Go straight up
one more floor
to find the cattle

trucks


(31/1-31/3/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 47-48.





II

The Golem


(3-22/4/05)







created a traffic jam and called it Constellation
Drive        ABM840 squeezes in ahead
of me            Roberta Flack sings The first time that ever I
saw your face        Atlas bearing the
weight of the world        A concrete emblem
ever I kissed your mouth        She doesn’t get it
yet / but some day soon she        will


(20-22/4/05)

Publications:
  • Magazine 3 (2005) [Aotearoa – Fernland – New Zealand]: 25-29.
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 51.






Michael Chabon: Summerland (2003)
Photograph: Fourth Estate




When I am thinking about a new novel, I always think of Auschwitz
    – Imre Kertesz (Reuters, 2002).


On the copyright page of my paperback edition of Michael Chabon’s 
novel Summerland, published by Fourth Estate (London) in 
2003, appear the following words:
The right of Jonathan Franzen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. (Chabon, 2003, p. ii).
Jonathan Franzen? But isn’t the book by Michael Chabon? Maybe they collaborated on it. Perhaps one is a pseudonym (the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa referred to his various literary personae as “heteronyms”) for the other. In that case, which is which? More to the point – which one is real? Michael Chabon, a consultation of various blurbs and internet sites informs me, was born in 1963 in Washington D.C. He grew up in Columbia, Maryland – according to the blurb for Kavalier and Klay (Chabon, 2001) – or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – according to the blurb for The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (Chabon, 1988). In any case, he now lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their four children. He is the author of four novels, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), a novella, The Final Solution (2004), two collections of short stories, a “serial novel,” Gentlemen of the Road, appearing at present in the New York Times magazine, and the novel The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, promised for May 1, 2007 ("Michael Chabon," 2007). Jonathan Franzen, by contrast, was born “near Chicago” in August 1959. He grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, but now lives in New York City. He is the author of three novels, including the National Book Award-winning The Corrections (2001), a collection of essays, How to Be Alone (2002), and – most recently – an autobiography, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History (2006) (Franzen, 2007). Let’s make a little chart:   1959 Jonathan Franzen born (Chicago) 1963 Michael Chabon born (Washington, DC) 1987 The Mysteries of Pittsburgh 1987-92 abortive work on Fountain City 1988 The Twenty-Seventh City 1992 A Model World and Other Stories –– Strong Motion 1995-2001 working on The Corrections 1995 Wonder Boys 1999 Werewolves in Their Youth: Stories 2000 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay 2001 The Corrections 2002 Summerland –– How to Be Alone 2003 (ed.) McSweeney’s Treasury of Thrilling Tales 2004 (ed.) The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist –– The Final Solution 2006 The Discomfort Zone 2007 Gentlemen of the Road (15-part serial novel) –– The Yiddish Policeman’s Union There’s nothing actually impossible to reconcile here. If we assume, for the sake of argument, that relaxed (Jewish) family-man Michael Chabon acts as the mask for tortured (WASP) loner Jonathan Franzen, then we can see at once that Chabon’s alleged traumatic battle with his abortive second novel Fountain City – “Where Mysteries had been a kind of Drake’s voyage, a wild jaunt in a trim ship to make marvelous discoveries and conduct raucous pirate raids on the great ports of American literature, Fountain City was more like the journey of Lewis and Clark, a long, often dismal tramp through a vast terrain, in pursuit of a grand but fundamentally mistaken prize. Mosquitoes, sweltering heat, grave doubts, flawed maps – and, in my case, no Pacific Ocean at the end” (Chabon, 1995) – coincides with Franzen’s own fictional debut. Similarly, while the latter spent seven years grappling with the intricacies of The Corrections, the former was dashing off two novels and a collection of short stories. The suspiciously long gestation periods in both author’s careers are thus neatly plugged by the conjecture that they are one and the same person. As Chabon remarks in Wonder Boys, his novel about an author obsessed with an unfinishably vast master-work:
Motivation, inspiration were not the problem: on the contrary I was always cheerful and workmanlike at the typewriter and had never suffered from what’s called writer’s block; I didn’t believe in it. The problem, if anything, was precisely the opposite. I had too much to write: too many fine and miserable buildings to construct and streets to name and clock towers to set chiming … it stood, as of that morning, at two thousand six hundred and eleven pages, each of them revised and rewritten half a dozen times. (Chabon, 2000, pp. 11-12).
Like Stephen King’s “Richard Bachman,” like Evan Hunter’s “Ed McBain,” like Ruth Rendell’s “Barbara Vine,” Jonathan Franzen appears to have constructed an alter-ego to draw off the flak, to divert attention from himself, above all (perhaps) to justify his inexhaustible creative fecundity. “Mr Difficult” (the title of a new essay added to the 2003 paperback edition of How to Be Alone) may well be, at the same time, America’s sweetheart: “nominated by The New Yorker as one of twenty writers for the 21st Century,” according to the blurb for Wonder Boys (Chabon, 2000).[1] It’s as if Mark Twain and Henry James turned out to have been the same person all along.


(3-22/4/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 53-55.







