Book Review

Between the Woods and the Water

by Patrick Leigh Fermor

     Patrick Leigh Fermor was an English college dropout who walked across Europe between the two world wars and wrote a trilogy of books about the experience. The first volume, A Time of Gifts, was poorly written and often a chore to read although it did pick up momentum in the second half of the book. The second volume, Between the Woods and the Water, is a vast improvement.

Leigh Fermor begins this book by crossing the Danube River from Slovakia into Hungary. He is immediately greeted with warm welcomes and taken to a procession and celebratory mass in a Catholic church for the end of Lent. He proceeds on to Budapest, has an amazing time, and moves on to hike across the Great Hungarian Plain, the western most steppe of that geographical feature spreading all the way to Mongolia. He continues to have interesting encounters with the country folk and even spends a night with a camp of Romani people. Despite all he has heard about their criminal tendencies, the night passes without incident to his pleasant surprise. As he gets closer to the border with Romania, he starts staying in upper class villas owned by people he made contact with during his previous travels. What is great about this whole section is the vivid description of the landscape, something that he improves on as he goes farther along. His portrayal of the upper classes, as well as the other people he meets, is of higher quality too. Maybe Hungarians are just more exciting people than the Germans he writes about in the previous volume, but they are more interesting and lively in these chapters than anything he had written before.

One interesting part of his journey through Hungary is the intellectual curiosity and passion for reading that Leigh Fermor shows while he stays with the Hungarian aristocrats. One thing he does when he visits them is read the books they have collected in their personal libraries. Some of the weakest and most muddled passages of A Time of Gifts are those where he struggles to explain historical events from the places he visits. It is some seriously bad writing, but here in Between the Woods and the Water he does a far better job of explaining with clarity all the entanglements of people who either migrated to Hungary, traveled through it, or tried to conquer it. This is tough subject matter including tribes of Avars and Goths, later settlements by Huns and Magyars, invasions by Mongols, Germans, and Ottoman Turks, and eventual collaboration with the Habsburg kingdom. He makes some sharp observations about the Magyar language too. His ability to comprehend and describe the syntaxes of all the languages he encounters while traveling is impressive even if he never fully masters the complexities of Magyar. Being able to explain what an agglutinative language is is good enough.

As Leigh Fermor continues into Romania, he keeps calling on contacts he made through others he met in Hungary. His original plans to sleep in forests, fields, and farms gets scrapped as he continuously gets invited into the homes of aristocrats, living a high and leisurely life with them. They enjoy his company so much that their hospitality seems to be without end. The downside of this is that as he travels southwards into Transylvania, most of the people he associates with are ethnic Hungarians and Swabians, but he encounters far fewer Romanians. Transylvania was formerly part of Hungary and Romania incorporated it into their country when the Habsburg Empire broke up after World War I. The author is acutely aware of the tensions between the two groups as, yet he continuously maintains optimism in the possibility of them all uniting under the banner of one nation despite their separate identities.

Socially speaking, he spends a lot of time with an interesting character named Istvan who takes him on a series of adventures. One interesting part is when the two are swimming nude in a river and two farm girls see them, taunt them, and encourage them to chase after them where something or other happens behind a hay rick. What happens there is left to your imagination, but if it involves two naked men it shouldn’t be hard to figure out. Istvan also takes Leigh Fermor and Angela, a married woman from Budapest, on a car ride around the western edge of Transylvania. Leigh Fermor and Angela are having a fling and Istvan wants to make sure they are out of the sight of nosy neighbors who won’t mind their own business. Along the way, the author continues to expound his knowledge about Romanian history as they visit castle ruins in the mountains. He clearly informs his readers about the lives of John Hunyadi and Vlad Tepes, the count who inspired Bram Stoker to write Dracula.

Leigh Fermor then goes off on foot again, trekking through the western edge of Transylvania along the Mures River, connecting again later with the Danube before crossing over into Bulgaria. His descriptions of the mountains are incredible. He uses language to capture the weather, the running water, the plants, the trees, the sounds, the mist,and various other people he meets along the way. Some of the best descriptive writing involves animals; he wakes up one morning to look over a cliff where he sees a golden eagle stretch its wings before taking off in flight, being joined by another eagle. This passage is magnificent.

