Joshua Cohen - As Said to Me and Said through Me, Revealed to Me at Night as if in a Dream

Joshua Cohen, Witz (Dalkey Archive Press, 2010)

"On Christmas Eve 1999, all the Jews in the world die in a strange, millennial plague, with the exception of the firstborn males, who are soon adopted by a cabal of powerful people in the American government. By the following Passover, however, only one is still alive: Benjamin Israelien; a kindly, innocent, ignorant man-child. As he finds himself transformed into an international superstar, Jewishness becomes all the rage: matzo-ball soup is in every bowl, sidelocks are hip; and the only truly Jewish Jew left is increasingly stigmatized for not being religious. Since his very existence exposes the illegitimacy of the newly converted, Israelien becomes the object of a worldwide hunt... Meanwhile, in the not-too-distant future of our own, "real" world, another last Jew—the last living Holocaust survivor—sits alone in a snowbound Manhattan, providing a final melancholy witness to his experiences in the form of the punch lines to half-remembered jokes."

An excerpt:
"Over There, Then

IN THE BEGINNING, THEY ARE LATE.
Now it stands empty, a void.
Darkness about to deepen the far fire outside.
A synagogue, not yet destroyed. A survivor. Who isn't?
Now, it's empty. A stomach, a shell, a last train station after the last train left to the last border of the last country on the last night of the last world; a hull, a husk—a synagogue, a shul.
Mincha to be prayed at sundown, Ma’ariv at dark.
Why this lateness?
He says reasons and she says excuses.
And so let there be reasons and excuses.
And there were.
A last boat out, why didn’t they catch it? They didn’t have their papers? their papers weren’t in order?
He says excuses and she says reasons.
And so let there be excuses and reasons.
And there were, if belated.
Misses Singer strokes her husband’s scar as if to calm him. But what she calls a scar he knows is his mouth."

Joshua Cohen, Bridge & Tunnel (& Tunnel & Bridge) (The Cupboard Pamphlet, 2010)

"A man performs the role of the Sun in a bit of modern choregraphy, and a young ballerina ruins a dinner party with one violent sneeze. A painter paints paintings of walls and hires a painter to paint onto a wall. Some lifestories get rejected. Some stalkers get stalked. Here, for you: twelve stories, to be read as they were written—on the bridge, in the tunnel, in the bus, on the train."

An excerpt:

"WHEN WE STOPPED SAYING WE WERE GOING TO MOVE OUT OF THE CITY"
When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the city, we had:
nothing to talk about at parties, nothing to talk about on the train, nothing to talk about to my aunt, nothing to talk about to her parents, nothing to talk about over pizza, nothing to talk about over good but insufferable sushi, nothing to talk about on the corner of Canal Street & Centre, nothing to talk about at jury duty, nothing to talk about in the bathroom at the theater before a movie began. When the bun place closed. The midnight movie theater in Midtown. When there was nothing to do in Midtown. No point to go. When the deli that pastramitized its own meats shut down, too. I really liked that bun place. When we stopped saying we were going to move out of the city, we became more bearable (we had to be). But, speaking just for me, more depressed."

Joshua Cohen, Heaven of Others (Starcherone Press, 2008)

"When a ten year-old Jewish boy is exploded on a Jerusalem street by a ten year-old Palestinian boy, he wakes up in a heaven no one in his tradition prepared him for, a heaven of others. Cohen's novel stands at the crossroads of a conflicted city and word-play that both celebrates and dismantles tradition."

"A breathless flight of controlled delirium, an exquisitely blasphemous tour of an afterlife where earth's dominion, in all its terror and glory, trumps the miraculous and overturns the world to come... It's a brave book that should earn its young author the reader's profound and enduring admiration." - Steve Stern

"Joshua Cohen has created a visionary novel that is terrifying and heartbreaking and humbling in its luminous brilliance. In my view, it firmly places the author on the same level as Kafka." - Michael Disend

"While the concept of a heavenly afterlife is among the most widespread religious beliefs, crossing cultural and geographical boundaries, the form of that Heaven has been the subject of much speculation. From the Elysian Fields to Valhalla to the Christian Heaven of Revelations, the nature of the afterlife has been a driving force of religious imagination, inspiring a variety of faiths and informing centuries of conflict.
Among those many speculations, the possibility of multiple Heavens coexisting simultaneously and serving each of their respective believers is not a new idea, though it’s certainly still a radical one. It’s a notion that challenges the supremacy of all claims to “the one true God”. But there is a slice of literature devoted to the idea, explored in numerous interpretations. What Joshua Cohen’s A Heaven of Others introduces is the horror of being sent to the “wrong” Heaven — one that doesn’t serve one’s particular faith. For Cohen’s central character, experiencing someone else’s Heaven is not eternal reward, it’s a nightmare.
A Heaven of Others is the story of the brief life and infinite afterlife of Jonathan Schwarzstein, a young boy living in Jerusalem up until the point this book begins. On Jonathan’s 10th birthday, while on a shopping excursion with his parents, another boy of his age, a Palestinian, runs up to him on the street, embraces him in a tight hug, and detonates the explosives in his vest. The blast destroys the street, killing a number of bystanders, including Jonathan’s parents, and, of course, Jonathan and the other boy. Boldly, even audaciously, Cohen tells Jonathan’s story from the first person, with the child narrating his experiences from a post-blast perspective. From the start, the inescapable truth is that Jonathan is dead. But it’s everything that happens to Jonathan after being exploded from the world that matters here.
As Jonathan’s all-too-conscious spirit begins to explore his afterlife, first on a people-less Earth, then climbing a golden, many-spoked ladder into the sky, he quickly realizes that an error has been made. Though he can’t be sure of the reason, Jonathan guesses that it must have been the result of dying in such close quarters to the Palestinian boy, bodies mingled in the blast, and perhaps being sucked into that moment of martyrdom—but whatever the case, he realizes that he, Jonathan, a Jew, has wound up in the Muslim Heaven. Isolated and alone in death, it’s a slow realization for a child with limited experience of the living world. Only when Jonathan meets his allotment of virgin houris and they tell him to seek Mohammed for a way to correct his situation does he fully grasp the mistake. So begins the remainder of Jonathan’s journey, a mixture of clinging to the memories of his ten short years and journeying through the afterlife in an attempt to reunite with his parents and find the right Heaven.
In straight prose, this story would be blunt and maybe even trite, but the beauty of Cohen’s writing is such that the tale is scripted in a dense, frequently punctuation-less poetry. One result of Jonathan’s spirit reality is that his pronouns and am-ness have been exploded, as well. Time, space, and sense of being are rendered relative, even irrelevant, and with it much of the language we take for granted. Jonathan’s attempts to speak from this perspective and retain the memories of his life result in a stumbling, cascading delivery coupled with an omniscient vocabulary beyond the grasp of a living child. The technique allows Cohen to write in feverish and metaphorical brush strokes, making this less a novel than a litany. All of this combines to give Jonathan an easily read otherworldliness, and the confusion of his after-death situation swirls with the naivety of his childhood experiences to evoke a visceral sense of a lost soul.
With such long-form poetry, it would be easy enough for the reader to get lost in the dense passages, and the reading is often challenging in its delivery, necessitating pauses and re-reading on occasion. But the stark and surreal existence on the other side is brought to life in spooky ink drawings by Michael Hafftka, sprinkled liberally throughout the book and putting shape and form to Cohen’s descriptions. Hafftka’s drawings also work to drive home the nightmarish qualities of Jonathan’s experiences, taking Cohen’s symbolism to even more expressionistic levels with scribbled lines, bold dark shapes, and smudged, brushed features. The figures are often warped and distended, and correspond to notions of the bizarre life beyond our world.
Cohen’s work here is brave, but perhaps more notable for its lack of judgment on today’s world. Though Jonathan spends much of the story reflecting on his life on Earth, especially in remembering an obviously idolized father, the afterlife that Jonathan encounters is peppered with dangers that are amorphous and beyond anything to do with the living, including religious beliefs. Though Jonathan’s faith is tested on his journey, the resolution is deliberately vague. There’s no happy ending of being reunited with his family in a familiar Jewish Heaven to be had, because, as we slowly learn to appreciate, such things are nothing to do with Heaven’s true nature. Cohen draws attention away from religion and towards the diffusion of identity that follows from being integrally united with the totality of Creation. We realize through Jonathan that everything we are that makes us individual will be lost, and in chilling final lines, Cohen pinpoints that experience as being one of abject terror.
This is not satire, nor is it really a cautionary tale—there is nothing on Earth that can be done to change the nature of Heaven. There is not, in any real sense, a problem to be solved for which Jonathan serves as an example. Rather, A Heaven of Others is more a thought exercise, a contemplation of life’s trivialities in the face of the unknown of death, and also an affirmation of the importance of those trivialities in making us who we are as individuals—something that doesn’t last for very long, and should therefore be cherished." - Patrick Schabe