Stanley Kubrick had shot                              remarked
    Altered States                                the bookshop guy
        he might have focussed on            who sold me
            the exploitation            Primo Levi’s 
                of the Indians    Collected Poems
            instead of seeing it        Fitzcarraldo
        as one more                          – oh,
    New Age                                      yes –
romp                                                 & Spartacus


(29/3-3/4/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 56.







Golem stories are all hard telling.
    – Gustav Meyrink (Meyrink, 1972, p. 43).


But I can see that I’ll have to go back a bit in time to explain 
this sudden interest in Summerland and the other works of Messrs 
Chabon and Franzen.
   While collecting various bits-and-pieces of local ephemera to 
bring back as presents from the Czech Republic (as one tends to do 
in exotic places), I came across a display-case full of Golem 
matchboxes. There were also Kafka T-shirts, Prague Castle tea-
towels, Charles Bridge coasters, Metamorphosis mugs, but I won’t 
bother you with those. (Funnily enough, I was actually looking for 
pieces of Jaroslav Hašek – Good Soldier Švejk – memorabilia, but 
that’s another story …)
   The Golem matchbox defeated me. Its jaunty, kitschy absurdity 
seemed pleasingly at variance with the heavy-handedness of so much 
of the official culture I’d run into there: ostentatiously 
“post-modern” plastic statues of President Havel with a bra and 
suspenders, automobiles made out of toilet-rolls, pictures of 
scruffy losers participating in happenings … all the stuff that 
would have seemed so daring in the days of Yoko Ono. I bought it. 
It wasn’t expensive.
   What’s more, I had the perfect recipient in mind: my friend 
Sarah Shieff of Waikato University, who makes a speciality of 
Golem lore (one of her more daring conjectures is the relationship 
between the Golem of Jewish legend and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Gollum, 
that cringing, treacherous, slimy little sneak … (but see further 
Shieff, 2006).
   Sarah seemed inordinately pleased to get the matchbox (if I’d 
known just how pleased she’d be, I might also have presented her 
with the set of Golem playing cards which had been given away to 
another friend). It looked like a fairly paltry offering to me, 
but she repaid it by lending me two things: one a rather blurry 
dub of the German expressionist film The Golem; the other a copy 
of Michael Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
   The film proved to be a bit of a disappointment. I’d heard 
it was a classic, but it was actually long, static and boring 
(though the Golem himself has a kind of loony zest about him). 
Predictably, I discovered later that there are in fact two films: 
the 1915 Der Golem, dir. Henrik Galeen and Paul Wegener, based 
loosely on Gustav Meyrink’s novel, and a 1920 “prequel” entitled 
Der Golem, wie er in der Welt kam [The Golem: how he came into 
the world], dir. Karl Boese and Paul Wegener (Internet movie 
database, 2005). Both are generally entitled The Golem in English, 
but the first – fabulously rare – is set in the present day, while 
the second – described by one critic as more impressionist than 
expressionist – takes place in 16th-century Prague. They’re 
often confused with one another. It was the second one that Sarah 
lent me.
   Chabon’s book, by contrast, was a revelation. I started to read 
it the evening I got it out of a tepid sense of duty to my hosts, 
but was immediately glommed. For those of you who don’t know, it’s 
the picaresque tale of the intertwining lives of two cousins, 
American-born Sam Clay (Samuel Louis Klayman), and his Czech 
cousin Josef Kavalier, set in the 1940s and 50s, spanning two 
continents, a host of minor characters etc. etc. Your typical 
Pulitzer-prize winning pap, in other words. What made it stand 
out, for me, was the author’s obsessive interest in Golden Age 
American comics (his heroes first create, then make a living 
writing and drawing the adventures of a costumed super-hero 
called “The Escapist” ).[2] That, and the marvellous opening 
sequence where Josef, a trained escape-artist, makes his exit 
from Nazi-occupied Prague in the same crate which is being used 
to ship the original Golem to safety in the Baltic states … Well, 
you’ll have to try it yourself to see what sets it apart from 
other sprawling epics of the same ilk.
   As I read on, I began to realise just how much this Michael 
Chabon had been dogging me. His first novel, The Mysteries of 
Pittsburgh, had usurped a title which I very much wanted to use 
for my own unpublished (and probably unpublishable) first novel. 
The Mysteries of Auckland, my anticipated homage to the world of 
Eugène Sue, had to give way to the Borgesian Keep Reading as 
the Day Declines …
   Then there was Wonder Boys, one of my all-time favourite 
American films. I hadn’t made the connection, hadn’t even realised 
the film was based on a novel, let alone one by Michael Chabon. 
This saga of Michael Douglas’s Lost Weekend on an American college 
campus seemed to me at the time (2000-2001, around the turn of 
the millennium) to have rolled every cliché about hard-bitten 
American writers into one pleasing package. They all used 
typewriters rather than computers, they were all drunk or 
stoned almost all the time, everyone admired them and hung 
on their every word, and they always got the girl … In short, 
however hungover, down-and-out, stubbly or ill-dressed they might 
be, they were the epitome of cool. What more can you ask for in 
a fantasy?
   Then, hunting through a second-hand shop for a copy of Kavalier 
and Clay (having had, reluctantly, to return Sarah’s copy), I 
came across Chabon’s Summerland, a curious amalgam of Harry 
Potter and Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which 
uses the metaphor of baseball to motivate its juvenile hero and 
heroine’s journey-of-self-discovery. And that, of course, was the 
coincidence which alerted me to the Jonathan Franzen connection.