There isn’t much to dislike about this book. Not all of the writing is perfect, but there are so many more high points in comparison to the first volume of this trilogy that the low points ca be easily overlooked. It is interesting to see how the author’s literary skills grow before your eyes as he continues to write. It also helps that Hungary and Romania are far more interesting countries than Germany or Austria where the author traveled in A Time of Gifts.

Between the Woods and the Water is an exciting travelogue and work of descriptive prose. In it, we see where Patrick Leigh Fermor improves on all the problems he had in the previous book and watching this process of growth unfold is one of this book’s charms. The author is a Romantic at heart and by that I refer specifically to the Romantic movement that preceded the Victorian literary style. But Patrick Leigh Fermor’s Romanticism is a little different; he has the sublimity of nature, the castle ruins, the passage of time, and the push towards transcendence, but at the young age of nineteen, he is too young to wallow in a hopeless longing for the past and the melancholia that the Romantic poets insisted on indulging in. He travels and writes in the here and now as if he loves every minute of it.

 

Book Review

Hasidism: A New History

by David Biale et al

     If you’ve ever been to New York, be it upstate, downstate, or in the city itself, you have no doubt encountered Hasidic Jews at some time. Due to their distinctive clothing they are hard not to notice. Sooner or later, curiosity gets the better of us and we start to wonder who these people are and what they are all about. Answers are not always easy to come by. There are not many books written about the Hasidim and your average person isn’t well informed. Therefore, the acclaimed Jewish historian David Biale and a team of seven other scholars put together this 800 page cement block of a tome called Hasidism: A New History. Despite its size, it is an accessible book that should answer a lot of questions that any curious person might have about this enigmatic community.

As it should, this historical account begins with the founding of the movement. In the 1700s, there was a Jewish scholar named Israel Ba’al Shem Tov who lived in the Polish-Lithuanian Federation encompassing what is now Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Israel Ba’al Shem Tov was a scholar of the kabbalah and a tsaddik which is something like a Jewish shaman. His practice emphasized trances, ecstatic prayer, singing, dancing, and the experience of devekut, a mystical union with God. He actually had no intention of starting a religious movement. He was simple a scholar who, at various times in his life, attracted other like-minded scholars of The Torah and other Jewish texts. Many of these scholars returned to their communities and shared their newfound knowledge with others and groups, known as Hasidim, began to form into courts around each tsaddik. The tsaddiks were elevated to the status of rebbes, which, if I understand correctly, are strong authority figures who guide their court’s beliefs, practices, and lifestyles. Membership in these Hasidic communities was initially limited to men only. Each Hasidic court operated independently of the others and they all varied from one another on matters of doctrine and ritual. Sometimes this led to conflict between competing Hasidic courts.

Another source of conflict came from other members of the Eastern European Jewish communities who came to be known as the Mitnaggdim. Since most of the Hasidim were illiterate, they never wrote down their own history so what we know about them came from the Mitnaggdim who wrote books and pamphlets in opposition to the new movement. Therefore it is up to the scholar to sort out what is fact and what is derogatory propaganda. When the Mitnaggdim characterized the Hasidim as a bunch of drunken, Dionysian revelers, we can’t dismiss the allegation entirely. Since the Hasidim practiced devekut through singing, dancing, and ecstatic ritual prayer, you can say that Hasidim valued experience over intellectualism. The Hasidim were not necessarily anti-intellectual; it is just that they valued communal ritual practice over scholarship and attention to Jewish law which is what differentiates them from other strains of Orthodox Judaism to this day.

As time went on, the tsaddiks got older and passed their leadership roles down to their sons so that dynasties were formed. These dynasties were named after their places of origin so when we hear names like Chabad-Lubavitch, Chernobyl, Ger, Belz, and others we can trace back the lineage to the location and rebbe of its first court.