"Joshua Cohen's A Heaven of Others could not be more different from his previous novel, Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto. The latter is long and (literally) garrulous, a crazed monologue by a concert violinist who seizes the opportunity to regale his captive audience with the story of his friend, the composer Schneidermann, rather than play his scheduled cadenza. The former is short and fabular, narrated by an Israeli boy who has been blown up by a suicide bomber and finds himself in the wrong heaven - the Muslim heaven.
Cadenza is a maximalist novel that attempts to encompass - through Schneidermann - Jewish history in the 20th century, while A Heaven of Others is a minimalist novel that focuses on a single Israeli family without particularly emphasizing its Jewishness. And while Cadenza relates the stories of two older men and their accomplished, eventful lives, A Heaven of Others presents us with the abruptly terminated life of a ten-year-old yet to experience more than the formative days of youth.
Yet both of these books show Joshua Cohen to be a writer of determinedly innovative inclinations and should impress readers - whose numbers ought only to increase--both as already accomplished works of fiction and as harbingers of further engagingly experimental efforts to come. If A Heaven of Others is not exactly the book one might have expected from the author of Cadenza for the Scneidermann Violin Concerto, that very fact on reflection seems only to indicate this is a writer who will not necessarily pursue the same set of unconventional strategies (unconventional at first) but will produce experimental work in the purest sense: fiction that continues to surprise.
Perhaps the most noteworthy achievement of A Heaven of Others is the style Cohen has fashioned for his recently deceased narrator.
Now that he has made his ascent, he is wrong. In the wrong. Being dead, he's correct. But being dead where he is, he's in error. Incorrectly mistaken. Not him but here is what's wrong, all wrong, and the timing of it, too, for him, for now and for here.
Pigs tried to take me unto their squigglies, their hypnotically spiraling tails and their hairy and rotting though seemingly citric oiled flanks, exposed hunks of bunched phosporescent bone to hug tight with your thighs tightened against the grease of the wind, oinked me to grab on, snouted me out to hold on and hold tight, offering me to ride them out to wherever their flights might end, terminus, maybe hoping I'd guide them to safer, smoother landings. But I ignored them because of climbing, climbing is enough.
This is a nicely-calibrated blending of the natural ingenuousness of a ten-year-old boy (presumably rendered in Hebrew-inflected English) and the free-flowing perspective of one who has just become disembodied and finds himself inhabiting a realm where terrestrial linguistic conventions probably no longer apply. It lends the novel a kind of dreamlike poetry that is its most distinctive, and most compelling, quality.
What begins as a "mistake," a misplacement of the Israeli boy in the wrong heaven, becomes a realization on the boy's part that heaven must ultimately be the abandonment of all earthly religious divisions:
Listen and I will say what I have said. In this heaven as in any heaven I am no longer a Jew. In this heaven as in any heaven I am no more a Jew than I'm not. Jewful and Jewless. Listen. Then hear. Understand. To be religious in heaven is to be truly fanatic...
And he learns to face the only eternity likely to be in store for us:
. . .Mostly however I am ambivalent about and to this death. Thriving off the fund of numb. And so to my death, too. Sunned. Both were inevitable. Are. Or at least one happened and another will happen, and so you will notice that I still say and so think Will happen becuase a mind of mine wants to believe in a future. Listen that that, too, will pass. Into waiting for waiting. Which will pass as well, on its own. There is not waiting in the future and there is no future in the (you understand). Listen and then passing will pass. Hearing, too. Again await the all over again. Understand, then listen anew.
ADDENDUM A Heaven of Others is accompanied by numerous illustrations by the artist Michael Hafftka. While the drawings are, as far as I am able to judge, interesting enough, I can't really say they add much to or work very provocatively with Cohen's text. Perhaps a hybrid of fiction and art that truly reinforces the former, creates something new from the interaction of each, might still be created, but I don't think this is it." - Daniel Green

"Richard Pryor used to tell a joke about the night he came to in an ambulance after a cocaine binge-induced heart attack. Surrounded by white medics, his first frantic thought was, “Shit! They sent me to the wrong heaven!” This idea that there are multiple heavens, right ones and wrong ones, white ones and black ones, is pushed to its fantastical limits by Brooklyn writer Joshua Cohen in his dream-world novel of the afterlife. True to the author’s trademark style of high-wire breathlessness—some might say talkiness — A Heaven of Others may have the longest subtitle of any book in recent memory, even in these subtitle- happy times. The full title is A Heaven of Others: Being the True Account of a Jewish Boy Jonathan Schwarzstein of Tchernichovsky Street, Jerusalem, and his Post-Mortem Adventures in & Reflections on the Muslim Heaven as Said to Me and Said Through Me by an Angel of the One True God, Revealed to Me at Night as if in a Dream.
Cohen, author of three previous books, is best known for last year’s Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, a tireless 385-page monologue that dashes between its intertwined themes of classical music, American culture, and the fate of the European Jewry. The book made strong if quiet waves in experimental literary circles and among music writers for its daring sweep and hypnotizing prose rhythms, part Hasidic prayer and part Charlie Parker. Like Cadenza, Heaven is a challenging but rewarding read on thematic and formal levels.
The novel’s short earthly opening is set on a hot commercial street in Jerusalem, where a 10-year-old Jewish boy waits for his parents outside a shoe store. His social mirror approaches in the form of a young Palestinian boy who happens to be strapped with secret explosives. When the Palestinian boy sees the Jewish boy, he hugs him. Driven by something he doesn’t quite understand, the Jewish boy hugs the Palestinian back. Just as their four eyes squeeze tight—“like lemons”—a button is pressed; the bomb’s energy is released. What follows is the first of the novel’s wonderfully psychedelic prose supernovas. The moment of the blast, at once the moment of death and birth in the hereafter, opens a thousand doors to a slow-motion flock of flying pigs—the metaphorical meat of the slaughtered. The fleshy fractal geometry of bodies crushed and severed and splattered in every direction becomes “a huge pink hurtling, oink mad… Pigs are coming out of the woodwork.”
Along with the pigs appears a rope ladder to heaven. Alas, it turns out to be a rope to the wrong heaven, the Muslim heaven, a heaven of others, but the Jewish boy grabs it because it is there and begins to climb. As with the rest of the novel, Cohen adopts the vantage of the newly disembodied (and disemboweled) Boy, who is caught between the flying mess and the ladder that beckons him up, up and away from the blast scene.
Pigs tried to take me unto their squigglies, their hypnotically spiraling tails and their hairy and rotting though seemingly citric oiled flanks, exposed hunks of bunched phosphorescent bone to hug tight with your thighs tightened against the grease of the wind, oinked me to grab on, snouted me out to hold and hold tight, offering me to ride them out to wherever their flights might end, terminus… But I ignored them because of climbing, climbing is enough.
Once at the other end of the ladder, the Boy begins, like an ethereal Joseph K., a futile search of multiple elusive explanations. His journey takes him through deserts, oases, and valleys full of rusty nails; it is a spectral, largely soundless, beautifully distorted journey through the Muslim heaven of mirages and monsters, full of dreamlike misunderstanding and illogic. At a pit surrounded by a tire he meets the boy who killed him, and talks a sort of politics; he meets Queen Houri and her virgins, who ask him to become one of them; and he encounters a serpent in the Valley of Nails who says he can take him to Mohammed, who will hear his plea. But nothing works out in this heaven of others, and the snake lunges and falls dead, “its tongue hanging longingly out… forked in two directions different though equally nowhere, as dead as I stood.”
The scene is one of more than two-dozen illustrated by Michael Hafftka, whose haunting black and white ink drawings are often as arresting as Cohen’s language. This is the second time Hafftka, a Brooklyn-based artist with works in the permanent collection of MoMA, has worked with Cohen. They are a natural team and tempt a comparison to Ralph Steadman and Hunter S. Thompson. Just as those two challenged our idea of journalism, Cohen and Hafftka challenge our idea of literature. Call it High Jewish Gonzo for the lit journals." - Alexander Zaitchik