(3-22/4/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 57-59.







Trying to write a poem called “Things
        to Do in Auckland When You’re
          Dead” while watching Barton
               Fink I find the pencil
                    necks are ganging
                             up on me
                                again
                                     de-
                                     vising
                                     scripts for a-
                                     ments to deform
                                     unlike the other writers
                                     hard at work on Wallace Beery
                                     wrestling flicks … Let’s put a stop to that 
                            right now


(24/2-22/4/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 60.
  • Essential New Zealand Poems: Facing the Empty Page. Ed. Siobhan Harvey, James Norcliffe & Harry Ricketts. A Godwit Book. Auckland: Random House New Zealand, 2014. 232.
  • Ice Road Trucker. nzepc: Six Pack Sound #02. Compiled and edited by Michele Leggott, Tim Page and Brian Flaherty (2/12/15).







In his various entities he created his own epics.
    – Jack Vance, The Killing Machine (Vance, 1997, p. 286).


So what of Jonathan Franzen? What’s his part in this equation? 
When I say that he’s the man who dissed Oprah Winfrey – or, rather, 
the man who had his novel unselected for Oprah Winfrey’s bookclub 
– I imagine you’ll remember what I’m talking about.
   His website (Jonathan Franzen, 2001) still provides links to a 
lengthy debate on the subject:
Jonathan Franzen stands accused of insufficient Oprah gratitude. And since his infamous banishment from the Winfrey polis on Oct. 12 [2001], that sin, in turn, has dilated into nearly every character flaw imaginable — he’s arrogant, elitist, hypocritical, snobbish, and flat-out stupid. Such, at any rate, has been the verdict of nearly every commentator since the curiously inert affaire Oprah has exercised the literary world and its wags. … But what, exactly, has he said? He’s ambivalent, that’s all. In an interview with the Portland Oregonian, he did utter the fateful characterization of himself as a writer “solidly in the high art literary tradition.” … Likewise, his other infamous pronouncement, on the Powell’s bookstore Web site, bespeaks less foppish disdain for the besotted taste of the masses than simple bewilderment. Yes, he said that Oprah has “picked enough shmaltzy one-dimensional [novels] that even I cringe.” But he also rushed to remind his interviewer that “I think she’s really smart and fighting the good fight. And she’s an easy target.” [Chris Lehmann, Posting Thursday Nov 1, 2001]
and so on …
Newsweek quoted a literary agent as saying, “Most of the people I hear talking about all this now refer to Franzen along the lines of ‘that pompous prick.’ ” Another agent, quoted in the New York Observer, called him an “ungrateful bastard.” What publishing person in his right mind would get on the wrong side of Oprah, when she has the power to make your career with a single phone call? And any writer who defends Franzen in this fight does so at the risk of ruining his own chances of ever scoring that cash cow. Why else would Rick Moody and Harold Bloom tell the New York Times’ David Kirkpatrick that it was hypocritical to object to Winfrey’s logo? [Eliza Truitt, Posting Thursday Nov 1, 2001]
It isn’t that Franzen actually refused Oprah Winfrey the right to “select” The Corrections for her book-club; the problem is that she “disinvited” him after hearing some of his negative comments about 1/ her irritating logo, and 2/ the quality of some of the earlier selections. As a result, he became America’s pre-eminent example of an élitist literary snob. That damning central accusation informs most of Franzen’s essay collection How to be Alone. Am I or am I not a snob? Is it or is it not possible to write “well” – or to the best of one’s ability – and “accessibly” at the same time? In some of the essays he comes across as the worse kind of hypocritical fencesitter: “To the man-in-the-street who, I’m sorry to say, / Is a keen observer of life, / The word intellectual suggests right away / A man who’s untrue to his wife” (Auden, 1991, p. 298). “Sifting the Ashes,” for example, where he begins by pointing out all the myriad evils of smoking, and then justifies the fact that he still smokes by suggesting how nobly the act “[inhales] contradiction and [breathes] out ambivalence.” (Franzen, 2003, p. 168). Yeah right. In others we come, I suspect, a little closer to the heart of his dilemma. In “Mr. Difficult,” for example, he points out to a correspondent who described him as “a pompous snob, and a real ass-hole” that “Even as an adult, I consider myself a slattern of a reader”:
I have started (in many cases, more than once) Moby-Dick, The Man Without Qualities, Mason & Dixon, Don Quixote, Remembrance of Things Past, Doctor Faustus, Naked Lunch, The Golden Bowl, and The Golden Notebook without coming anywhere near finishing them. (Franzen, 2003, p. 241).
Just plain folks, in other words – not one of those fancy-pantses who actually get to the end of “high art literary” novels … He proceeds to damn with faint praise the career of William Gaddis, author of The Recognitions, which Franzen did once succeed in reading by dint of taking ten days off from his own work. Gaddis, the “Mr. Difficult” of the title, was – in Franzen’s view at any rate – a genuinely snobby, élitist ass-hole who wrote genuinely difficult books. By contrast, despite his admitted use of “fancy words … like “diurnality” and “antipodes” [and] phrases like “electro-pointillist Santa Claus faces” (Franzen, 2003, p. 238), the author of The Corrections is a positive W. C. Fields! In “Meet me in St Louis,” Franzen chronicles in embarrassing detail the lengths he actually went to in order to placate Oprah’s Book Club before the final débâcle of the “disinvitation.” He allows himself to be poked, prodded and packaged by a film crew until the reader positively longs for him to grow a backbone and tell them to back off. No dice. The ghastly travesty continues. His excuse is that he’s the kind of person “who instantly acquires a Texas accent in Texas”:
When I talk to admirers of Winfrey, I’ll experience a glow of gratitude and good will and agree that it’s wonderful to see television expanding the audience for books. When I talk to detractors of Winfrey, I’ll experience the bodily discomfort I felt when [during the filming] we were turning my father’s oak tree into schmaltz, and I’ll complain about the Book Club logo. (Franzen, 2003, p. 300).
As a result, “my sense of dividedness will only deepen.” It’s easy to make fun of this beginners’ treatise on Alienation for Beginners: “How to sound like a tormented intellectual in fifteen easy lessons.” One has to remind oneself constantly that this was a real dispute, with serious repercussions. The inherent absurdity of jumped-up talk-show host Oprah Winfrey as arbiter of American letters (with the apparent endorsement of such luminaries as Harold Bloom) should not obscure the difficulty of Franzen’s task. He’s forced to explain the inevitable trahison des clercs: the tendency of all writers to bite the hand that feeds them, to an audience of Dr. Phil watchers. He doesn’t make a very good job of it, but who would? Without the Chabon connection, one might be tempted to write off Jonathan Franzen as one more victim of the increasing impossibility of communication between high culture and low culture. How can the Blooms and Franzens speak meaningfully to (let alone for) the people who attend Monster Truck rallies? Franzen’s alter-ego, however, his Golem, Michael Chabon, can chatter on about baseball and comics to the manner born. His dividedness has deepened, all right – for a moment there, in 2001, as the Twin Towers fell and L’Affaire Oprah ground on, it must have threatened to swallow him up. Then came the National Book Award, and – above all – the Pulitzer Prize.


