Animal Review
Fanzine of Herbivorous Youth
by Avner

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The Fierce Beauty of Death?
Svejk

 

I stared at the picture but couldn’t decide what I was looking at. It had soft grayish hues, but was not in the least blurred or grainy.  It appeared to be a mummified seal with the legs of a fawn. Or some other unlikely hybrid – it looked realistic enough, and yet extremely bizarre. It left me completely disoriented for what seemed like long minutes. Well, it was the morning paper, and I hadn't had coffee yet. Eventually it dawned on me, and as with other famous optical illusions, once your mind realizes what you're seeing, you wonder how an earth you could have seen it differently beforehand. 

Even before I realized what I was gazing at, the title of the article left little room for doubt: “The Fierce Beauty of Death.” It was about photographer Pesi Girsch’s latest exhibition in a Tel Aviv gallery. She shoots stately, carefully posed arrangements of animal corpses. The article argued that Girsch – the daughter of German Jews who settled in Munich after the World War II, she came to Israel as a young girl, and later returned to study art in Munich – relates to European traditions and to the aesthetics of death typical of colonialism – stuffed heads of game animals on the walls, rugs with teeth and the like; that she comments about concepts of controlling nature, as well as war atrocities, cruelty to animals and several other issues. The article even mentions 'Le Roi des Aulnes' ('King of the Alders,' but translated to English as 'The Ogre') by Michel Tournier, a book I thought was very impressive when I read it, although I can’t remember the connection, or association, to the subject in question. 

It all sounded very convincing and intellectual, I suppose, but I looked at some more pictures on the artist’s web site (http://www.geocities.com/pesi_girsch ) - apparently as popular as this one - and remained doubtful. People usually see dead animals on their plates, where they mostly don’t look like dead animals, or as roadkill, where they are anything but aesthetic. I admit the combination of death and serene, soft, symmetrical visuals is indeed powerful and disturbing, but so is the nine o’clock news. The website claims that "beauty has no other source than the unique wound, open or hidden, which each one of us carries within him, protecting it and escaping from the world into it, to a profound temporary solitude." Jean Genet said that, and he may well be right, but corpses are still corpses, and in my view beauty is either alive, or still life.  And I’m not trying to claim art has anything to do with beauty. 

It isn't fair, but it must be admitted - there's a scale, ranging from a crushed cockroach at the bottom, to the body of your pet beloved for the last 15 years at the top. In Girsch's pictues - the few I saw - the dead fowl seem less disturbing than the cat and the buck.  A dead carp poking his eyes at you at a festive meal is an awful thing, but not as bad as the head of a roast pig, with or without the apple.

Dead humans are quite a common sight in movies and TV, but not in real life: Come to think of it, I saw a dead person up close exactly once, and I’m sure some friends of mine haven’t seen a dead person ever – it's easier for Jews, who, besides not eating pork, have no wakes, and whose children are not forced to kiss their dead grandfather’s foreheads – remind me which movie it was? No artist, unless trying at all costs to be provocative and controversial, would do similar things with dead humans. Or maybe I'm totally wrong and its been done before. I don't really want to know.

 

Animal Review Makes the Scene: Svejk 

 

Ruth Bondi was born in Prague.  She came to Israel in 1948, after spending most of the war years in Ghetto Terezin, or Theresienstadt by its German name.  She wrote for the left wing, now extinct, newspaper "Davar" and translated Czech literature to Hebrew.  On Saturday she came to Haifa, where she was a correspondent in the fifties, to talk about 'The Good Soldier Svejk' by Yaroslav Hasek.  The event took place in a little cellar in Jerusalem Street in Hadar, where I attended painting class when I was 11 or so.  By now they have air-condition installed in most public places, so everything is much more pleasant.  Surprisingly, the place was almost packed, and several people in the audience seemed to be old mates on a regular meeting.  A few were even under 40.  Two illustrations from the book were screened with a sort of magic lamp on a large sheet.

