The Missing Melody: What We Don?t Hear When We Read Gershom Gorenherg alking through downtown Bangkok one day, I came upon a shrine to the Hindu god Brahma. Behind the four-faced idol sat a trio of percussionists, two with boat-shaped wooden xylo- phones and one with a fat bamboo drum. In return for donations, they played to the deity, the elfish song of the xylophones hovering above the dark drumbeat. I pulled out my pocket recorder. \When I played back my tape, I found my microphone caught only the bright high xy- lophone notes, divorced from the deeper drumming. It?s still a pleasant tune, worth keeping even?but only half what the musicians hOped for. That sundered song came back to me recently, when I read a front-page piece on Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea ofStorier in the New York Times Boole Re- view. The reviewer, Alison Lurie, read Rushdie?s superb tale of a storyteller battling the forces of silence as an al- legory for the author's own travails since the publication of The Satanic Verses. She also pointed to parallels with Alike in Wonderland, The Phantom Tollhooth, and ?the classic folk tale in which the hero travels to strange lands to lift a Spell.? So far, so good. But when Lurie mentioned the book?s ?updated Ara- bian Nights background? and leapt onward without an- other word, I had to wonder if she?d missed half of Rushdie?s music. And that led to wider questions: How much does a reader miss when he or she lacks the tra? dition of stories that matters for the writer? And how much do each of us lack when we are poor in stories in whose terms we can write our own lives, or when our stories are chosen from but one cultural storehouse? Look at Harozm: Most of the action takes place during a night spent on a Kashmiri houseboat called the ?Ara- bian Nights Plus One,? and that?s clearly how Rushdie sees his story. From the boat, the boy-hero Haroun Khal- ifa and his father, Rashid the storyteller, travel to the hid- den moon of Kahani (story), where the lands of Gup (gossip) and Chup (quiet) do battle. Naturally, the capi- tal of Gup is built on an archipelago of 1,001 islands. And note the names: ?Rashid, as Alison Lurie says, is a near Ger-shore Goreaherg is a senior editor oftheJerusalern Report. anagram for Rushdie. But the caliph Harun al-Rashid is also the central figure in The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night; using this name is as subtle as calling the hero of an odyssey Ulysses or giving the name Hamlet to a man whose uncle killed his father. But details like these are only signposts to the shared meaning of the books. The Thousand Nith and One Night is a story about stories. To save ?the daughters of the Mussulmans? from a king who marries and murders a virgin each night, Shahrazad (Scheherazade) tells him stories?stories in which, again and again, people spin yet more stories in order to convince kings or demons not to kill them. A storyteller will become grand vizier if he brings a king the perfect tale or will be impaled if he fails. Storytelling, to paraphrase Proverbs, saves from death. In Rushdie?s 1,002d night, storytelling itself faces a death sentence. Its enemy is the Cultmaster; but he is, rather than an Ayatollah, ?a snivelling, drivelling, mingy, stingy, measly, weaselly clerh??a bureaucrat, in short, the ultimate modem creature, who wants to control the world and sees no point in stories ?that aren?t even true.? His hope is to plug up the that feeds Kahani?s sea of stories, a job made easier because the Source is lo- cated beneath the Old Zone of the sea, ?an area to which hardly anybody went any more? since ?there was little demand for the ancient Stories flowing there.? The dan- ger to storytellers comes when there is a failure of won- der?~and when no one knows or cares about the tradition through which they create new stories. If peo- ple don't visit Harun al?Rashid anymore, how will they understand Rashid the storyteller? be fair, Lurie may have heard the drumbeat of the 1,001 Nights running through Rushdie?s story but chosen not to write about it; a reviewer doesn?t have room for everything. Still, there's an irony in practically ignoring this connection when so much of Harozm is a plea for the importance of the old stories, and particularly of the Nights. And if Rashid is Rushdie, he?s also the ancient caliph, the storyteller and the hero of his stories becoming one. It?s a lesson in how someone who has a treasure of tales can use them to Spin the story 39 that is his or her own life in heroic and laden with meaning. Though many western readers are likely to know the Nights only from a thoroughly bowdlerized children?s tale or two, Scheherazade's epic isn?t exclusive Muslim prOperty. Still, Rushdie