"A Heaven of Others, Joshua Cohen’s second novel and fourth book of fiction, is a horrifying, terrifying, and instructive account of the wrong heaven in another’s shoes. Real shoes, that is, left forever in a real river of honey following abduction by eagles and a missed tête-à-tête with “the man named Mohammed”—the only one, it turns out, who might be able to bail our narrator, Jonathan Schwarzstein, of 37 Tchernichovsky Street, Jerusalem, out of a surreal and macabre but theologically accurate wasteland of a Muslim afterlife, and restore him to the heaven of his faith or choice. Though he is only ten when a Muslim boy his age explodes him on the street outside of a shoe store in latter-day Israel, by the time we hear him speak, from heaven, he is no longer a child but a child of eternity, “maturing to infinity,” and beyond and beyond, amen:
He hugged me I don’t know why I hug him back in return.
Us, we hug tightly. We fall on each other. We feel for one and for others we fall. We feel. And we hug.
Their eyes shut, they squeeze — just like lemons.
And then they explode.
Mind the seeds.
And so, with a bleating of radio goat voices naming the names of the dead and the oink-oink of pigs as heaven-bound traffic (drawn faithfully by painter Michael Hafftka), we are ushered up a shoe store ladder into the heaven of virgins and buffets as promised on the homiletic “Islamofascist” VHS tapes and cassettes you can buy on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn… No, not quite. A kind of dramatic escape into suspenseful anti-climax follows as, perhaps, in the Jewish tradition there is really no such thing as heaven and certainly no description, only a hopeful and equally vague notion of olam haba—a later, post-rabbinic introduction to Jewish theology that promised the Jewish Diaspora a messianic future in a perfected “world to come.” Jonathan, who has survived so much already, comes to this heaven to endure, to remember, to doubt, and to gossip; to expound his opinions on prayer, beet salad, tourism, and personhood; and to tell us who he was while he lived: who we are or were. His father is a piano tuner, his mother the Queen. He may or may not have had a brother named David who may or may not live with a “Movieperson,” a male lover in Hollywood, and this brother’s mother—Jonathan’s father’s first wife—may or may not have died of breast cancer; her tumor, in Cohen’s sincerely stupefying description, metastasizing into the K’aba or merely the black stone of secular helplessness, the speechless family all circling and circling around: “In the morning it had lost its roundness, by then it had further dulled off to become this hulking huge big black square As hard as rockstone Aba he was pacing Around and around and glancing at nervously as if it had just fallen through the ozone on down from space...”
But if Cohen is not Philip Roth, he is also not Shalom Auslander or Etgar Keret, and this is not yet another voyeuristic novel in which heaven is an excuse for irony, empty parables, amusement parks, or some gratuitous tour of the fantastic in rollercoaster magical-realist prose. A Heaven of Others is closer to Bernard Malamud’s late book God’s Grace or the mythical tales of Amos Tutuola in its treatment of another reality: sincere, serious, tender, American, an allegory maybe, but never merely clever, never a superficial phantasmagoria, and never only a vehicle for something else. In fact, as soon as Jonathan gets to heaven he tries to find his way back. And so would you, if heaven consisted not of milk and honey but trees overripe with musical virgin fruit, camel caravans drawing illegible maps in the sand with their hooves, and a valley of nails in which a snake— instead of the Prophet — offers to be your guide. Having come to some unspeakable realization, exhausted, Jonathan gives up and begins his commentary, at once to explain and atone: “I never entered into the Valley of Nails not even as unshod as I was, and because I never entered into the Valley of Nails between the Two Mountains that might have been clouds after all I never had my Salaam answered, neither did I then truly seek the man named Mohammed […] When it came to the ultimate sacrifice, I demurred. When pain entered into the world, my dream exited, flying. When a single choice was offered me I chose another.” Here the book turns to exegesis and metaphor, Hafftka’s paintings growing darker and wilder as the novel grows tighter and clearer, more humbled, more quiet—as if now it knows what it means to say, and what it means to say it: “[…] I cleave to this identity for and only for the memory—mine—of my Aba and the Queen. For them how I loved them. And for the expectations they once had for my own memory. Expectations becoming love in their ripening. A memory to be had by others. Becoming. Others I never made in an image I felt becoming the world.”
Like the doomed atmosphere of Prague’s old Jewish Quarter in Paul Leppin’s short story collection Others’ Paradise, the very boundaries of existence at any stage are the subject of myth, and existential ambivalence a form of theology; life is a kind of prayer; and the Jew is a feverish metaphor that bears the brunt of evolution. Now that Leppin’s seedy and labyrinthine world is gone along with Leppin’s own peculiar syphilitic paranoia and the comfort of personal enemies, we are left — Cohen seems to imply — with a stranger and more relative doubt almost as sure as certainty, much as Jonathan is lost and knows he is lost in a heaven he can only intuit. In this utter awareness Cohen offers us perhaps a pure, holy regret for what seems lost forever, but lost only to us, he reminds—the survivors: as the heart of his book is an idea-as-doctrine he calls Maturing to Infinity, or growing ever and ever, a metamorphosis abandoned by theology and teleology both. (Though as Cohen, a writer so aware of etymology would appreciate, Jonathan’s lack of a telos, or end, simultaneously makes him teleos, or perfect—as horrifying as that perfection might be.) The victim is a sacrifice at once trapped and free in his eternal victimhood, forced to change unrecognized, uncounted, and unaccounted for, while at the same time mourned on earth, consecrated as a martyr, and remembered forever as the 10-year-old boy he no longer resembles or knows.
In this vision of endless change above and beyond tradition, however, we may recognize Cohen as Jonathan as an outsider in Israel, and also Cohen as an outsider among his own in America. A heaven of others: the poem not of militant secularism but individual doubt, agnosticism, or Agnon’s—gnosticism, as S.Y. Agnon, too, wrote of tradition amidst modernity and was influenced by German literature and reflected his heart’s philosophy in a necessarily new language; though in the untranslated epigram, Cohen chooses the Hebrew-language poet Saul Tchernichovsky as his shadow Virgil, and the poem “Levivot,” or “Pancakes,” which tells the story of a boy’s trajectory from unquestioning obedience and acceptance—the untranslatable egel melumad, literally “a learned calf” and also the taunt for a yeshiva student — to freedom and, consequently, sacrilege: “having no weapon in its hands/It will cleave to all its persecutors forbid.” Notice the double meaning of this English translation: cleave in the sense of to split and to separate, as well as to join together — “Cleave, which in American means both To rend and To adhere,” as Cohen does, in his faith and faithlessness, holiness and profanity. “In this heaven as in any heaven I am no longer a Jew. In this heaven as in any heaven I am no more a Jew than I’m not […] To be forever estranged, even amid your own congregation, and to be forever wandering, even within your own encampment, and only because they make me a stranger, and only because they make me a wanderer, they who would be I only if, I who would be they only why [. . .]”
It is poignant and profound to refract one’s religious doubt this way through a religious mirror, brave to structure an epic novella around religious terrorism in which belief interrogates itself, through its own manifestations, which is something like God seeing himself in the passing surface he has created. Cohen engages his own religion in the terms of that religion, in its own language, which he recreates using myths—like wind-up Schulzian toys—cast in Semitic-syncretic mold, bursting with contradiction. Foreshadowed by writers like Kafka and Bruno Schulz, and poets like Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, these myths are fashioned by Cohen out of the baffling vulgarity of modern life in order to make that life personal again and thus open to interpretation: bombs become seeded fruit and foliage a landscape of exploded nails; a pogrom joke in which a fictional shtetl dresses its animals in human clothes and returns to find it repopulated is turned into an allegory for the state of Israel, with Ray-Ban sunglasses. Though we may be far from home, tragedy is never far from humor. Like Beckett, after whose beat much of the rhythm is marching, Cohen manages to be serious and wry at the same time, ironic and sincere: “Remember that the dead cannot sacrifice. Never again! And, too, that it is not for the living to judge the sacrifices they are bound to make […]” Never again is the slogan of Holocaust remembrance, the refrain of Yom Hazikaron, or the official Israeli Day of Remembrance, on which the last page records this book to have been finished.
Indeed, Cohen’s Israel is in part a Jewish literary graveyard: besides Tchernichovsky Street, there is Antschel’s Funeral Home—Antschel being the birth name of Paul Celan, author of the funereal Todesfuge—and references to Kafka, Haim Nahman Bialik, and a selection of Jewish religious sources from the Old Testament to folklore and legend abound. Still, Cohen finds room for Quranic exegetes, Muslim myths of the afterlife — the Jews become pigs as they ascend to heaven—and the composer Richard Barrett, who has set Celan’s poem “von hinter dem Schmerz” to music. Not quite the Western Lands, Cohen discovers Bialik’s desert, Emanuel Swedenborg’s heaven — and also Swedenborg’s desert, Bialik’s heaven — which is to say the book draws its language from the most expressive of Hebrew poetry and baroque Swedish religious philosophy to create in fiction a personal mythology, always attentive, always delimiting and defining, always unorthodox, but so steeped in its traditions that it reads as modern and classic as, say, Kafka’s account in Amerika of America. Only whereas Kafka wrote of one place he had never seen, Cohen, an American Jew, writes of two—making Israel foreign to Israel and heaven foreign to all except those with an intimate knowledge of German poetry, Hebrew scripture via the King James Bible, and 14th-century Muslim religious tracts, in the hope of bringing these loci to light anew and writing intelligently about subjects so familiar to us, at all. (It would be interesting to know, for example, how this book about latter-day terrorism might be received in Israel, where Cohen, though Jewish, would certainly be seen as an outsider in a local debate.) After the intimate and bittersweet homecoming of the virtuoso Laster’s showbiz Yiddish in his first novel, Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, in which the aforementioned violin prodigy improvises a novel about his friend—the missing composer, survivor, and misanthrope Schneidermann—from the stage of Carnegie Hall as his cadenza, or solo, Cohen explored his other roots: the Europe and South Jersey of his immediate family, and the unsolved mysteries of the Hebrew alphabet (Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed, again with Hafftka). While both books were departures from his modest first collection of stories, The Quorum, here, in his latest novel, linguistic and symbolic estrangement become a means to enlightenment — a ladder rather than a path, which, once climbed, leads to the dream of a dream, isolating the past, and epitomizing the present. The voice of reportage we trust to guide us through the Paradiso is even more guileless and haunting here, more alive in the memory of an unsuspecting boy, and so therefore more revealing of everything holy and unholy which we hold dear, despite: life, as Stanley Elkin says — death’s alternative.
And yet if A Heaven of Others is Cohen’s most political and topical book, it is also his best effort at pure storytelling, a tale as instructive as it is tall, an allusive novella in the voice of a poem with the power and richness of a full novel—and not the kind with a lot of dialogue in it. Like a sign upon the hand and between the eyes, Jonathan’s post-mortem account of his “Adventures in & Reflections on the Muslim Heaven” serves to remind us of what literature was once like before it was cast out of an amateur’s Eden and banished forever into the marketplace: a commentary, that is, in conversation with other literature, about their mutual meditations on the original Word — a dialogue in the form of a confession less flagellating than the famous self-interrogations of St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo. One of the great joys of this book, and one of its fortunes, is the transparency of its influences, the legibility of its inspiration. As the story of an individual in the modern world and beyond, the book eschews politics for a skeptical ethics based less in an abstract humanism than in the personal desire to choose the face by which society knows us: The only hope we can have in a world in which our very names make us targets is the hope of free expression, in word and deed; and as the state is only a continuous ruin, memory is the property of the one who remembers — though other victims be lost to television and forgotten by the world.
Perhaps nothing written since Kafka quite conveys the arbitrary cruelty and absurdity of a world such as this in the most proximate human terms, and the inner sense, or intuition, of a soul that mediates between. In fact, now that so much Jewish literature has been written and rewritten again in English, now that we have so many authors and classics, it is all the more rare and inspiring that Cohen, scandalously overlooked in America, especially by the Jewish literary community — the novel is timestamped almost four years ago, in 2004 — continues to delve deeper and further with each book into an inherited terrain while making of that holy ground these beautifully uncharted territories with their own maps and legends. (It did not come as a surprise that, according to his website, Cohen has just finished an 800-page novel about the last Jew on earth, called, blasphemously: Graven Imaginings.) “How did I get here, if I am still an I” Jonathan asks in the opening sentence, and is mocked in a kind of Yiddish by the narrator, who is himself: “He got here how he got here.” At once terrifying and singular and singularly important, A Heaven of Others repeats and channels the echo of that initial question, forcing us to see ourselves between destinies, between politics and political persuasions, and between answers themselves, to ask in fact who and what we really are: how did we get here, that is, if we are to remain an I?" - Daniel Elkind