Bondi apologized for lacking the ability to speak and think at the same time, and continued to read from printed pages a rather brilliant account, full of intriguing facts I was unaware of, of her relation with the good soldier, one of the lesser known and least appreciated masterpieces of the former century, at least in the English-speaking world.  (Maybe I'm wrong, but it rings true.)

Most tourists come to Prague for three reasons, she said:  the Golem, Kafka and Svejk; that's two-thirds Jewish, Bondi remarked, but naturally Svejk has his own Jewish points as well.  Yaroslav Hasek - an alcoholic, anarchist (later communist) and famous practical joker, married a nice Jewish girl, Yarmila, and even tried to change his ways for the sake of her bourgeois parents; it lasted two years.  She used to finish up some of his feuilletons, and apparently was too good at it.  Hasek later remarried, but never bothered to divorce, so he was also a bigamist.  Max Brod, no other, was the first to recognize Hasek's genius as installments of "Svejk" started to appear in self-published booklets, with the now classic illustrations of Lada, who received several underpants and socks for his pains.  To the amazement, and later ridicule, of the local literary establishment, which considered Hasek's work nothing but cheap, low entertainment for the masses, Brod compared Hasek to Rabelais and Cervantes.  Hasek wrote to him - a polite thank-you note - and told his beer mates (some were Jews as well):  "I was a nobody up until now, but now that I'm in Jewish hands, I'm on my way to the top."  Or something in that spirit.  Hasek cannot be considered anti-Semitic, Bondi said:  He ridiculed everyone equally. 

When Bondi was a child, Hasek was practically forbidden literature; it was not allowed to poison children's minds with Svejk stories.  It wasn't until she became resident of the Ghetto that she began to learn about the tremendous importance of Svejk.  People in the Ghetto quoted Svejk all the time, and some could actually recite whole chapters by heart; the spirit of Sveik was so fitting to Ghetto life that one writer began to write the new adventures of Svejk in the Ghetto: He stands in the wrong line at city hall, has his ID stamped with the letter "J," and ends up in Terezin.  The book was not completed as the writer died in the whereabouts of Auschwitz.

The original Svejk is also unfinished.  As is the case with many other masterpieces, what is mostly remembered is the sentence from the opening paragraph: "They have killed our Ferdinand."  Hasek planned to write about Svejk's adventures in a Russian prison camp, but died at 40 before the last battle (in the book) was waged.

When Bondi came to Israel she was happy to realize that Brod - who escaped on time and settled in Tel Aviv - had already made Svejk popular in Israel, in the form of an adaptation for the stage.  Everyone could quote the opening sentences in the unique intonation of actor Meir Margalit, but no one read the book.  It took her thirty years, but she translated it all to Hebrew.  She then continued to translate many other Czech authors.  "No one speaks Czech," she said; so, unlike translations from English, where critics allow themselves to prod and criticize the translator's work in a petty way, in her case they just say the translation is "readable." This is like saying that apricot dumplings, a famous Czech delicacy, are "edible."

I'm one of those critics, by the way, but I don't think I ever said that.  I once reviewed (favorably, as always) a book by Otte Pavel, a writer who committed suicide, and wondered about his motives - Bondi sent me a handwritten letter with details about Pavel and some new information suggesting his death was in fact an accident.  I never reviewed Svejk, but I'm a big fan, though I read the full version only after reading the adventures of two famous followers, Ivan Chonkin and Yossarian.

Hasek was extremely prolific - new pieces are still being published in the Czech republic - because he needed the money for beer.  There are several early sketches for the character and adventures of Svejk, but mostly they are bland and unimportant.  A new 'Svejk Encyclopedia' published recently reveals many new details and hilarious stories of Hasek and his book, and establishes the fact that Svejk, actually, is almost documentary.  There's hardly any fiction in the book - only the names were changed.  It seems one just need to look around and meticulously record stuff to create a timeless comic masterpiece. 

I also learnt that Budejovice, Svejk's hometown, which he invokes endlessly with tales of peculiar people and nonsensical and out-of-context events, is none other than Budweiser.  It figures.

  

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