The Vanguard Messiah

Sami Sjöberg

• Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9783110424683
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

In recent years the role of religion in the avant-garde has begun to attract scholarly interest. The present volume focuses on the work of the Romanian Jewish poet and visual artist Isidore Isou (1925–2007) who founded the lettrist movement in the 1940s. The Jewish tradition played a critical part in the Western avant-garde as represented by lettrism. The links between lettrism and Judaism are substantial, yet they have been largely unexplored until now. The study investigates the works of a movement that explicitly emphasises its vanguard position while relying on a medieval religious tradition as a source of radical textual techniques. It accounts for lettrism's renunciation of mainstream traditions in favour of a subversive tradition, in this case Jewish mysticism. The religious inclination of lettrism also affects the notion of the avant-garde. The elements of the Jewish tradition in Isou's theories and artistic production evoke a broader framework where religion and experimental art supplement each other.

1Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew

Toute création inédite est l’œil de Dieu.41

1.1Formative Years in Romania

Ion-Isidor Goldstein was born in 1925, shortly after expressionism peaked in Germany and surrealism had begun to move centre stage in France. This was a fervent period also in the Romanian avant-garde, which was promoted by three cardinal art magazines: Contimporanul (published 1922–1932), Integral (1925–1928) and Unu (1928–1935). Besides publishing works by Romanian artists, many of whom were of Jewish origin, the magazines’ editors were well connected to foreign artists, such as Herwath Walden and André Breton, as well as Romanian emigrants living in Paris – among others, Tzara, Fondane and Victor Brauner.42 The Romanian avant-garde was well informed of current West European aesthetics and poetics.43 The legacy of this intense period affected Isou when he began to take an interest in the arts.

Most histories of lettrism settle for acknowledging Isou’s Romanian Jewish origin but leave his childhood and teenage years otherwise unaccounted for. However, this phase was crucial in light of the Jewish import in lettrist theory and poetics. Its importance is evident throughout Isou’s autobiographical notes regarding his adolescence in Romania and its standing in his work. As he acknowledges,

je suis entièrement, dans chaque défaut, dans chaque clarté, dans chaque élan, dans chaque courbe, dans chaque réticence un Juif. Je suis tellement Juif que c’est peut-être le seul mot dans ma vie que j’écrirai avec majuscule, sans avoir l’impression d’ajouter une dimension, de combler une irrégularité, d’élever une notion par la mystification pompeuse d’une grande lettre.44

I am fully, in each defect, in each light, in each impulse, in each curve, in each reluctance a Jew. I’m so Jewish that it is perhaps the only word in my life that I write with a capital, without feeling that I add a dimension to make up for a deficiency, raising a notion by the pompous mystification catered by an upper case letter.

Isou conceived of his Jewishness in ethnic and religious terms as something given and thus non-negotiable. Even though he recognised the burden of being Jewish in interwar Romania with its recurring pogroms, he did not wish to assimilate – had this even been possible. As a Jew, he was subject to anti-Semitism that escalated during the Second World War and culminated in the Shoah.45 However, in his works Judaism is not solely related to the Shoah and suffering, but rather to earlier, and from a Western point of view even exotic, traits of the Jewish tradition, such as mysticism. Granted, Isou was well aware of the outlandish character and intrigue his theories evoked in Paris, which suggests that his autobiographical accounts of Eastern Europe were also intended for the promotion of his artistic career in post-war France.46 Yet, unlike the “exotic” African folk art that was introduced into Western aesthetics by Einstein’s Negerplastik (1915), Judaism was a tradition lived in the heartlands of continental Europe. In this sense Judaism could not be regarded as unfamiliar as cultures from beyond “the Old Continent”.

The label of exoticism is nevertheless apparent in Isou’s late novel Adorable roumaine (Adorable Romanian, 1978), which includes a reminiscence of his childhood and the neighbourhood he grew up in:

Je suis né à Botoșani, localité située au nord-est de la Roumanie, tout près de la frontière russe. La ville est divisée en plusieurs quartiers, certains occupés par des gens riches et d’autres par de pauvres artisans à peine échappés à leur terre patriarcale.47 Mon père, commerçant aisé, avait hérité de ses parents une maison dans le quartier des « déguenillés » (Calicime) et nous habitions là pendant l’été, alors que la saison de grande activité commerciale nous trouvait dans un immeuble neuf construit sur le marché.48

I was born in Botoșani, a town situated in northeastern Romania, just by the Russian border. The city is divided into several districts, some occupied by the rich and others by poor artisans who barely escaped to their patriarchal land. My father, a prosperous merchant, had inherited a house in a “ragged” neighborhood (Calicime) from his parents and we spent the summers there, whereas during the commercial high season we lived in a new building on the marketplace.

The suburb of “paupers” in Botoșani is described as mostly Hebrew (Jewish) and comprising nearly a quarter of the city. It was the darkest and most forlorn city district with battered unpaved roads with no foothpaths. The city itself was bustling with Jewish life, presented by its numerous (counting more than 70) prayer houses and two synagogues in the interwar period.49

The history of Botoșani is marked by its location at geopolitical and cultural crossroads. The town is situated in northeastern Romania, in the Moldavia region, approximately halfway between Iași and Cernivtsi (Czernowitz), which is currently situated in Ukraine. The geographical location of the cities forms an axis that coincides with the south-westernmost perimeter of the so-called Yiddishland, which denotes East European Yiddish-speaking Jewish communities situated between modern Latvia and northern Romania, central Poland and eastern Ukraine. These communities consisted not only of cities but also of smaller towns and villages, with dynamic reciprocal exchange (of agricultural, cultural products). During the interwar period the Jewish inhabitants of the area were in exchange with each other, but most often a longing for urban surroundings was manifested by those originating from more traditional, rural settings.