"Dan Elkind: 'A Heaven of Others' is a book about life, the afterlife, and the spiritual identity or soul that mediates between. Your idea of Jonathan maturing even after his murder — “maturing to infinity,” as you put it, and so becoming in heaven a person whose wisdom and insight have soared beyond anything earthly — seems to entail an entire philosophy. Even in heaven he is an individual, beyond what you’ve called, elsewhere, “the consolation of cult.” How easy is it to break free of that “consolation” today, and how do you think such cultural elopements are viewed by mainstream society?
Joshua Cohen: Blown up in a suicide bombing, Jonathan transcends Judaism with relative ease: He dies. Those who attempt to reposition themselves with regard to the religious or political identity they’re born into, and to do so without being killed, have it more difficult. Martyrdom is reductive; the daily exigencies are far more complex.
Children of Jonathan’s age, especially boys, are always told: “Just wait until you’re grown,” “You’ll mature.” As if humanity might age to a biological wisdom, or soundness of judgment — the “mainstream,” you’ve called it, which doesn’t exist. The section entitled “Maturing to Infinity” posits such a process, but infinitely, eternally: “In heaven maturation is unending. Maturation is ripening not to rot but to riper.” On one rung of the ladder, we’ll shed our prejudices; on another, religion. This cosmology is ridiculous, of course. But it does suggest that religion has an element of childishness to it. God will always be a negligent parent.
As an American Jew, it must have taken some time to convince yourself that you’re qualified to write about Israeli culture in the era of terrorism, that you can follow an Israeli boy to the Muslim heaven and beyond. Given the irreverence of your literary imagination, how do you think Israelis will receive this book? What does your American perspective consist of?
- What qualified me to write about Israel was that I wanted to; it took no time to convince myself. The only reservation I had was about heaven: I wanted to write about the Jewish heaven, but did not feel qualified because I did not and do not believe in “it,” though I should. Swedenborg mapped the Christian heaven. The Muslim heaven features prominently in the Quran, Arabic poetries and Hadith. The Jewish heaven, though, is still a mystery; it’s mystic. Jews believe in olam haba — literally, “the world to come,” which is, accurately, this world if and when messianically perfected, and not “the next world,” or any other world, for that matter, past or future.
How did I reconcile myself? I found, strangely, I had no reservations writing about the Jewish heaven under the guise of a Muslim heaven — in the mirror of A Heaven of Others. As for how Israelis will receive this book, I don’t know, as there hasn’t yet been a translation. My American perspective, as you put it, consists of being indulged in my irreverence, only and entirely.
One thing that discerning readers will notice is how much other literature is referenced or woven into “A Heaven of Others,” like into the rest of your work. I’m thinking of Harold Brodkey, Edward Dahlberg or Gershom Scholem in “Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed,” or Saul Bellow in “Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto.” Do you see yourself as a custodian of literature, especially of Jewish literature? How do you view this kind of remaking and interpretation at a time when most readers don’t even know the literature you’re coming from?
- A Heaven of Others hosts references to the works of poet friends Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs; S.Y. Agnon; Saul Tchernichovsky; the Quran, of course; the Books of Isaiah and Genesis; Marco Polo’s Travels; Ibn Kathir (1301-1373, a Quranic exegete and historian); Abu al-Ma’arRi (973-1057, “the Eastern Lucretius,” who reviled religion), and a handful of others. I do not see myself as a custodian, though: The spirit in which I invoke these texts — many of which are from traditions other than my own — is not custodial. An interest in the archival is foolishness; the records room holds no allure: These texts are alive to me; they are, in every way, my life.
Your taste is especially influenced by European literature, though the heart of your expressiveness is American — I mean improvisatory, inclusive, unpretentious. Why do you think American literature has become so isolated from the rest of the world, so self-reflexive, to the point of developing almost its own arbitrary rules of what can and can’t be done on the blank page? Why do you think it avoids big ideas and themes in favor of the mundane? Why this detachment and half-adherence to stories of quotidian experience?
- The answer is Karl Marx’s. Money, which has become everyone’s jealous God. We oversell and we underestimate. If we were as insipid as most of the television programming, movies and books made by us and for us, we would be dead. Our civilization would cease to exist.
American literature isn’t the worst of all possible literatures, though. Most literature everywhere and of every time is bad. This is a dangerous reality — especially for someone who makes his living as a book critic, and so sometimes has to praise or damn disproportionately, or against the standard, if only to keep working and sane.
“A Heaven of Others” is your fourth book of fiction. How do you see it in relation to your other books?
- They’re all the same book, essentially: the book before the book — in the style of the Quran, which was said to have been written in heaven in its entirety, before being given down to Muhammad... As for my own chronology, there’s a progression, or improvement, a complicated one: The Quorum, published first (2005), was written when I was 21. Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto was begun soon after, but was interrupted for the writing of “A Heaven of Others,” which was finished in summer 2004. Cadenza, finished in 2006, was published in 2007, as was my book about the Hebrew alphabet: Aleph-Bet: An Alphabet for the Perplexed, written in two weeks, over last Passover. It took three years to find a publisher for A Heaven of Others. One agent wanted no virgins. Another agent wanted the boy to be rewritten as, to quote from his e-mail, “a handsome young Israeli army commander.” One prospective publisher said if I depicted Muhammad, I’d be killed in a suicide bombing myself. I don’t think any book of mine will ever come as close to pure fantasy as A Heaven of Others. I’ll never again set a book in a world, or after-world, in which it’s impossible to buy a cup of coffee, or take an undisturbed afternoon nap." - Interview with Dan Elkind