(3-22/4/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 61-64.







                               fear – lunacy … Where’s this
                               going? as the radiator clicks
                               off. I used to play cards
                               in the winter now
                               I simply play
                               the odds
                               she
                       counters
                     – icy calm
	          (surprisingly,
             for such a one-eyed
    suck) I thank God I was born
with a beady-eyed sneer – so Lee
                                Van Cleef


(11/7/04-21/4/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007):65.






Gustav Meyrink: The Golem (1972)
Photograph: Mudra




One person is the whole world
    – Rabbi Hillel


But why do I refer to Chabon as Franzen’s Golem? Who, or what, is 
the Golem? It is, to begin with, one of the central metaphors in 
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
   There’s a lot to be said on the subject, and very little consensus, 
it seems to me, but I’ll begin by quoting an encyclopaedia entry 
about it:
Golem, in Jewish legend, an image or form that is given life through a magical formula. A golem frequently took the form of a robot, or automaton. The word means “embryo”, or anything that is not fully developed. In the Hebrew Bible (see Psalms 139:16)[3] and in the Talmud, the term refers to an unformed substance. Its present meaning developed during the Middle Ages, when legends arose of wise men who could instil life in effigies by the use of a charm. The creatures could be used to carry out their creators’ commands and were later conceived of as offering special protection to Jews. The best-known of the golem stories concerned Rabbi Juda Löw of Prague, who was said to have created a golem that he used as his servant but was forced to destroy it when it became unruly. Der Golem (1916) by Gustav Meyrink takes the legend of the golem as its theme. (Microsoft Encarta, 2003).
The Golem, in other words, is a kind of mystical Frankenstein’s monster, always liable to turn on its creator.
The Golem had no inclinations, either good or bad. Whatever action he performed he did under compulsion and out of fear lest he should be turned again into dust and reduced to naught once more … nothing would stop him in the execution of anything that he had undertaken. (Rappoport, 1937).
Rabbi Löw (allegedly) had to remove the “tablet on which he had written the Ineffable Name from under the Golem’s tongue,” every Friday, “as he was afraid lest the Sabbath should make the Golem immortal.” On one occasion he forgot this duty, and as a result it ran amok. There are many other versions of the legend. In the 1920 silent film, the Golem saves the Emperor Rudolf from a grisly death, thus persuading him to rescind his decree to banish all the Jews from Prague. All the commentators do agree on one thing, however – the creature was designed to protect the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe from accusations of ritual murder and bloodshed. Where opinions differ is on how well it fulfilled this task. Gustav Meyrink takes a rather different slant. For him the Golem is a kind of psychic doppelgänger. On the few occasions it actually manifests itself in his strange, elliptical prose fantasia, it has the narrator’s own face, for:
as that same Golem stiffened into clay the instant that mysterious phase was removed from its lips, so must, I thought, these humans dwindle to soulless entities so soon as was extinguished within them some slightest spark of an idea, some species of dumb striving, however irrelevant, already deteriorated with most of them, from the look of it, into a mere aimless sloth (Meyrink, 1972, p. 26).
We are all lifeless Golems, the author implies, unless we are engaged in the quest for transcendence. The novel ends with a vision of the perfect alchemical union of man and woman, accomplished under the twin sign of Isis and Osiris: “a hermaphrodite in two halves, the right female, the left male … its golden head is in the form of a hare. The ears of it stand up high and close together, giving the semblance of two pages of an open book.” (Meyrink, 1972, p. 287). That book, presumably, is the book IBBUR, repeatedly invoked in the text, a kind of super-Kabbalistic ritual volume, written in Hebrew, and containing a whole variety of mumbo-jumbo fin-de-siècle secrets of the universe. In another sense, it is perhaps Meyrink’s own book, a runaway success in the feverish, super-charged psychical atmosphere of First World War Austria. Michael Chabon has another, even more ingenious take on the Golem. When the young Czech artist Josef Kavalier, early in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, is asked to draw his own idea of a comic-book Superman for a prospective publisher, he produces a sketch of a “tall, brawny man … [with] four Hebrew characters etched into his forehead.”
“Is that the Golem?” said Anapol. “My new Superman is the Golem?” “I didn’t – the conceit is new to me,” Joe said, his English stiffening up on him. “… To me , this Superman is … maybe … only an American Golem.” He looked for support to Sammy. “Is that right?” “Huh?” said Sammy, struggling to conceal his dismay. “Yeah, sure, but Joe .. the Golem is … well … Jewish.” (Chabon, 2001, pp. 85-86).
The name of the original Golem, Rabbi Löw’s bond-servant, was Joseph. Sam has Americanised his surname from “Klayman” (Clay- man) to Clay. The symbiotic relationship of the two cousins – their friendship and artistic collaboration – culminates in love for the same woman, Rosa Luxemburg Saks (named for the leader of the abortive Spartacist revolution in post-war Germany), and in a child, Tommy, fathered by Josef but brought up by Sam. Which is the original and which the copy? Neither, one is forced to conclude. And both.


