Call It English by Wirth-Nesher Hana;

Author:Wirth-Nesher, Hana;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2022-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

Moses Herzog: “Here i am. Hineni!”

Maybe he is Moses Herzog, translator and embodiment of cross-cultural translation. In 1964 Bellow published Herzog (for which he received the National Book Award), a novel about a Jewish intellectual, son of immigrant parents, who spends several weeks ruminating about his life and composing letters to both the dead and the living as he comes to terms with his failing career and marriage. In the wake of his wife Madeleine’s sexual infidelity with their neighbor and friend Valentine Gersbach, and of his inability to complete his study “overturning the last of the Romantic errors about the uniqueness of the Self,”32 Herzog reviews his life as son, husband, father, lover, and thinker. Writing his letters to Nietzsche, Adlai Stevenson, General Eisenhower, contemporary scholars, ex-wives and lovers, and friends (among others), he evaluates his attitudes and behavior. (“When writing, I ask myself what is honorable or dishonorable,” says Bellow.)33 Recognizing that his big old house in the Berkshires is “the symbol of his struggle for a solid footing in White Anglo-Saxon Protestant America,” Herzog acknowledges to himself, “I too have done my share of social climbing” (309). Motivated by his guilt as absent father and by his jealousy of Gersbach who has usurped his paternal role, Herzog impulsively flies to Chicago to retrieve his daughter and to take revenge on the lovers, but a near disastrous car accident and the tender presence of his child rein in his planned outburst. Shaken by his ordeal and the recognition of his fragile humanity, Herzog returns to his pastoral house in Ludeyville for a temporary retreat, having expressed love for his brother, his son and daughter (with whom he intends to spend the rest of the summer), and the new woman in his life, Ramona. His brother and sister believe that he has suffered a breakdown just as he begins to feel that he is recovering. Having decided to sell his rural WASP haven, Herzog projects his doubts onto the mind of his brother Will, “He expressed it to himself in Yiddish. In drerd aufn deck. The edge of nowhere” (329). Ludeyville is not home; his social climbing days among those who complained about “the Micks and the Spicks and the Sheenies” are over. “What a struggle I waged! . . . But enough of that—here I am. Hineni!” (310).

Concluding his inner journey for the identity of the man Moses Herzog with the Hebrew word uttered by his biblical namesake in reply to God’s call from the Burning Bush, Bellow dramatically reverses the translation pattern of the novel where Hebrew and Yiddish words have always preceded their English translation. Herzog’s assertion that he is “here,” by which he does not mean the sociogeographical place that is Ludeyville, appears in Hebrew to underscore the biblical narrative that has served as backdrop and linguistic and cultural framework out of which Moses Herzog comes to define himself. Just as Leopold Bloom is cast as a modern-day Ulysses, so Herzog is cast as a modernday Moses, with the difference that he is fully conscious of his biblical precursor.

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