When I began reading Miriam Yevick’s A Testament for Ariela I realized that not only had she had an interesting life, but that she had considerable literary gifts as well. In this post I want to look at how she handles time. Testament is a memoir, not an autobiography. It is based on letters she began writing to Ariela when she was only four months old and concluded when she was three-and-a-half. Yevick does not organize events in chronological order. Her approach is, well, it’s not quite clear what it is. Let’s call it layered.
The book is organized into two sections:
- Part I: A Testament for Ariela
- Part II: Grandma’s Flight from the Nazis Relieved
First, I want to examine how she deals with the Seder halfway through the first section. Then I want to look the contrasting organization of Part II.
Three Seders, Three times
We’re in the section entitled, “Sorrow and Early Disorder,” which is, as I’ve said, about halfway through the book. Yevick opens the section with a direct address to young Ariela, “You were by my side last November when I planted the flower bulbs...” She works her way to talking about a Seder that was performed at her “grandparent’s villa in Scheveningen nearly sixty years ago.” At this point she’s well into that process. Notice the mixture of languages, English of course, but also phrases of Hebrew and of Yiddish.
After the meal we waited intensely for Elijah, the prophet, to enter through the open door and take a sip from the tall silver cup, reserved all year for him alone. I measured the wine’s surface: Had its level diminished, yes or no? I was not sure; I believed it had. I thrilled and trembled at the passing breath of this holy man, who would visit every Jewish family until time immemorial. We raised our cups and implored in full voice that he may rain his curses upon those who afflicted us with so much sorrow. And we sang the beautiful melody:
“Eliyahu Hanavi,
Eliyahu Hatishbi . . .”The seder moved on: “Who knows one? Who knows two?” Then one of my uncles gurgled the verses of the kid song in his unique way. We were sleepy, but staying awake was worth the effort, for the seder ended in a thumping crescendo with our family’s song of celebration:
“Wenn wet duss sein?”
(When will it be?)Grandfather asked the opening questions and the refrain, sung by all, was accompanied by a rhythmic banging on the table, which waxed louder and louder:
“Bimhayrah, Beyamenu!”
(Speedily and in our days.)
“Wer wet duss sein?”
(Who will it be?)
“Meshiach, tzidkenu.”
(The Messiah, the Holy One.)
“Wuss wet demuls sein?”
(What will there be then?)
“Yom gilu, yom ditsu, yom ritnu, yom khedvu,
Gilu, rinu, ditsu, chetvu,
Yuvoi Eleni, Yuvoi Eleni. . . “
(Days of rejoicing, of pleasure and of song of praise to our Holy One will come to me!)
“Leshanah habah be Yerushalaim!”
(Next year in Jerusalem!)We walked home inhaling the spring air filled with the scent of lilacs and hyacinths.
We walked home from our grandparents’ seder for the last time in April l940 in Antwerp, through one of the city’s broad alleys bordered with tall chestnut trees. We looked at the moonlit sky above the white and pink candle-like blossoms. Three weeks later we looked at the same sky to see airplanes bearing swastikas flying overhead.
“Let us see some more flowers, Grandma!”
Your little legs hurried on.You led me down the street pointing at flowering dogwood and cherry blossoms and picked up old acorns from the grass. The neighbors watched you benevolently as you crisscrossed their lawns in dance-like step. We exchanged our best wishes for the Passover and the upcoming Easter holiday. The phone rang as we returned home. It was Jackie, telling us to leave soon from our house in New Jersey to Manhattan, where my parents live, to be on time for the seder.
[Kindle Edition. Locations 764-781]
Notice how she comes back to the notional present. The Seder was her last one in Europe; she mentions seeing swastikas on planes flying overhead. And then she is in the present, with young Ariela talking to her. We then go to a Seder in the present, that is, Ariel’s youth. The seder begins:
And now the table is set and all is ready. He orders his grandparents to rest while they wait for all of us to arrive.
And here you are creeping under the seder table from your parents towards me, bringing all your belongings with you: your chick, your Haggadah, and your father’s afikomen which he has shown you how to steal. You sit on my lap and open the book:
“What is that?”
“Those are the pyramids, Ariela.”
“And that?”
“Those are the slaves, carrying blocks of stone for the King of Egypt.”
“Tell me more.”
“About what?”
“About Egypt and the pyramids.”
“The Jews had to work so very hard, carrying the blocks all day long to build those pyramids for the King, the Pharaoh. They slaved day and night, year after year. They wanted so much to leave and go home to their own country, to Canaan, to Palestine.”
Moses went to the King: “let my people go,” he said.
“No”, said the King, “I will not let your people go. They must work hard and build those pyramids.”