Joshua Cohen, Cadenza for the Scneidermann Violin Concerto (Fugue Press, 2006)

"This brilliant first novel is a portrait of an artist at the end of an art form. The elderly Jewish-Hungarian composer Schneidermann, who survived a musical education, survived the war, survived Europe, survived the neglect of all his music, finally and suddenly vanishes during a movie matinee on the Upper West Side of New York.
The novel begins with Schneidermann's friend--his last friend, his only friend--the violin virtuoso Laster, onstage at Carnegie Hall. He has finished playing the first movement of Schneidermann's last composition, his Violin Concerto. At this point he is supposed to begin his cadenza... his solo. Instead, he drops his instrument and lifts his voice, delivering the text of this novel unto the audience, held captive through night into morning only by dint of the spiel.
In its obsessions, its black humor, and its depth of multiple cultures, Laster's voice is a final great unwanted gift from the old world to the new. Somehow, at age 25, Cohen has created a requiem for high culture that in its disgusted wisdom, its layers of historical and cultural references, would seem to have come from a man of 90 - except for the ruthless and hilarious energy of its gaze."

"Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto is a wild, wide-ranging, freewheeling and ultimately lonely work that speaks to the most crucial aspirations of literary fiction's much-maligned "experimental" genre... What distinguishes Cadenza from postmodern irony is the genuine compassion an observer will feel for Laster, despite his insistance on being both instrument and executor of his own destruction.... The impression of his gaze is as unavoidable and inevitable as the tragedy awaiting his cadenza's finale." - Miles Newbold Clark

"It's no accident that Joshua Cohen's debut novel, Cadenza for the Schneidermann Violin Concerto, comes packaged in a guise of sheet music so exact that it will cause musicians to do double-takes, wondering why they've never heard of this Schneidermann fellow. Cohen himself delivers the performance within, a sprawling 380-page verbal onslaught, all of which purports to be occurring on-stage at Carnegie Hall over a single night. Readers... will find themselves amply rewarded - dazzled by Cohen's language, his knowledge of music and history, and most of all the sheer chutzpah of his prose.
In lieu of an unbroken dream, what we get is akin to the restless, late-night perambulations of an insomniac sifting through his life, the back-and-forth motion of text across the page recalling a violinist's bowing... The character of Schneidermann is inherently fascinating, worthy of this epic treatment: steeped in the knowledge of music and philosophy, he...holds forth on history, music, philosophy, theology, art, Jewishness, and the Holocaust. The book consists largely of a sustained, erudite set of free-associations on, for instance, the difficulty of writing about music, what it means to be Jewish, what makes some art transcendent versus mediocre, and the role of the individual in directing the arrow of history.... Cohen baldly exposes warts, rendering characters who are sympathetic yet flawed. Both main characters have a tragic dimension, but it is Laster who ultimately cuts the most tragic figure: six-times over a failure as a husband, estranged from each of his children, and left in the end without even his erstwhile companion.
Cohen's book sometimes reminds one of Beckett's trilogy in its comic sensibility, its embracing of the lowly and bodily, and the implication that speaking is fundamentally a way of holding the abyss at bay. What sets Cohen's book apart from such forbears is how wonderfully, deliriously steeped it is in the world of music. The book teems with musical allusions and puns, with its descriptions of "flat daughters [and] a sharp mother," its reflections on Beethoven's "mania for motivic expansion," and even a device as simple as replacing "shhhhh" with "pppppppppp." It's not all puns, though. Cohen's own writing is best characterized as musical... grappling with its weighty themes in language that soars with a virtuoso's touch and intensity." - Tim Horvath