The authors characterize the nineteenth century as the Golden Age of Hasidism. That was the time when the movement spread outside of Poland-Lithuania into Russia and the Austro-Hungarian territories. As they gathered momentum, they picked up new members along the way. The Hasidim were primarily rural people who survived by farming. With the invention of the railroad, pilgrimages to visit Hasidic courts became more frequent and these annual journeys became the high points of many adherents’ lives. All the while, the borders of the Hasidic community were porous so that some Jews attended the courts without being full-fledged members. Some Hasidim moved from court to court, sometimes belonging to two or more at the same time. Gentiles sometimes found themselves attracted to the courts as well and were known for seeking out medical aid, the blessing of talismans, or simple spiritual advice from nearby tsaddiks.

Of course, this burst of energy led to an eventual decline as Modernism set in. Impoverished Jews were forced to move to cities to live where they encountered more cosmopolitan ideas including socialism, anarchism, Zionism, and reformed Judaism. The Hasdic courts were decimated, but what remained became a bulwark of anti-modernity and a haven for traditional, and some would say reactionary and backwards, forms of Judaism.

Then came the two World Wars and the Holocaust. The authors don’t dwell too long on the Holocaust and for good reason. We all know what happened there and giving fine details about that nightmare wouldn’t lend much of value to the intentions of this history. What they do go into in great detail is how the Holocaust effected the Hasidim, the ways in which it influenced their self-concept as a religious movement, and what it did to change the structures of their communities. Of other great importance is the mass emigration of Hasidim to America and Israel. The most surprising thing to be learned from this book is that many Hasidim, even those who live in Israel, are anti-Zionist. The reasoning behind this is sufficiently explained but still a little hard to grasp for those of us who are outside the community. The experience of their immigration to America is entirely different. Not only are they now forced to live as an anti-modernist movement in a modernist society, but it is a multicultural society as well, a fact that has hurt and helped the Hasidim in many ways. But at the end of it all, the authors demonstrate how the American experience has been a great blessing to the Hasidim because it is the place where they have been able to thrive unlike any other place they have been in the world.

What is really impressive about this book is that it is so easy to follow. With eight different authors, you would expect it to vary in quality and style from chapter to chapter, but that just isn’t the case. The writing is consistent in its pacing and clarity all the way through. Even some of the more esoteric aspects of things like the kabbalah, theodicy, and devekut are explained with enough skill to make them comprehensible to those of us who aren’t so familiar with what they are. The tone is also as neutral as possible; the authors don’t exoticize the Hasidim like a species of strange animal nor do they judge them. They simple describe them and leave it at that. The biggest problem with the book is that it doesn’t provide enough of an insider’s point of view. As a reader, it made me feel like I was voyeuristically watching the Hasidim from a distance through a pair of binoculars. But this is a history book and not a work of social science. To get a better understanding of the experience of Hasidic ritual and practice, I found some good documentaries on the internet to supplement my reading. Some of the Hasidim are incredibly talented musicians and singers.

If you are not a member of the Hasidic community and you want to know what these people are all about, Hasidim: A New History is possibly the best place to start. Not only is it informative about who the Hasidim are, but I think it also goes a long way in explaining what it might be like to be an ethnic or religious minority in America. In conclusion, while I can’t speak for the Hasidim themselves, I do think they could benefit with a little more outreach to other Americans outside their community. It is true that some members of Chabad-Lubavitch are making some attempts at this, I know because I have spoken with a couple of them myself, but we are living in dangerous times when anti-Semitism is on the rise and the Hasidim mark themselves out visually as an American Other. This makes them a prime target for scapegoating by the more ignorant members of our society. As the Crown Heights Affair of 1992 proved, sometimes being the Other in America is not so easy. We should all make an effort to tolerate those who are different from us, but sometimes you have to be the one to initiate that first step. In the end I get the impression that the Hasidim are just a bunch of harmless, regular people like the rest of us. They just happen to live by a different set of rules. Besides, they dedicate their lives to the experience of joy. Shouldn’t that be a part of all our lives anyways?