has a prob- lem, and not just in Harozm. With one hand he taps the xylophone of European literature, but with the second he pounds a drum his readers hear far less well. How much of the bitter satire of the Koran in The Satanic Verses, how much of Rushdie?s wrestling with faith, res- onates for his western readers? Rushdie is aware of the problem; in Shame he refers to hiinself as ?a translated man,? and writes: ?It is generally believed that some- thing is always lost in translation; I cling to the notion that something can also be gained. How mach does a reader miss when he or she lacks the tradition of stories that matters for the writer? Arid how mach do each of as Zach wherz we are poor in stories in whose terms we can write our own lives, or when our stories are chosen from hat orte cultural storehouse? In that hepe is a note of deSpair. This isn?t just Rushdie?s dilemma. It belongs to anyone who knows a tradition of stories that his or her readers don?t. The sto- ryteller lives by his store of tales; to leave them out of one?s own stories is to choose a kind of silence, but to use them and nor have them heard is also to choose silence. The problem is also evident in those Jewish writers whose Jewishness goes beyond immigrant ethnicity to delve into Jewish literary tradition. When two charac- ters in I. B. Singer's ?The Tale of Two Liars,? talk about the River Sambation, it makes sense as the banter of con- man and con-woman before their victims?even to a reader who doesn?t know the legend of the river that hurls stones six days a week and rests on the Sabbath. But the dialogue resonates better if you know the crooks are quoting a legend that dates back to the Talmud and early midrashic collections; playing on their victim?s piety, they build their own credibility. Elie Wiesel cites the same legend in A Beggar in Jerusalem, explaining it well enough that any reader can understand?and so well that the tale becomes a litera- ture lesson rather than a story. 40 TIKKUN VOL. 7, No. 6 In that novel, in fact, Wiesel seems terribly unsure of how to deal with a tradition that readers don?t share, overexplaining one image, underexplaining another. Much of the plot is based on the metaphor of the sepa- ration of the female Shechina, or divine presence, from the male God. A soldier missing in the Six Day War is named Katriel, ?the crown of variation on Kater, the highest emanation of God in the kabbalistic hierarchy. His wife is Malka?Malchut, the lowest em- anation, another name for the Shechina. In contrast to the traditional idea of the Shechina going into exile with the Jews, both Shechina and the Jews have returned to Jerusalem?but God himself has been lost in the battle. Wiesel, though, gives no explanation of the names, leav- ing the allegory as shrouded as he leaves Katriel?s fate. Still, one has to sympathize with Wiesel rather than crit- icize him. Any Jewish writer who wants to allude to tra- ditional sources today knows this unhappy choice: whether to provide Rashi to his or her own allusion, thereby interfering with the reader?s interpretation, or to say nothing and risk having the reader?s reference go al- together unnoticed. Wiesel?s Night provides an example of the ideal solu- tion, a story that is powerful even when half-heard, though resonating better when the tradition is known. In Auschwitz, a young boy is hanged by the 5.3. before thousands of prisoners, and slowly strangles for over half an hour. Wiesel writes: Behind me, I heard man asking: ?Where is God?? And I heard a voice within me answer him: ?Where is He? Here He is?He is hanging here on this When I first read this, when I was seventeen, I was both overwhelmed and a bit confused. Was Wiesel, in fact, saying God had died in Auschwitz? Could he, de- spite his Judaism, be making the boy into an unresur- rected Christ figure? The older tale, which my American Reform Jewish upbringing hadn?t given me, I learned years later. One night in Jerusalem, my wife came home from a class on Traetate Sanhedrin of the Talmud and reminded me of Wiesel?s account. Then she Opened the heavy volume be- fore me to the section explaining why a person who has been executed must not be left hanging, lest God?s name be desecrated: (Continued on p. 79) RIGHTS IN THE WORKPLACE (Cont?zizzred?om p. 24) closings could unite around a comprehensive ?worker?s rights? proposal. As a long-range program, it could give unity and structure to current organizing efforts around various components of the package. And this package ought properly to be the first of many aimed at broad- ening the fundamental rights of Americans vis-a-vis the private sector, in commerce, education, communica- tions, housing, and so on. The framers of the