(3-22/4/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 67-69.







of Perpetual Tension
intercede for me
when the dehumidifier
kicks the bucket

& there’s nowhere else to go
but Tamaki
hunting for head-office
‘up the stairs – just ask for Craig’

a girl xeroxing
in her tracksuit bottoms
her colleague who can’t work
the cash machine

Our Lady of Perpetual
anxiety
when the calendar
skips two beats

two months’ marking
jammed into two days
Our Lady
when you find you’ve got to buy

those spines you eyed up
hours before
then get to K Rd
half a quark too late

the bus doors
are wedged open
the men in silver suits
unzip their skin


(1/10/04-21/4/05)

Publications:







We finance your future, not your past
   – Trustbank TV Ad


Terezín, or Theresienstadt, was built as an Austrian garrison-town 
in the late eighteenth century. The whole area was surrounded by deep 
ditches and immense earth and brick fortifications. The smaller, 
satellite redoubt outside the main walls came, over time, to be 
employed as a prison. During the First World War, Gavrilo Princip, 
the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was incarcerated in it. 
He died there of influenza in 1918.
   After the Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, Terezín 
was turned into a concentration camp. It was actually used as a 
marshalling point for the death-camps further east, but the Nazis 
went to great lengths to persuade foreign observers, especially 
the International Red Cross, that it was a kind of idyllic spa-town: 
hence the lying propaganda film (directed by Kurt Gerron) about the 
so-called “Paradise Ghetto.”
Of the 140,000 people who were interned at Terezín, 33,000 died and 87,000 were transported to Nazi death camps elsewhere. Of those, 15,000 were children. Only … 132 children lived. (Fields, 2005).
The concentration camp command made little or no attempt to combat the various epidemics that broke out periodically in the overcrowded ghetto, but conditions there were generally more tolerable than in the other camps. There was a lively cultural life, including lectures, concerts and even hand-copied magazines, and the children were able to continue their education in makeshift schools. Thousands of their drawings and poems still survive, and can be seen on display in the Terezín Memorial museum in the centre of the town. The small fortress became an SS prison, and was used for recalcitrant prisoners (including the poet and resistance leader Robert Desnos) from all over Europe. Brutal executions and torture were commonplace. Many of the cells and dormitories still remain in their original condition. In August 2002, during the unprecedented floods that inundated much of the Czech republic, including the centre of Prague, the Elbe overflowed its banks and drowned the lower floors of the Terezín Memorial museum. The damage was even worse in the small fortress, which was almost entirely under water. A concerted international effort has, however, succeeded in restoring most of the exhibits.


(3-22/4/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 71-72.







music
lots of fear

as the motor-mowers
start

up
The Big OE

we got on really
well

driving round Paris
on the wrong side

of the road
That was amazing

Montmartre
there

the locals
very very kind


(25-26/2/05)

Publications:
  • Magazine 3 (2005) [Aotearoa – Fernland – New Zealand]: 25-29.
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 73.







Kidnapped by communism for 40 years, [Prague has] opened its 
gates to a flood of happy-go-lucky tourists
    – Kris Dando, “Nine Great Reasons to Visit Prague” (Dando, 2005).


