Gabriel Moked: Farewell to a Literary Legend

Five years ago, I accompanied Gabriel Moked to assisted living. He was suffering from terrible pressure sores and screamed in pain as they undressed him. I tried to soften the blow, went to the nurse and said, “Do you know who this is? This is Gabriel Moked. He is an important editor and a professor of philosophy.” “No,” the nurse smiled, “he *was* a professor of philosophy.” And I thought how sad it was that the man who knew better than anyone how to appreciate such an existential, Kafkaesque response, so cruel, was the man suffering in the next room. Later he left assisted living. Who leaves assisted living? Only Gabriel Moked. He returned to the legendary apartment at Ben-Gurion and Dizengoff, where he continued to imagine for himself a decisive battle, a single newspaper column, a special issue of “Now” or the “Jerusalem Review,” a foreword, a translation, a scholarly book on the generation of statehood, one strong, right word that would defeat all the graphomaniacs and establish poetic justice on earth. Even when he lay in Internal Ward D at Ichilov, already sedated and ventilated, I swear I saw his mouth move as he muttered, “We will revive the ‘Jerusalem Review’! Ben-Shaul is not a bad poet at all! He deserves more recognition!” By chance I was there when he died. I signed the death certificate. And still I do not believe it. The mind cannot grasp it: the strongest man, the most alive man I knew, is no more. “Is there nothing to be done for him?” I begged the doctor. “He is 92,” he said in amazement at my astonishment.

This is not the place to recount his many merits, and his heavy, heavy obligations. He was a larger-than-life man, a superman in the sense Nietzsche meant it, a man who turned his life into a work of art.

He was born Gabriel Monbez. His ancestors were expelled from Spain, and he took great pride in some Monbez pirate from Portugal who traced his lineage back in the 16th century. While vacationing with his parents in a resort town, on the eve of the school year, the Luftwaffe began bombing their city, Warsaw. For years he hid in a closet with a Polish policeman who saved them. That was the formative experience of his life, reading books silently in the dark. A life in thoughts and dreams. He never left that closet. In his view there were always the bad and the good, there would be one final battle and the light would overpower the darkness, and it did not matter whether the darkness was a mediocre poet or Adolf Hitler. More than once he sang me in Polish a children’s song he had sung with Janusz Korczak, roughly translated: “We are the light, we are the candle, / even if we burn, they will not extinguish us.” “At least a hundred children stood there then, all holding candles,” he told me. “How many are left? Maybe two or three.” With the liquidation of the ghetto, his father, who was a doctor, insisted on staying behind to provide assistance to Mordechai Anielewicz’s rebellion headquarters. “I remember the last conversation with my father, in the snowy courtyard of the hospital in the ghetto. I asked my father, ‘Do you think there are Nazis and war even in the stars that sparkle in the sky at night?’ And he smiled, hugged me and kissed me before my mother and I left the ghetto. That was the last time I saw him.”

Mother and son fled here and there, barely escaping death, until the Red Army freed them. Until his dying day he remembered Stalin with gratitude and refused to apologize for it, in fact, he refused to apologize at all. When he was 12, they immigrated to Israel. “Just ten days after I arrived, the British imposed a curfew on Tel Aviv, in what was called the ‘Black Sabbath.’ I was then swinging on a hammock in the yard of the house, eating watermelon and reading ‘The Jewish War Against the Romans’ in Polish, while between my house and Hershele’s kiosk [where the Tamar juice stand stands today, as it happens, in the editor’s note] stood a British tank. Everyone wondered how I could remain calm in front of the tank, and I explained that compared with the Nazis, soldiers who approach a kiosk and politely ask for a glass of cold water are really a completely abnormal picnic.” At the Shalva Gymnasium he met his soul brother, David Avidan, who Hebraized his name to “Moked,” so that he would stand at the center of things. The two were members of Banki, the communist youth movement. Avidan emerged as a gifted writer of revolutionary poetry in the style of Mayakovsky, while Moked emerged as a brilliant political commissar, the author of especially cruel and amusing polemics. At age 17, this child, who until five years earlier had not spoken a word of Hebrew, was appointed deputy to Alexander Penn in the literary section of “Kol HaAm.” During the “drone night,” Gabriel called me and asked what Kafka’s first novel was. After I answered, I said, “Gabriel, Iran has launched an attack on Israel, hundreds of drones and cruise missiles are on their way to us.” “Really?” he replied. “Well, I’ll read about it in the morning papers.” In the morning papers! Because the choice to read Kafka or watch the news is always ours, but Moked’s greatness, Moked’s glory, the reason I am pouring out these confused and mournful words a day after they disconnected him from the machines, is not his genius, geniuses are not scarce, but some rare inner integrity that detached him from the party, from all partisanship, from all compromising mass conformity. “In the long, hot summer of 1954,” he wrote in 1972 in the wonderful “Memories of the Now House,” “the writer of these lines was in a certain state of ambivalence, with one hand writing socialist reviews against the ‘Palmach generation,’ and the other secretly turning the pages of Kafka stories in an English translation. In those days, my feeling increasingly grew that the doctrine of socialism invites grotesque distortions,” for example, denying the greatness of Eliot and Pound, Kafka and Agnon, because of their conservative positions and bourgeois tendencies.

