Living in Hope and History by Nadine Gordimer

Persia, Khwaja Mu’in’ud-Din Chisti of India, Sheikh Muzaffer of Istanbul. He is also, surely, Zaabalawi, and brother of all the other wanderers who appear and disappear to tantalize the yearning for meaning and salvation in the streets of Mahfouz’s works, offering and withdrawing fragments of answer to the mystery of existence, and guidance of how to live it well. This one, when first he makes his appearance in the quarter of Cairo invented for Mahfouz’s notebooks, is heard to call out: ‘A stray one has been born, good fellows.’ The essence of this stray one’s teaching is in his response to the narrator, Everyman rather than Mahfouz, who gives as his claim to join the Sheikh’s Platonic cave of followers, ‘I have all but wearied of the world and wish to flee from it.’ The Sheikh says, ‘Love of the world is the core of our brotherhood and our enemy is flight.’
    One of the Sheikh’s adages is: ‘The nearest man comes to his Lord is when he is exercising his freedom correctly.’ Many of Mahfouz’s parables are of the intransigence of authority and the hopelessness of merely petitioning the powers of oppression. With the devastating ‘After You Come Out of Prison’ one can’t avoid comparison with Kafka, although I have tried to do so since Kafka is invoked to inflate the false profundity of any piece of whining against trivial frustrations. In answer to a journalist’s question, ‘What is the subject closest to your heart?’
    Mahfouz gave one of the rare responses in his own person: ‘Freedom. Freedom from colonization, freedom from the absolute rule of kings, basic human freedom in the context of society and family. These types of freedom follow one from the other.’ This love of freedom breathes from every line in this book. It is imbued with what his character Kamal has called ‘a struggle towards truth aiming at the good of mankind as a whole . . . life would be meaningless without that’ and with the tolerance Kamal’s friend Husayn has defined: ‘The Believer derives his love for these values from religion, while the free man loves them for themselves.’
    Whatever your personal hermeneutics, it is impossible to read Mahfouz’s work without gaining, with immense pleasure and in all gratitude, illumination through a quality that has come to be regarded as a quaint anachronism in modern existence, where information is believed to have taken its place. I pronounce with hesitation: Wisdom. Mahfouz has it. It dangles before us a hold on the mystery. Mahfouz is himself a Zaabalawi.
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1996

JOSEPH ROTH: LABYRINTH OF
EMPIRE AND EXILE

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    I approach writing about Joseph Roth’s work somewhat defensively. Pundits will say I have no right because I admit I have no German and cannot read it in the original. How could I deny this lack, a deafness to what must be the bass and treble of his use of language? But I believe I have understood him according to my time and background. A writer whose work lives must be always subject to such a process—that is what keeps the work alive.
    Strangely, while I have been writing this, the wheel of Karma—or historical consequence?—has brought Roth’s territory back to a re-enactment of the situation central to his work.
    In Roth we see a society—an empire—in which disparate nationalities are forced into political unity by an over-riding authority and its symbol: the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the personality of Emperor Franz Josef. There, the various grouped nationalities’ restless rebellion, the rise of socialismand fascism against royalism, led to Sarajevo and the First World War. After the Second World War the groups that had won autonomy were forced together again, if in a slightly different conglomerate, by another all-powerful authority and its symbol: the Communist bloc and the personality of Joseph