"Joshua Cohen has, at first glance, both challenged himself to the astonishingly difficult task of entirely narrator-driven storytelling and formatted his nostalgic novel to be innovative and forcibly paced to the internal metronome of its narrator. This novel, the first by Cohen, opens in a seeming cirque de cérébrale address of a Carnegie Hall audience by a virtuoso violinist, Laster, having just played the final composition of his friend, composer Schneidermann. This near-manic oration delivers a portrait of Schneidermann’s music, frustrations, and nature, while, initially, Laster offers very little information about himself.
Such a lack of concrete information positions Laster to drone on as little more than an expository pundit, as this is the novel -- the speaking Laster does about Schneidermann before the Carnegie Hall audience. While such a format could prove disastrous in lesser writing, it delivers a freshness and originality while its primary focus is on the classical music world, composers, and personal hardship.
Within this fast-paced novel, the language conveys a sense of nostalgia, despite cleverly infused modern references. It is challenging to adjust to the initial rhythm of the writing, as it is fast-paced and stuffed with cultural, musical, operatic and even medical references, especially armed with such little information about the speaker himself. In short, such care is given to not give the sense that Laster is purely a bearer of exposition, that at first anyway, the story feels stagnant and stuck. So much so, that it would be easy to feel uninvested initially, as it becomes almost bothersome just how little information is available in this nonstop, unfocused dialogue with a manic episodic flavor.
And, then, quite suddenly, but at a rather unpinpointable moment, you become invested. Perhaps it is Cohen’s excellent command of vocabulary, which becomes impressive, as the dialogue continues, that such frenetic storytelling can take place without any repetition of words, even thoughts. Cohen doesn’t care much about structural, grammatical, or usage rules, but only because he clearly knows them all well enough to break, bend, and reconstruct them on his own terms.
Slowly, tiny threads of the Holocaust and whispers of mid-20th century American anti-Semitism slip in and slide between words and suddenly, quite suddenly, in fact, the notion arises that if poor Laster should stop talking, should slow his anxious speaking pace for even a moment, his memories might prove too painful, his burden too much, and all of his thoughts would become too jumbled for him to even process. Somehow, Cohen makes the reader feel a sense of responsibility toward his characters. It becomes so glaringly obvious that a beautifully tragic story has sprung up and unfolded and you are engrossed and cannot bear to let Laster suffer. Without realizing a metamorphosis at all, the readers suddenly find themselves responsible for this pained and animated narrator.
Cohen’s voice is an intelligent and thoughtful one, though, unfortunately, not terribly unique. But that doesn’t matter much, as he delivers such a heartbreaking story which speaks to both European-American Jewishness and to broader themes of creative frustration, nostalgia, and quietly contained grief. What feels foreign initially becomes endearing once initiated. Cohen tackles a lofty format aspiration with wit and humor and, in the end, executes all the elements extremely well. " - Amy Güth

"So he, Cohen, writing with amazing energy but less like the twentysomething he is than a crotchety octogenarian on a month-long meth binge, has him, Laster, the virtuoso violinist, protégé, financial supporter, and "performing monkey" for him, Schneidermann, the brilliant but obscure composer, supposed to perform the cadenza, launch instead into a 300-page verbal improvisational fusillade without so much as a single inhalation or rest beat (15 hours! So maybe I should read his short story collection, The Quorum, instead!), not so much a story as "talking, eulogizing, ranting, sermonizing" about his, Laster's, but more so his, Schneidermann's, life but more so a cultural/political/musical/religious/historical consideration of the entire 20th century and the end of classical culture from a Hungarian/German/Jewish/New York perspective. He, Cohen, will drive most readers away screaming "Oy! Too much is enough!" but they, the readers who stick around, will be delighted, if exhausted, which is why you, most public and academic librarians, should buy this, Cohen's, book, which might just become a cult classic." - Jim Dwyer

Joshua Cohen, The Quorum (Twisted Spoon Press, 2005)

"Because we shouldn't believe in nations, because we have forsaken our traditions or our traditions have forsaken us, because only individuals matter to those who happen to be one ... because everyone has their own voice and we're all speaking at once, connected through a disconnect and yet still insisting on our fundamental differences, that we're special, marked by virtue of our sheer existence... Because of all these paradoxes — screaming into each other through any ear and enacting a love-death in the gray middle — how can we truly expect to listen when we want only to be heard? But what is there to say that hasn't already been ignored? — these are some of the ideas that this book does not address.
Joshua Cohen has performed in-depth investigations into mirrors and navels to return with The Quorum, his first collection of short fiction. A set of ten stories, a set of dreams, and a long monologue, these are all first-person rants given over by the somehow alienated, individuals seeking only a sympathetic hearing, all dealing with identity and religion as well as occupied with technical ideas of reliable narration and the structure of the mind's ear. From a review of a book about the Holocaust that's six-million blank pages to a suicide note from a young university student, from a letter to home outlining an economy based on hair to a eulogy for a poem, from a story narrated by three-hundred concubines to the title story about a group of people who interchange appearances, habits, proclivities and talents, The Quorum is a sensitive and inevitably absurd take on the individual's lifelong quest to get someone, anyone, to listen."

"Cohen writes with a purpose and clarity that belies his youth, but with all the ferocious energy of inexperience... In this collection, [he] employs the destabilizing irony and complexity of the best innovative writing to reach toward [...] the "perpetual": the idea that some consistent, underlying truth does, or should, exist." — Review of Contemporary Fiction

"The blasphemous Hegelian synthesis Cohen's continually undertaking puts the balm of his irrepressible lyricism on the ancestral wound. It's difficult, as the writer-narrators often admit, not to pile on the prose bandages too thick." — Village Voice

"Cohen is probably the most serious non-Czech writer to come out of Prague in recent years. When he wasn't stirring up trouble at the Prague Pill (RIP), he was stirring up dust at home, in his tiny basement flat in Old Town, working deep into the night like the demented alchemists who came before him. I call him an alchemist because that's what he does in his work—he takes those shitty inevitable bits from the world around him and turns them into golden nuggets of metaphysical brilliance." - Think Again