Recent visitor Kris Dando’s nine “reasons” are arranged under the 
following headings:

• Getting Around 

“One of the features of Prague is that it is compact and simple 
to find your way around.”
   It’s interesting to recognize – and not recognize – your own 
experiences in getting to know a new place when reading about it 
afterwards. My main memory of the trams is the strange whistling 
clangour they made gliding past the windows of my room late at night 
(they can’t have stopped running till the early hours, if at all).
   As for the metro, what struck me about it was the steepness of 
the escalators angling their way down deep under the earth. On one 
occasion one of them seized up, forcing all of us to climb back to 
the surface. Louts riding in the opposite direction hooted and jeered 
to see so many elderly, heavily-laden ladies and gentlemen struggling 
wearily up the precipitous incline.

• Cuisine

“The food is overall pretty bland and basic, involving uninspiring 
meats like sausage and dumplings and the vegetables are pretty scarce. 
Cabbage is very popular.”
   The food is a bit on the heavy side. The beer, however, is 
excellent, and cheaper than any other beverage (including water). As 
a result, I put on a lot of weight while I was there. Almost every 
pub seemed to offer cheap, reliable food all through the day. 
   It was, however, rather appalling to see so many prosperous-looking 
Czechs sitting proudly in McDonalds or KFC, scarfing down gourmet Big 
Macs and chicken nuggets.

• Guided Tours 

“We had a diverse mix of people: singles and couples, Germans, Aussies, 
Brits and an obnoxious cabbie from San Francisco.”
   I didn’t go on any tours while I was there, preferring to walk 
around on my own. Perhaps my most interesting encounter was with 
a pair of young Japanese at the foot of the castle, vainly trying 
to make sense of a truncated tourist map. They asked me for 
directions in German. Having ascertained that they spoke no 
English, I was forced to admit that I, too, was a stranger 
(Ich bin auch Ausländer) in town …

• Castles, castles, castles 

“With a magnificent cliff-top outlook, a 1000-year-old history 
going back to a simple walled-in compound in the 9th century, 
and a breathtaking scale that qualifies it as the biggest ancient 
castle in the world, Prague Castle is the indisputable centrepiece 
of the Czech capital.”
   It’s actually more like a small town than your normal image of 
a castle. Wandering through it, I began to understand what Kafka 
(who lived for a time in Golden Lane, a little cul-de-sac running 
down the side of the walls) had in mind when he wrote, in Der 
Schloss, of an immense administrative labyrinth unreachable by 
any but the elect.

• Take A River Cruise 

“The price included a few free drinks and buffet dinner but 
sitting on the boat’s top deck, gazing at Prague by night was worth 
the admission alone.”
   I didn’t do this, either, even though a river cruise is usually 
my favourite thing to do in a new place. Perhaps the city streets 
were just too fascinating. Perhaps (it was Midwinter) the waters of 
the Vltava / Moldau looked just too cold and grey.

• Prague Memorials 

“Small prayer papers covered with small stones and coins adorn 
many tombstones [in the Old Jewish Cemetery]. One of the most 
adorned is that of 16th century scholar Rabbi Low about whom 
many legends are told, most notably that he created the ‘Golem’, 
a servant made of mud who later went on a destructive rampage and 
had to be destroyed.”

• Museums 

“Objects from 153 Jewish communities throughout Bohemia and Moravia 
were brought to Prague by the Nazis in 1942, to be used in a planned 
‘museum of an extinct people’ after their extermination programme 
was complete.”

• A Bit Of Entertainment 

“I wasn’t too sure I’d enjoy it but was it was good wholesome fun: 
two princes fighting over the same girl, duels, wrath of the Gods, 
soaring violins – I forgot I was watching string-led puppets after 
a while!”
   I missed the puppet theatre – though a good impression of it is 
given by Jan Švankmajer’s 1994 feature-film Faust – but we did go 
to the Opera, the Ballet, and the Black Light Theatre, where objects 
float about the stage as if by magic. One of the pieces there was 
about a love affair between a taxi driver and a mermaid, unable 
to settle on whether to live under water or in the world above.

• The Countryside

“Undoubtedly the highlight (well, for me anyway) was the cemetery 
at Sedlic [sic], just a few minutes out of Kutna Hora. Macabre 
is an understatement - the place has an ossuary, a huge building 
filled with the bones of over 40,000 people. Yes, bones.”
   “More than a tad creepy,” Kris Dando calls it. Again, I was 
alerted to its existence by one of Jan Švankmajer’s films, the 
ten-minute short “Kostnice” (1970). “You can smell the death,” 
as one commentator remarks (Internet movie database, 2005).


(3-22/4/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 74-76.







Sun in Scorpio (Tropical zodiac)

At times you may be considered by others as 
somewhat different, although on your own 
part, when those of comparable mental ability 
are part of your experience, you are known as 
a soul with nobleness of purpose and high-
mindedness of principles. …
   Long ago you may have been part of the 
once mighty Mongolian people of the ancient 
Gobi desert, or among the culturally advanced 
Chinese. From such lifetimes as these, you 
have the ability to perform what is expected of 
you and to do what is necessary without being 
held back by your feelings or by 
considerations of a personal nature. This is a 
strength you inherited from one or more past 
lives in these remote Asian cultures, whose 
people shared this self-denying trait. …
   Perhaps you were once a young Chinese 
woman who gave birth to many children, ran 
a large household and pleased the master of 
the house. You may have done all this while 
quietly enduring the agony of brutally bound 
feet, which was once a cultural requirement 
for the true ladies of ancient China. …

    – Online Horoscope (Oct 27, 2004)


(27/10/04)

Publications:
  • Catalyst 5 (2006): 38.
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 77.







