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Books: Messiah in an Armored Car
Harvey Blume

The central figure in historian Michael Andre Bernstein�s first novel is a rabbi who does not preach peace

At the center of Michael Andre Bernstein�s often spellbinding first novel is a charismatic rabbi who looks into people�s souls, articulates their deepest perplexities, and seems to foretell their futures. He also utters enigmatic pronouncements that tantalize followers and bind them to him. "I do not need men and women to kneel before me," he says, for example. "All I want is for them to rise with me ever higher to the completion of what it means to be fully human." Nor does it diminish Rabbi Brugger�s cachet that his critics tend to disappear in mysterious fires. Though he leaves mayhem behind him, Brugger appears luminous to devotees, one of whom fears that if he looked into the rabbi�s face too long, "all else would be ugly and horrible to me from that point on."

We�re never quite sure what Brugger�s agenda is or how to evaluate his seemingly uncanny gifts. What we do know for certain is that he does not preach peace to the Jews. On the contrary, he recommends vio-lence for its own sake. Violence, he teaches, can be "the cleanest mode of contact. It allows the pure to touch the defiled without becoming polluted themselves." Does Brugger harbor an ambition to be the messiah? He�s shifty on this point, announcing only that when the messiah comes, it will be in "an armored car instead of [on] the traditional white donkey."

If Brugger seems to have more than a passing resemblance to cult leaders such as Jim Jones and Charles Manson -- and, in some respects, Meir Kahane -- that�s because the author has modeled him on one of their kind. Michael Andre Bernstein is a professor of literature at Berkeley, whose several books and many essays prefigure "Conspirators" without diminishing the novel as a fully realized work of fiction in its own right. In one of those essays, "Murder and the Utopian Moment," Bernstein tells the story of Ira Einhorn, a Philadelphia cult leader of the early 1970s who was charged, in the early 1990s, with killing an acquaintance of Bernstein�s from college days. Bernstein recalls what a shock it was to learn of that murder. "I felt the room turn suddenly quiet," he writes, "and something that must have been nausea but seemed utterly unfamiliar constricted my world to a kind of dispersed aching."

Years later, much that was Einhorn comes forth as Brugger, but there are some key displacements. For one thing, Brugger, unlike Einhorn, is a rabbi, though one who has shrugged off traditional Jewish observances. In addition, he hails not from the nooks and crannies of sixties counterculture, but from a remote province of the Hapsburg Empire shortly before World War I.

Launching himself at us from that distance gives Brugger an element of surprise. In addition, it brings Hapsburg culture to life in unexpected ways. That Bernstein animates that culture as well as he does is not all Brugger�s doing. The rabbi gets help from a rich cast of intriguing characters. These include Tausk, for example, who becomes a highly efficient police interrogator and spy when he is kicked out of yeshivah for mischievously urging fellow students to consider the possibility that Jesus Christ was divine. Tausk works for Count Wiladowski, the governor of the province, who defies the snobbism laced with anti-Semitism that is rife among his peers in order to enjoy Tausk as an intellectual equal. Wiladowski has grown bored with the job of suppressing strikes and other forms of disorder; he often interrupts briefings to find solace in his expensive collection of pornography. Droll and paranoid -- he sees assassins everywhere, which wouldn�t bother him unduly except that he imagines they are all after him -- Wiladowski is perhaps the most sympathetic character in the book. Among the least sympathetic, when we first encounter him, at any rate, is young Hans Rotenberg, the arrogant son of an influential Jewish industrialist and financier. Hans reviles the established order, and brings to the task of overthrowing it the sort of intensity his comrades associate with "shameful erotic encounters." Hans applies his considerable resources and intelligence to the task of becoming a terrorist, which he succeeds in doing, though not at all as he had hoped.

It is difficult, in reading about Jews who lived in Europe not long before World War II, not to think that they and everything they are involved in or care about will soon be swept away. But Bernstein manages to ward that future off for the duration of his novel. The interaction between his characters is sufficiently absorbing that if one thinks ahead to the Shoah, it is only to notice how little the death camps cast a backwards shadow on the book. The novel, then, satisfies one of the aims Bernstein has strenuously argued for in his critical work, namely that of rescuing the Jewish life that preceded it from what he calls the "backshadowing" of the Holocaust. In an essay called, "Remember that I Have Remembered: On Jewish Memory and History," he wrote that, "when a culture has been savagely wiped out, it is often remembered later as having been still more homogenous than if it had ceased existing simply with the passage of time. Such leveling... duplicates the perspective of the murderers for whom their victims were an undifferentiated mass of bodies to be disposed of."

Readers of Bernstein's critical works will find some of his other prized critical positions realized in the novel. For example, in the essay about Einhorn, he wrote that, "in our culture, it is neither sexuality nor the darkest urgings to violence and domination that are repressed.... What is repressed, though, is the force of the prosaic." "Conspirators" does full justice to the force of the everyday and the mundane.

The book�s narrator is Alexander Garber, a dramatist whose trifling confections become enormously popular after World War I, when playgoers look back on Hapsburg settings with nostalgia. On one of his travels, Garber comes across evidence that Tausk, his childhood friend, is now a leading interrogator for the Soviet secret police. Trying to understand Tausk�s path from yeshivah to the OGPU leads Garber back to a shameful secret of his own, and to a story that he can�t begin to tell using the stale conventions that have made his career. It�s a tale that involves Jews and gentiles from all classes of Hapsburg society, and climaxes in one literally explosive event.

Garber finds inspiration in paintings from a Book of Hours, which depict daily life in bygone Galicia, and show ice skaters, hunters, servants and brigands alongside each other. Each of them, he reflects, is so "entirely caught up in what he is doing, it is no wonder none of them takes in the whole picture." To get the whole picture, Garber must, like the anonymous painters who inspire him, "include everything, no matter how ridiculous, because that is the only way to represent what is essential."

The style Bernstein, through Garber, devises to accomplish this runs contrary to what one expects from a contemporary novel. The prose is dense, thick in clauses and qualifications, and the exchanges between the characters are polished repartee. The danger of this style is that it risks devolving into fussiness. And at times Bernstein does seem straight-jacketed by the imperative to make his narrative one in which absolutely nothing is ever lost. But in the end, the stylistic gamble pays off. The prose seems just the medium the nov-el�s characters require in order to reflect about each other and to grouse about their standing within the hierarchies of Hapsburg society. The Jews have special need to grouse, especially the workers, since the tolerance they enjoy is provisional, and subject to revision during hard times.

On the strength of this novel Bernstein shows he should not be classed with literary critics, however eminent -- one thinks of Lionel Trilling, for example -- whose efforts at fiction tend to be dutiful and bloodless. It might be closer to the mark to think of Bernstein as a novelist with a penchant for ideas. The complex challenges he sets himself in this book, and the flair with which he meets them, make this first novel a compelling, enjoyable read, and create high expectations for his next effort.