Constitu- tion, even at their most timebound, had a broader vision ofthe Rights ofMan [sic] than the mere Opportunity to be equally exploited. Beyond fundamental rights But that fundamental rights model in turn falls short of a covenantal relationship between employer and em- ployee which recognizes workers as whole human beings, on and off the job. It is time to go beyond a ?worker?s rights? theory to look at on-the-job life as an integral part of the whole life of every working person. The radical in- equality between the worker who (like most of us} defines her? or himself largely in terms of what s/he ?does,? and the employer who sees her/him as a unit of non-fixed la- bor cost, poisons the worker?s whole life, and, ultimately, the family and community s/he lives in. Employers must be held accountable for how they handle the tremendous and social power that this relationship gives them. The ?rights model? limits the powerful in very 5pc. cific ways. But it also assumes that everybody will use all the power they have and are not specifically barred from using. From the worker?s point of view, having a set of specified fundamental rights as an employee is certainly better than merely being equally eXploited; but it is still a starting point on the way to being able to function in the workplace as a whole, respected human being. A new administration will be in a unique position to implement this vision?in the shorter term, a compre- hensive code of fundamental rights in the workplace, and, in the long term, a revision of relationships between worker and management. The presidency's potential as a pulpit has already been commented on far beyond my poor power to add or detract. The emphasis of Clinton?s campaign on increasing the numbers of good jobs while simultaneously improving the skills and aptitude ofwork- ers, dovetails with our vision of empowered, respected work-life. That vision has the marks of AmeriCan leg- islative style at its best?simultaneously a near-transcen- dent set of goals, and a concrete program of laws and regulations. It is consistent with the demands of many unions, but it goes far beyond them?far enough to ward off the usual accusations against a Democratic adminis- tration of being a ?captive of Special interest groups. A case can be made that labor unions, representing less than 20 percent of the work force, comprise a special interest group. But working Americans as a whole (plus would- be workers) constitute nearly three?quarters of the p0p- ulation. To empower them/us is to shape the entire polity into a free and mutually responsible community. l:l SHARING STORIES (Continued from p. 40) Rabbi Meir said: They told a parable about this. It?s like twin brothers who lived in a town. One was made king and one became a robber. The king commanded that he be hanged. Everyone who saw him said: ?That?s the king hanging.? So the king ordered that he be taken down. The image of God hangs on the gallows, says the Tal- mudAuschwitz, certainly the divine image within humanity was executed. From old tales a storyteller makes new ones; with old stories a listener can better hear the new. With a rich store of stories, a person can read his or her own life as a grander tale. Or to choose another parable: In The Thousand Nights and One Night, in the Tale of Ala al- Din (or Aladdin), the magician proclaims: ?New lamps! New lamps for old!? PeOple think him a fool, but by this trick he trades a mere piece of copper for the magic lamp that is home to Ala al-Din?s generous genie. Old tales, like old lamps, have great power. I would submit, though, that those of us who grew up in America in the laSt generation or two use newer but less magical tales as models for our lives. Our sto? ries are likely to come from Leave it to Beaver and Alka- Seltzer commercials, not Shakespeare, the Bible, Shahrazad?s tangle of tales, or rabbinic legend. That makes it easier to read our own lives as sitcom or soap opera, with their meager meaning, than to see ourselves as King Lear, or Shahrazad, or Israelites leaving Egypt. Is this an argument for a ?Great Books? curriculum? Not in the restricted sense that the term is often used, in which ?great? means only books in that chain of tradi- tion that leads from Homer through ShakeSpeare. West- ern Civ. 101 is only one of the jugs of gold in the storeroom of stories, and I?m greedy. I recommend such greed. I also want fistfuls of legends from the Talmud and Bereshit RabbahRabbi Akiba entering paradise, and Alexander the Great traveling beyond the mountains of darkness. But I?m not satisfied with that jug alone, either. Let?s grab fistfuls of stories, let?s shower them on our chil- dren and our students. Let?s bathe in a sea of stories. [3 VOL. 7, No. 6 79