The real question about Auschwitz is, not why did it happen, 
but why doesn’t it happen more often?
    – Woody Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters


But maybe you knew all this already. Maybe I’m the last person on 
earth to whom this is news. I haven’t actually seen any references 
to the Franzen-Chabon double-act anywhere, but that doesn’t prove 
anything.
   Whether or not Jonathan Franzen actually is Michael Chabon 
(and there are an appalling number of doubles, masks, deceptive 
resemblances, and completely counterfeit pasts in the latter’s 
books – one reason why I read him as the carbon-copy and Franzen 
as the fons et origo), the question remains why it should mean so 
much to me to demonstrate the fact.
   The Summerland copyright page is, after all, my only smoking gun 
– all the other evidence is completely circumstantial. It could be 
a mistake, a mere misprint. Franzen would have to have been very 
busy indeed to create two thriving literary careers in the time it 
normally takes to jump-start one.

On the one hand, of course, I’m fascinated by literary impostures 
and doubles, by the way in which they can release a kind of energy 
unavailable to the everyday self.
   I’ve created a fair number of pseudonyms and alter egos myself – 
or, rather, found myself writing in someone else’s voice. Lorraine 
West, author of Everything a Teenage Girl Should Know (2004) and 
Wendy Nu, co-author of The Britney Suite (2001) are two who have made 
it between covers, but there are, I’m afraid, various others still 
lurking in the back issues of small magazines.
   “Every woman adores a fascist,” said Sylvia Plath (with doubtful 
veracity) in “Daddy” (Plath, 1974, p. 55). Every writer adores the 
double. It stands for so much! It can act as the voice of conscience 
(Poe’s “William Wilson”), dramatise the split psyche (Gogol’s “The Nose”), 
or simply point to the crucial disjunction between the worldly and the 
artistic selves (Henry James’s “The Private Life”).

On the other hand, there’s the Golem itself – that brute lump of 
clay brought to life by a few scrawled hieroglyphics.
   The Golem, as we’ve seen above, can be seen as a type of the 
superman – a projection of our own idealised strengths and 
aspirations. But it also dramatises our Jekyll-and-Hyde duality – 
the masks we use to reveal a hidden self.
   I’ve already talked about Jonathan Franzen’s attempts, in How 
to be Alone, to explain (indeed, embody) the “treason of clerks,” 
their general untrustworthiness and tendency to be members of the 
awkward squad. Why do they always seem to satirise their patrons 
(Oprah) and speak up for their foes (William Gass)?
   Where is that betrayal more apparent than in my response 
to Terezín?

Even before I saw the place – Terezín, Theresienstadt, whatever 
you want to call it – I knew I had to write about it. I knew I 
had to write about it the moment I saw that it would be difficult 
to get there – that there was a resistance to overcome. “Press on 
the pressure point because it hurts,” is what I wrote about it. 
Press on the pressure point because it hurts. No matter who it 
hurts. In a sense it’s easier if it’s only oneself.
   The Holocaust is such a simple morality tale to those of us 
born so long after the war, so far away from its physical legacy. 
It’s so easy to paint the protagonists in black and white, Oskar 
Schindlers and Josef Mengeles, oppressors and victims.
   Everything’s more complicated when you’re on the spot, in the 
New Europe, that constantly-expanding superstate which swallowed 
up (took in?) the Czech republic just a couple of months before my 
arrival, surpassing the wildest dreams of the Holy Roman Empire.
   I knew, of course, that the real story of the Terezín ghetto 
was far beyond my powers. I had no right to tell it – no angle 
of engagement with it beyond normal human sympathy with the 
suffering that went on there. Watching Prisoner of Paradise 
(2002), the Oscar-nominated documentary about Kurt Gerron, 
the infamous director of the Theresienstadt propaganda film, 
had given me some idea of the facts about the “model ghetto” 
before I left New Zealand. Reading the book I have not seen 
a butterfly around here (1993), available in numerous languages 
from the Jewish museum in Prague, made me aware of the heart-
wrenching character of the site itself.
   It was difficult to get there, though – it did turn into a quest 
– and that made me suspect there must be something behind this 
apparent reluctance to face up to the past. There was something 
there needing to be examined. For my own satisfaction, if for 
no other reason. “Nothing if not curious,” that’s my motto. Nosey, 
some people would call it.
   The Māori politician John Tamihere landed himself in the doghouse 
in mid-2005 for suggesting that enough has already been said and 
written about the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. He claims that 
it’s time to move on, that dwelling on past injustices tends to 
foster a “victim” mentality. I can see his point, but I don’t 
really agree. I wouldn’t necessarily accuse Tamihere of this, 
but I suspect that it’s generally those who’ve done well out of 
the past who are most eager to forget it.
   Nevertheless, I think he speaks very strongly for our collective 
will to forget. It seems to be almost a biological necessity in the 
aftermath of tragedy to hide and lick your wounds and turn your thoughts 
elsewhere. It’s no coincidence that “war literature” tends to appear 
either during a war or twenty years afterwards. The books that came out 
a year or two after the First and Second World Wars were mostly ignored 
or damned with faint praise.