"A few weeks ago, the literature blog HTMLGiant hosted a heated discussion about whether or not difficult modernist novels like James Joyce’s Ulysses might find a publisher in today’s literary marketplace. Of the hundreds of responses to the thread and its follow-ups, the one that interested me most was Justin Taylor’s assertion that modernism’s true heir was born in 1980 in southern New Jersey, lived in Brighton Beach, and was in the midst of a period of extraordinary productivity despite an absolute lack of any significant critical attention. His name was Joshua Cohen.
I was skeptical, but the next day I ordered a copy of A Heaven of Others, Joshua Cohen’s fourth book, published by tiny Starcherone Books of Buffalo, New York. It arrived shrink-wrapped in a brown box, a slim volume with a monochromatic cover featuring a stylishly crude pencil and ink drawing of a boy hunched over himself and looking at his feet.
Neither the cover nor the size of the book signaled ambition. The frontispiece, however, did, announcing the book’s full and expanded title—A Heaven of Others, Being the True Account of a Jewish Boy, Jonathan Schwarzstein of Tchernichovsky Street, Jerusalem, and His Post-Mortem Adventures in, & Reflections on, the Muslim Heaven—and then: as Said to Me and Said through Me, by an Angel of the One True God, Revealed to Me at Night, as if in a Dream, thus revealing before reaching the epigraphs (one in Hebrew, one in German) or the dedication (which invokes Czechoslovakia, Nazism, Sovietism, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Israel, and the Czech Republic) a novel filtered through three points of view (a dead boy, an angel, and an author who communes with the Divine while sleeping), two competing cosmologies of the afterlife (or, for that matter, the present life), and the single most transgressive narrative position in literature with regard to religion since the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.
I devoured the book in a single sitting, and then I read it four more times in the weeks that followed. Each reading opened up new riches the previous reading had passed over. I pitched several magazines a review of the book or a feature article on Joshua Cohen, hoping to broadcast my enthusiasm, but there was little reciprocated enthusiasm for a book by an unknown young writer, already more than a year old, published by a house unfamiliar even to readers as catholic in their tastes as me. So I asked Justin Taylor, the only other person I knew to have read the book (and a person, mind you, I’ve never met in person), to join me in a public conversation meant to provoke you the reader to find the book and give it a couple of hours of your life, with the expectation that the book’s pleasures will make you similarly evangelical on the subject of Joshua Cohen, and that with time the book will find the audience it deserves.— Kyle Minor
Minor: When you introduced me to the work of Joshua Cohen, you said, “It’s like you go your whole life thinking that Beckett was the true Last Modernist, and then this guy from New Jersey shows up . . .”
Taylor: Yep. Though I probably should have said last true Modernist. But in either case.
It’s a question of scope, I think. And something like a sense of the Imperative. You read Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Pound, etc.— you get that sense.
Minor: Reading A Heaven of Others, I felt something similar— there was that same kind of shock one gets when entering into certain works of Faulkner or Woolf or Joyce, where you simultaneously are thrilled and a little intimidated by the surface, but it doesn’t take long to just fall into it, since the text is teaching you how to read the text. It’s been so long since I’ve discovered a book like that, it feels new, but then one realizes that it’s also old-fashioned, and mourns that it’s old-fashioned.
Taylor: Yeah, Faulkner. That’s probably a better example, since we’re not talking about collage, quotation, or any of the other technical aspects of Modernism. Faulkner is a really solid touchstone, because his process isn’t related to theirs, but he’s still so clearly in the vein.
This idea of a text that teaches you how to read it, I think, is key.
Minor: Because we are, with Cohen, dealing with a special attention to a consciousness that requires a highish diction to take in all the wonders the character must take in. In Faulkner’s case we’re talking the lyricism provoked by Mississippi, but in the case of this book, we’re talking a Jewish kid in a Muslim heaven.
Taylor: Right. And of course the inflections and dialect and manifest content are derived from the character—Jonathan being a little Jewish boy who lives (lived) in Jerusalem.
But the style of delivery, the form of the book, is something else again. The vastness—the sense of limitless possibility, that every thought gets thunk through every possible vicissitude—that’s the form of Infinity, which is to say: Heaven, where the book is set.
Minor: One way the reader is reminded of Beckett at the level of language is in the way that Cohen turns abstractions over and over in order to get at ever more complicated abstract responses to what surrounds him. So at story’s beginning, we get sentences like: “How did I get here, if I am still an I? If how and where is here? can still be asked and why?” And once the reader wraps his head around what the character is trying to wrap his head around, which is that a suicide bomber wandered into his parents’ shoe store and blew a hole in his gut, and now he’s the subject of an unexplainable cosmic mix-up that calls into question not only his own previous understanding of the world, but also the opposing understanding of the world that prompted the shoe store bombing in the first place, the reader feels there may be no other way into understanding than such questions layered upon questions.
Taylor: That beginning seems highly reminiscent of The Unnameable. But there’s a weird tension between that and what he tells you in the frontispiece. ”...As Said to Me and Said through Me... Revealed to Me at Night as if in a Dream.” It’s a very retro move to stick that on the front of your book. I think even when Poe did it for The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym it was kind of old-school. And there’s a shade of satire in that, but not as much as you might at first suspect. Cohen’s alluding to The Pilgrim’s Progress, I think. Which is actually blackly funny, when you think about it, that a classic Puritan quest-narrative should be the proper “form” for the relation of a story about a mixup between Jewish and Muslim spiritual realms. Questions on questions, like you said.
Minor: Pilgrim’s Progress isn’t all. Even a reader as slow to allusion as me notices right away the play with sources including the Qur’an, the Book of Isaiah, Swedenborg, Milton, Dante, various Jewish mysticisms, etc. Even as the Islamic and the Jewish are foregrounded, it’s the bigger questions of gods and heavens and human traffic with goodness and badness and the divine that are being called into question, and the reader wonders if what we have here might in some sense be a repudiation of childhood impositions of surety, or at least a path toward a possible repudiation.
Taylor: But that’s the great thing about this book—about great books in general, right? They just keep Giving.
Minor: And here—more great books stuff—we have the particularities of the character’s (and dare we say the writer’s) preoccupations standing in for the broader preoccupations common to readers drawn to literature
Taylor: There’s something much bigger than any one God’s little red book at stake here. All those would-be master texts are drawn into the sphere of this book’s universe, rather than the book’s being-drawn towards them—like in the Progress, say. I like that idea of the repudiation of certainty. Because religious conflict is always, at heart, a question of competing and incompatible certainties. And this book isn’t sure of Anything. Every notion seems to contain its own inverse, practically. The world of Heaven is in total flux. Even the narrative voice is dynamic and shifting. Who is speaking? Jonathan? Cohen-the-narrator? the Angel talking to/through Cohen?
Minor: Given these ends, one isn’t surprised that Cohen is bold in his appropriations, and a writer as smart as the one that made this book would certainly have to know that what he has waded out into is the vast boggy quagmire of identity politics and the questions about which writers from which groups have the right to which voices and which narrative positions. One thing I love about this book is that Cohen assumes human beings are human beings, and that—this old Greek idea—I am human, and therefore whatever is human is not foreign to me (including, here, the heaven humans will or won’t populate).
Taylor: Yes, and it’s weird how revolutionary such an assumption is—that human beings are human beings. We need to be reminded of that, it seems, time and again, because so much of religion is devoted to convincing us otherwise. You have to be a real nihilist to become a suicide bomber—even if you are a True Believer in your version of Heaven, you are going to hope that that place is ethereal, non-physical, etc. That’s what Cohen denies most vehemently in this book. It’s one of the few certainties in the text, I think. That despite its morphic and hallucinatory nature, Heaven is textural, physical, real.
Minor: It’s something I have especially appreciated in the work of American writers who are Jewish, notably Philip Roth, whose career trajectory seems largely a pursuit after maximum narrative freedom, and whose best work has been criticized for the very underpinnings that, it seems to me, delivers him his strengths. Cohen seems plenty aware that all this is on the table. I dug up an interview he did concerning A Heaven of Others with The Jewish Daily Forward, for which he writes criticism. He says, in part:
What qualified me to write about Israel was that I wanted to; it took no time to convince myself. The only reservation I had was about heaven: I wanted to write about the Jewish heaven, but did not feel qualified because I did not and do not believe in “it,” though I should. Swedenborg mapped the Christian heaven. The Muslim heaven features prominently in the Quran, Arabic poetries and Hadith. The Jewish heaven, though, is still a mystery; it’s mystic. Jews believe in olam haba — literally, “the world to come,” which is, accurately, this world if and when messianically perfected, and not “the next world,” or any other world, for that matter, past or future. How did I reconcile myself? I found, strangely, I had no reservations writing about the Jewish heaven under the guise of a Muslim heaven — in the mirror of A Heaven of Others. As for how Israelis will receive this book, I don’t know, as there hasn’t yet been a translation. My American perspective, as you put it, consists of being indulged in my irreverence, only and entirely.
Taylor: Hah, that’s a great line at the end, there. Yeah, the easy (lazy) way to read this book or talk about it is “look at the ballsy Jew kicking the Muslim hornets’ nest.” I don’t know much about how it was reviewed (if it was reviewed) but I can imagine him having to deal with a lot of that. And in a way, the sheer physicality of this Heaven seems to me very Jewish- it embodies what he is talking about. His “next world” essentially is a new version of “this world.” But I’m curious about what you said about Roth. I wondered what qualities you were talking about.
Minor: I’m sure the idea of the ballsy Jew kicking the hornets’ nest has something to do with the fact that a book so ambitious and well-made was published by Starcherone Books rather than Alfred A. Knopf and that you and me are having this public conversation instead of David Remnick and James Wood. But the reader does sense choices that tilt toward restraint. For example, the great provocation would be to do portraiture of Mohammed (and literally, too, since the book is illustrated). This, Cohen chooses not to do.
Taylor: Well, because in the end it’s not a book about Muslims. It’s not about baiting some enemy culture. Not in the end–or the beginning. Or at all. It’s about finding the ultimate expression of the self always already contained in the most extreme conception possible of Otherness—in this case, Somebody Else’s Eternity. Jonathan gets there, and not only is it all About Him, in a way it all is him. (And parenthetically—I’m not sure if that explains why the book wasn’t published by Knopf. It’s an incredibly challenging text, for a lot of reasons, and I don’t know that it would have made any major house a lot of money. A National Book Award maybe, but money . . . ?)
Minor: What I meant, with regard to Roth, is that we see in his early work (as perhaps with Bellow’s) an obsessive engagement with James. Then, with Portnoy’s Complaint, he sheds the formal constraints of James for a dramatic monologue that springs from both the vernacular particular to Roth’s upbringing among Jews (but not exclusively) in Newark, and also from his protagonist’s straining against the cultural restraints imposed by the same people. Here he appropriates from his own origins in a way that he knows is likely to infuriate. Then, as he moves into the (to my taste) most appealing portion of his career, he expands his appropriations further outward. In American Pastoral (and the whole American trilogy), he stakes his claim to Americanness concurrent to everyone else’s Americanness by entering into stories of the other — the Swede, the Communists, the black man passing for a Jew at Athena College. And in Operation Shylock, he certainly tries on both sides of a debate about identity in Israel.
Taylor: Okay, now I see what you’re saying. Cohen’s from not too far from Newark—Atlantic City.
Minor: But it’s not the same New Jersey, either. Time has transformed it.
Taylor: I feel like A Heaven of Others is a book Nathan Zuckerman might have written while on a hot streak right after visiting Israel in The Counterlife, but then probably would have decided not to publish. It sounds like there’s an insult tucked in there, but if there is it’s not at Cohen—it’s at Zuckerman. Because for all its formal ingenuity and the profound intelligence of the narrative slash its author, A Heaven of Others is a very raw book. It’s an act of self-exposure, in many ways, and it feels like it was written in a hurry, by someone who had to either take enough speed to get it all out in time or else take enough morphine to never feel anything ever again. Like that was a decision Cohen had to make. And I’m speaking figuratively, but only semi-figuratively. I could ask him sometime, if it really was a choice between self-exposure and self-immolation.
Minor: This seems most apparent at the places where the book seems to really be showing its seams, such as the places where we break away from the prose for poetic interludes that certainly the author would have been advised to cut but chose not to cut.
Taylor: Yeah, I’ve complained to him about those, actually. I think they’re the book’s weakest link. Not because they’re not smart and interesting and blah blah blah, but because they’re such a clear break from the central conceit of the book.
Minor: Blah blah blah being, interestingly, a phrase the book is fond of.
Taylor: Hehe, right.
Minor: One reason I wanted to have this conversation is that I can’t see that there is a cultural apparatus for what seems to me to be an important book, but from a tiny press, to enter into whatever is left of the broader cultural conversation about literature. Yet we need one. A Heaven of Others is nothing if not timely, but I can’t foresee a Fresh Air conversation with Terry Gross anytime soon. In the old days, so far as I can tell from reading literary biography, sometimes a champion would come along and pick up, say, Virginia Woolf’s self-published novel, and bring it to popular attention. But here Cohen is again at a disadvantage, as he doesn’t seem to belong to any cohort of any real power the way Woolf did. It raises some interesting questions about the trajectory of challenging and ambitious literature, and, to me (and I would imagine to Cohen), it instigates some despair.
Taylor: I think “some despair” is probably putting it mildly, but yes, it’s a huge problem for the culture. Part of it, I think, is just the pace of things in contemporary American life. The biggest problem this book faces today is not that it’s hard, or from a small press. It’s that it’s over a year old. The whole culture of book reviewing—what remains of it—is oriented around the demands of the marketplace. New books are reviewed, typically with a buy/don’t buy frame of reference, and then that’s it. The New York Times reviews your book the week—maybe month—it comes out, or else they don’t, period. Some venues like the New York Review of Books or the London Review of Books take a slightly longer view, but not much. If Heaven got bought tomorrow by Vintage for a re-issue, it could get reviewed, but the story wouldn’t be Cultural Conversation, or even Great Book. It would be a marketing story—Indie Author Gets Re-Packaged by Big Press.
Minor: On the other hand, any in-print book (or almost any out-of-print book) is more readily available than any time in history, thanks to the Internet and, yes, Amazon.com. I don’t imagine that our yammering will inspire a run on the available copies, but what if it did? Certainly it would make for a story of the sort feeds my fading romanticism about literary culture, and certainly if word got out, it might set the stage for a more critically receptive mood for Cohen’s next novel, Witz, forthcoming from the Dalkey Archive Press. I’m told it’s a barn-burner—the last Jew on earth, living in Joisey. Maybe this is fantasy, or maybe today we can imagine it and speak it into being.
Taylor: And that’s the great paradox of our time—the August cultural organs are either gone or have become unresponsive to the real needs of the culture right now. (At least, according to my and your definition of those needs. I’m sure some people are very satisfied with how current lit-culture functions, and the mere fact that I/we disagree doesn’t make them necessarily wrong.)
But there’s this whole new apparatus developing to take its place. Such as—not to get too self- referential or congratulatory—the websites we both write for. HTMLGiant and The Rumpus are part of a new way of talking about books that is emerging, and rapidly establishing itself as a fixture in the culture. If the contraction of publishing means that A Heaven of Others is published out of Buffalo instead of midtown, in an edition 1/100th the size it ought to be in, the Internet means that we can directly reach the thousand or so people who want a copy of that book, and we can do it for free. We can tell them it’s there, and then they can buy it. We don’t need to make a case for “timeliness,” only for value. But what’s even more important is that we have a space to have these kinds of conversations about the value of art. I hope Josh sells a lot of books, but in the end, I’m not his publicist and I’m not his girlfriend, so his sales don’t impact me in a very direct way, other than my being happy for him. His book is important to me because literature is important to me, and he’s doing some of the best work I know of in the medium I’ve devoted my life too." - Kyle Minor and Justin Taylor