The earliest Jewish population in Botoșani dates from the sixteenth century.50 The colony grew rapidly in size at the beginning of the nineteenth century with immigrants arriving from Galicia, Poland and Russia. As in other major cities of the region, the Jews of Botoșani were a significant part of the population.51 The Jews had their own cultural life (newspapers, journals, theatre, music, art) centred on Yiddish and Hebrew and were not thus solely dependent on Occidental cultural “imports”. However, the models of cultural life were fairly bourgeois and derived from the West.52 Jewish bourgeois life in the cities can be regarded as a rather straightforward acclimatisation to the lifestyles of the French and German middle classes of the time. The all-encompassing Western influence was particularly apparent in architecture and education.53 In the late nineteenth century, the better-off Botoșanian Jews built houses based on current French trends. For instance, a prosperous Jewish merchant built the renowned Moscovici house in Palladian style right in the middle of the city.54 In addition to architecture, Romania had opted for schooling in accordance with the French model.55 The Romanian elite, though located mainly in the capital Bucharest, was French-speaking and the Romanian aristocracy was educated in France. In other words, all Botoșanians were under the influence of Romanian language and Franco-Romanian culture. Therefore, the Jewish people of Botoșani spoke mainly Romanian and Yiddish, with German and Ruthenian (Ukrainian) being the other prevailing languages in the area.

Individual language competence affected also the relations one had to current trends. During the nineteenth century East European Jews held varying positions to the inevitable encounter with modernisation. The main trends in the wide-ranging reactions to this were the secular Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), assimilation into a hegemonic nation state, Jewish nationalism, conservative-orthodox separationism, emigration (Zionism), socialism and a longing for a kind of “organic” Jewishness.56 In the light of his writings, the latter two were the most essential for Isou. The idea of an “organic” Jewishness was based on a romanticised image of the so-called Ostjuden (Eastern Jews), which was derived from Westernised Jews. The Ostjuden, Ashkenazim, were regarded as having conserved an “original” kind of Judaism in their tradition-oriented lifestyles in the East European small towns and countryside. Martin Buber was seminal in promoting such image of the Ostjuden.57 This ideal served as an archetype for the more assimilated urban Jewish population across the continent.58

The degree of Isou’s family’s assimilation remains unknown. Depending on the source, the Goldsteins are depicted either as a petit-bourgeoisie Ashkenazi family or upper-middle-class people who owned several grocery stores in the city.59 Nevertheless, Isou was at least of the second, perhaps third generation of Romanian-speaking Goldsteins – his grandparents were Botoșanians. His family was at least trilingual, speaking Romanian and Yiddish as well as the amount of Hebrew required at the synagogue. Isou attended the yeshiva (rabbinic school) so he was familiar with Biblical Hebrew.60 The yeshiva institution was founded on the tradition of Torah study, so it is likely that Isou’s first contact with the Kabbalah occurred there during the 1930s.

In a mainly Yiddish-speaking community, language proficiency was a factor that constrained the access to texts in Hebrew, which includes most of the kabbalistic writings. It was not uncommon that only rabbis were fluent in Hebrew before the creation of the State of Israel and the revival of the language. Isou was a native speaker of Yiddish, who recalled the difficulties related to the study of the Kabbalah. According to him, if the

Cabbale (Kabbalah)[était] [d]ifficile pour notre compréhension, elle était certainement encore plus difficile pour les barbares (devenus chrétiens) qui ne savaient même pas comment pénétrer dans les textes premiers.61

Kabbalah was difficult for us to understand, it was certainly even more difficult for the barbarians (now Christians) who do not even know how to penetrate [to interpret] the first texts.

The difficulty with interpreting the Kabbalah was twofold: language hindered access to the kabbalistic line of thought, which was unique. Hence, Isou’s perception of the Kabbalah as a concealed doctrine is politicised as pro-Jewish. Additionally, the quintessential kabbalistic idea of a hidden truth within the text is conserved.62 Even more so, this hiddenness is sustained by the Jewish tradition rather than secular urban trends adopted by modern Jewry. This aspect of the Kabbalah would become essential in lettrism.

Besides the urban Botoșani life, the countryside with its small Jewish communities was a source of inspiration for Isou – there is certainly a romanticist element in the background of his aesthetics. As already noted, the Jewish tradition existed in shtetl culture as a flipside to modern and urban Judaism.63 Shtetl is here understood as a complex phenomenon existing in Yiddishland from the early 1800s until the Nazi purges when Isou left Romania for Paris. Shtetl refers to the basic network that supports the life of a Jewish community – a synagogue, a ritual bath, a cemetery, schools and so on.64 It was not legally established and it should not be regarded as a completely Jewish world. Inst...

Table of contents

• Cover
• The Vanguard Messiah
• Title Page
• Title Page1
• Imprint Page
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Prolegomenon: the Messiah
• Chapter 1 Isidore Isou: the Vanguard and Purlieuan Jew
• Chapter 2 Judaicities in Lettrism: Theory, Poetics, Praxis
• Chapter 3 Messianism and Temporal Poetics
• Conclusions
• Epilogue: Towards a Quiescent Judaism
• Timeline
• Footnote
• Bibliography
• Index