My Czech hosts in Prague must feel something similar. In their case 
there is the additional injustice that half a century of suffering 
under Russian occupation is mostly overshadowed, in the eyes of the 
world, by the events of 1938-44 (don’t forget that the war began a 
year early in Czechoslovakia, as a result of the betrayal of Munich …). 
It must seem, to them, the height of bad manners for people to come 
barging into their country demanding a package tour of the murder 
sites. “Tourist,” after all, equates pretty closely with “voyeur.”
   One local analogy that occurred to me at the time was a foreign 
visitor to Auckland, eager to see the sights, asking to see Bastion 
Point first of all (“I hear your police force brutally manhandled a 
mass of peaceful Māori land protestors there; I’ve always wanted to 
see the place …”) I imagine that most of us might want to downplay 
the incident, put it in perspective, explain its larger implications – 
reroute them to a nice beach like Piha or Wenderholm, basically.
   I’ve never been welcomed more heartily, or with more open arms, 
than by my hosts in the Czech republic. Not only my friends John 
and Jana, but Jana’s family went out of their way to make me feel 
at home. Why, then, do I still feel compelled to touch on the sore 
point – to take a gawk inside Bluebeard’s chamber, brave the 
forbidden door, the one place they least wanted me to see in the 
cornucopia of wonders that is Prague?
   How can I possibly justify that lack of good manners?

I’m forced back, once again, onto the metaphor of the Golem: the 
emissary you send out to do your dirty work, that other whom you 
suppress or deny at your peril. Socrates called it his Daemon. 
It prompted him to ask all those awkward questions which led to 
a death sentence for “corrupting youth.” Then it demanded that he 
stay and take the hemlock rather than fleeing into exile.
   It was that same still, small voice that prompted Jonathan 
Franzen to open his fat mouth and denounce Oprah Winfrey. “There’s 
something in you that’s like biting on tinfoil” (King, 1990, p. 59), 
as one of the characters in Stephen King’s The Stand says to the 
closest thing to an artist in that book.
   There’s something in every writer, I’m afraid, that’s like 
biting on tinfoil: a basic ingratitude, a cold calculation of effect:
The Golem had no inclinations, either good or bad … nothing would stop him in the execution of anything that he had undertaken.
As a human being, I have absolutely no right to sit in judgment on the people who live in or near Terezín or the thousands of other camps lying like unhealed scars on the body of Europe. No right and no inclination. As a writer, though, I have to poke in my nose. If one could feel sure that it really was all in the past, that such things could never recur, then it would be easier to leave it alone. It’s not all in the past, though. It’s now. In the Czech republic itself (as in many other parts of Europe) the victimisation of the Romany continues (See further Polansky, 1998). That’s one small example. If we continue to conspire to forget the enormities we’ve committed in the past, where’s the incentive to rein ourselves in right now? As the children starve in the Congo and the bodies pile up in Iraq (or Israel/Palestine), we’re in no condition to pat ourselves on the back just yet. The Golem, to be sure, is a dangerous type of Superman. As a truth-seeking crusader, it has an unfortunate tendency to get distracted, run amok. But maybe that’s why it’s such an appropriate symbol for most of us. The Man of Steel makes a pitilessly rigid, inhuman model to live up to (you’d think even the “world’s policemen” would have noticed that by now). Personally, I agree with Chabon / Franzen: it’s better our heroes should walk on feet of clay.


(3-22/4/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 78-81.


Notes:
[1] The same disparity is maintained in their respective “official” websites. www.jonathanfranzen.com opens onto a chummy set of bio-bibliographical details; www.michaelchabon.com leads to nothing but a promotional poster for the 1977 Sitka World’s Fair, and a schedule of upcoming “Chabon dates.”

[2] Now the hero of a series of real (albeit pastiche) comics, collected in Michael Chabon Presents (2004): The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist. 2 vols. Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse Books.

[3] Psalms 139: 16: "Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.” [King James / Authorised Version (1611)].







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(3-22/4/05)

Publications:
  • To Terezín. Poems & Travelogue by Jack Ross. Afterword by Martin Edmond. Social and Cultural Studies, 8. ISSN 1175-7132 (Auckland: Massey University, 2007): 82-83.






Ossuary Chapel of all Saints (Sedlec)
Photograph: Jana Hašková (December, 2004)


Jack Ross teaches Academic and Creative writing in the School of Social and Cultural Studies at Massey Albany. He is the author of various books of poems, including City of Strange Brunettes (Pohutukawa Press, 1998) and Chantal’s Book (HeadworX, 2002), as well as four works of fiction: Nights with Giordano Bruno (Bumper Books, 2000), Monkey Miss Her Now (Danger Publishing, 2004), Trouble in Mind (Titus, 2005), and The Imaginary Museum of Atlantis (Titus, 2006).
He also edited, with Jan Kemp, the spoken-word anthologies Classic NZ Poets & Contemporary NZ Poets in Performance (AUP, 2006 & 2007).





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