“Then I will turn all the water red as blood, so you cannot drink it.”And so I told you the story of all the plagues, and how Moses split the sea, and led the Jews through the desert to Canaan, and you traced the pictures of my old Haggadah with your finger, just like I had done over fifty-five years ago.
Opapa, your great-grandfather, is pounding the table and singing: “tralalalalala . . .” in a melody composed by my Uncle Pinchas more than half a century ago, the family’s beloved tune. You stand by his side and sing with him, moving your tongue in and out in “lalala’s,” as you have done with him since you were a year old. Now you dip and count the plagues with your full fist immersed in and then removed from the wine glass. The soup is served and you relish the matzo balls and demand another portion, to your great-grandmother’s delight.
[Kindle Edition. Location 801.]
In the present, Yevick is telling Ariela about the deep past, about the events on which the Passover story, and hence the Seder, is based. During the course of the seder Ariel’s great-grandfather (and thus Miriam’s grand-father) slumps in his chair and the men carry him to his bedroom, where he rests. Later he is taken to the hospital where he is operated on (we’re not told why) and recovers. That ends “Sorrow and Early Disorder.”
We now have a layering of three different times: the deep past in ancient Egypt, 1940 in Europe, and the present in America. I think that a close look at all of Part I we’ll see that this temporal layering is pervasive, mostly moving back and forth between Yevick’s early life in Europe and the United States and the present world in which young Ariela lives.
Part I has 15 sections. “Sorrow and Early Disorder” is the eighth of these, putting the seder at the structural center of Part I.
Time Regained
Part II, “Grandma’s Flight from the Nazis Relieved,” is quite different in character. It IS a narrative, one event after another, and it is not addressed to Ariela in any obvious way, nor does she appear in it in any way. The story is told in seven segments, from August 28, 1939, when the soldiers were first mobilized in the Hague, through to August 10, 1940, when the family lands in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Now let’s step back a moment and look at the final section of Part I, which is entitled “Fear.” It has a number of subsections, each with a heading. They are spread about in time, the first is in the present. Then we move back into the past with the stock market crash of 1929, then Hitler and the war, followed by the early years of Yevick’s marriage in America. And then, and then, it’s complicated, we move around in time. But here is how “Fear” ends:
Lucky still to have known the fear of not being able to finish this task and to have overcome it, I dedicate this book to you, my beloved granddaughter Ariela, and to those of your generation. Do not worry, Ariela; face the future without fear. Let your imagination fly and keep your feet on the ground. Greet life with joy: bike on the heather, roam through the dunes, hike along the ocean, climb mountains, dance among the tulips and kiss by the fountain! And if your grandmother is still alive, come and tell her all about it.
[Kindle Edition. Location 1433.]
Set that aside for a moment. We’ll be back.
Part II also has a postscript, however, with two parts:
- I. Becomings,
- II. A Speech to the Students, May 1, 1970
“Becomings” is the longest, and has 11 sections, which span her life from the age of 3 until she is 81, in 2005. Roughly, these sections start very short and get longer. It’s in this section that she talks about being a “disciple” (her term) of Bohm in Jan. of 1948, a year after she got her degree at MIT.
Truly, I became his disciple for the rest of my life. All my further work as well as my emotional development was molded and inspired by having known him.
She named her son after him. Bohm left America in 1951, but she continued to correspond with him. She developed her interest in holography during her correspondence with Bohm.
And then we have that concluding speech to students, which she delivered 1970, five years before she published on holographic logic. Here’s the second paragraph (of three) in that address:
Such a global knowledge can evoke that “holographic awareness” which transcends its interpretation in the mechanical language of recurrent programs. It “holds compact in one” that global vision which continuously reinterprets reality in terms of lived experience. Thus you will assert your superior humanity and do better than the computer.
That is the only time A Testament for Ariela uses the term “holographic” or any of its cognates, though holography was obvious very important in Yevick’s intellectual life. Here’s the final paragraph of the address to the students, and thus of the book:
The world is there for you to rethink and redo. The problems are as numerous as the number of your brains. Your brains are young and vigorous; they will rise to the occasion! For “There is nothing as powerful,” as Victor Hugo said, “as an idea whose time has come.”
Compare that with the concluding paragraph of Part I. The words are different, the first is more specific, but the mood is the same. Both look to the future:
...face the future without fear. Let your imagination fly and keep your feet on the ground.
For “There is nothing as powerful,” as Victor Hugo said, “as an idea whose time has come.”
What happened to time?
Roughly speaking, all events have been gathered up into a capacious present looking toward the future. Everything is gathered up in “holographic awareness” that “holds compact in one” a global vision.
Was Miriam Lipschutz Yevick a mystic?
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