Then Gabriel did what few do, he abandoned his friends and chose the truth. He joined the “Lakrat” group, and together with Nathan Zach and Yehuda Amichai founded the journal “Now” in 1959, named after Amichai’s first book, “Now and in Other Days,” an apolitical literary journal. A journal identified with nothing except human existence in general and Israeli existence in particular. In the era of the party bulletins, when texts were judged by the political affiliation of their authors, Gabriel Moked carried out a textocratic revolution. He put the text at the center, and thereby shifted the race of political one-dimensionality, who shouts the loudest the same things, into a race of textual multidimensionality, who encompasses existence more fully, who compresses more meaning, and in ever more sophisticated modes of expression. The golden age of “Now” is the golden age of our literature, period. It is the bed where the most important Hebrew avant-garde since the days of Ibn Gabirol and Samuel HaNagid grew. In recent decades he had to watch, with tears in his eyes, the return of the party journals and the politicization and posterization, the distortions of justice and law that “moral” literature brings with it. That is how it is. As de Beauvoir said, “If you live long enough, you see every victory turn into defeat.”

I was 16 when I sent him poems and he accepted them for publication. But no one becomes a poet except during the wait for the next volume of “Now,” and the poems were published only after I had already become a soldier. In the meantime, and while desperately waiting for my poems to appear in print, I began reading the volumes of “Now” backward in the Kfar Saba municipal library. The poems of the first trio, Amichai, Zach, Avidan. The poems of the second trio, Vizltier, Horovitz, Wollach. The third wave of the 1970s avant-garde, Halfi, Baz’erno, Laskly, Reuveni. One of Gabriel’s favorite sayings was, “I erred in women and in creditors, but I do not err in texts.” That is, of course, an exaggeration, he erred in texts too, but when he was right, he was right in a big way. There are many literary historians. Few founded it as Gabriel Moked did. Few devoted themselves to it as Gabriel Moked did. Few bet on young poets and prose writers like Gabriel Moked. Again and again and again. Not in retrospect. In real time. We became close over “Ketam,” the journal I edited together with Yehuda Vizan in 2006, when we were both 21 and Gabriel was a mere youngster of 73. We admired “Now,” and among other things we used to make nighttime raids on Gabriel’s stairwell, which was piled with books from the publishing house all the way to the ceiling. We would break into the building with a knife or a credit card and gather up an Aaron Shabtai, or a Yosef Mundi, or both, of course, both. When he finally invited us up to the inner sanctum, Gabriel apologized that the bulb had just burned out and the electrician would come on Sunday. A Polish nobleman, then. And we climbed after him and giggled behind him, because we knew there had never been light, not for years, and there was no electrician and not even a bulb to burn out. When did we become friends for life? When his beloved, the art critic Tzipora Luria, died, and I called him and told him that no one should die, that there is no such thing as a good death. And he was moved, my God, Gabriel Moked was moved, and said, “Know this, Oded [with the stress on the second syllable], sometimes I regret that we did not grow up together. We could have been good friends. We are good friends even today, but I would like us to have been good friends in our youth too.”

What did I learn from my teacher and master Gabriel Moked? “Always read to the end,” even a boring book can end with a flash of brilliance, for example Berkeley’s book on optics, which lay face down for hundreds of years in the Oxford library until Gabriel discovered that the bishop returns near the end to discuss philosophy, a discovery that formed the basis of his doctoral dissertation. “Dedicate at least three hours a day to reading.” “Every significant truth has a distinct comic side” (“Look, behind this man’s forehead is a cluster of neurons! Ha! Ha! This man is nothing but a cluster of neurons!”), and “Every real avant-garde struggle must include liberation from death in general, from old age in particular.” Above all, I learned from him that a person can sit at his desk at night, alone, in silence, and think a thought that will change the world. I learned the power of a solitary person sitting alone at his desk at night, making plans and decisions. I learned that this creature, the person who sits and thinks and decides, is the most dangerous creature in the world. He taught me to fear my own power, and thus to believe in my own power. What a wonderful and terrifying lesson, one that no one bothered to teach me before, one that no one will bother to teach ever, because it is the truly dangerous lesson, the truly terrible one: the complete freedom we enjoy, and that no one will ever take from us, no matter what, unless we surrender it of our own free will. That is Gabriel, in the colloquial stress, a solitary, haunted genius, sitting alone, listening to the ticking of the clock, pulling out a sheet of paper and drafting a plan of action. And revising bylaws. And making an inner decision so profound, so inward, that the whole world will be forced to take it into account. I will give you an example. At one in the morning during the “drone night,” Gabriel suddenly called. I thought perhaps he was stressed. After all, an elderly man who does not know where to go. “Oded, I suddenly don’t remember, was Kafka’s first novel ‘The Trial’ or ‘The Castle’?” “In my opinion, ‘Amerika,’ Gabriel.” “Right, right, ‘Amerika’! So what’s new?” “Gabriel, listen, Iran has launched an attack on Israel, hundreds of drones and cruise missiles are on their way to us.” “Really? Well, I’ll read about it in the morning papers.” In the morning papers! Because the choice to read Kafka or watch the news is always ours, always. And I followed his path and read a book and went to sleep. And I slept like a baby, knowing that even in the Middle East, a person is master of his fate, if only he chooses to be.

In fact, I once sat with him for coffee the first time rockets were fired from Gaza at Tel Aviv. Everyone rushed to the kitchen. Gabriel held my hand: “Sit, sit. Hebrew avant-garde is steadfast.” Another time we were sitting when the siren for Holocaust Remembrance Day was heard. “Sit, sit. I do not see myself as a survivor.” I will never forget the looks I got from those standing around. Try explaining to them that the man babbling about Husserl and licking ice cream, “I have a sweet tooth,” is the man in whose honor they rose. How terrible, how terrible it was to be Gabriel Moked. How free, how free Gabriel Moked was. He died completely broke and completely wealthy. He did not do any of the things he was asked to do, including medical procedures, sport, proper nutrition, and died peacefully in his bed at the age of 92. He lived a life of total freedom, a man in a world of chameleons, truth in a world of half-truths.