"Spare, Original, and Strange": The Religious Atheism of Hugh Nissenson

by Dr. Alan Berger

Hugh Nissenson is a novelist of immense talent. His linguistic craftsmanship, aesthetic vision, and religious sensibilities mark him as a unique storyteller. By mixing prose, poetry, diary entries, journals, and original drawings, his novels transcend traditional genres. Spare, original, and strange—these words from Gerald Manley Hopkins, a poet whom the novelist admires, capture the essence of Nissenson's style.

Three traumatic events influenced his distinctive religious/mythic vision. In 1944 at the age of twelve, Nissenson first learned of the Holocaust. He was watching newsreels with images of the death camps. He remembers the photos and newsreels of Hitler. Once, he and his parents listened to one of Hitler's rants on the radio. Hitler, he attests, "dogged my childhood." The second event was the death from breast cancer at the age of thirty-one of a close friend of his mother. Her death moved Nissenson to wonder about God's justice: "I hate the idea that a just and loving God allows cells to metastasize and men to make gas chambers."

The third event was an exchange between Nissenson and a Catholic priest, following the Jerusalem trial of Adolph Eichmann, which, as a twenty-eight-year-old journalist, Nissenson covered for Commentary magazine. The priest told him, "Nothing about the war—not even the murder of children—shakes my faith." "It cost me mine," Nissenson recalls.

Though without faith, Nissenson is a religious writer. "All of my work, one way or another, has to do with the major themes of religion: What are we, is there a god, what is our relationship to this god. The religious impulse is something that has interested me all of my life."

It is fair to ask what Nissenson means by "religion." If, in the words of the second century Talmudic heretic Elisha ben Avuyah, "Let din ve-let dayyan" (There is neither Judgment nor Judge), exactly what is there? Nissenson's essay, "Notes from the Frontier", raises this quandary when he refers to the question an Israeli schoolteacher put to him, "Is it possible to create a humane civilization without (God)? That's the question."

His subsequent writing attempts to respond to this question. Therefore, any genre or work of art that helps him he uses. Events and accounts from biblical, rabbinic, and modern Jewish history, Jewish messianic speculation, and Jewish mysticism appear in his writing. For example, the fratricidal conflict of Cain and Abel, as well as the antagonism between Isaac and Ishmael (as expressed in the rivalry between Sarah and Hagar), comprise the mythic framework for his short story "The Well," which views the Arab-Israeli conflict through the intricate prism of water rights. "Forcing the End" retells the saga of Yohanan ben Zakkai who was smuggled out of a besieged Jerusalem in a coffin after the Romans destroyed the Temple in 70 C.E. Ben Zakkai established the first rabbinic academy in Yavneh, thereby preserving Judaism. Nissenson's retelling, however, ends not in renewal but in murder.

Cynthia Ozick once told him, "Hugh, you're not an atheist, but somebody who's made a religion out of atheism! It's a metaphor for you." While Ozick's observation gets at an aspect of his writing, I think Nissenson's literary and personal quest for a plausible explanation of theodicy and the apparent triumph of evil goes farther.

On the one hand, his work offers a vision of life lived without the traditional hope of the possibility of redemption. His novels and short stories trace a movement from ambivalence about the possibility of faith in a transcendent deity to a denial of this belief. In its stead, Nissenson's work offers an alternative vision. In My Own Ground, a devouring earth mother figure metaphorically supplants the absent, weak, or indifferent transcendent sky god. On the other hand, Nissenson does not despair. God may not be love. The deity may not even be—however, a meaning and purpose in life continues to be possible. A relationship of love between people may reveal the sanctity of the ordinary, a thought which allies him with Buber. For Nissenson there is no transcendence in the religious sense of the word, but there is a possibility of discovering meaning, if not salvation, in recognizing that the search for a religiously unanchored morality—all that can be hoped for after Auschwitz—is not only attainable but necessary. In his fiction, Nissenson attests that while the Holocaust bears witness to the triumph of evil, hope still exists.

In his concern with theodicy Nissenson is similar to Gerard Manly Hopkins, the nineteenth-century poet, and Richard L. Rubenstein, the contemporary theologian. Hopkins, who converted from the Anglican faith to Roman Catholicism, studied to become a Jesuit. A gifted poet, he was deeply moved by the sinking of the German ship, the Deutschland, in 1875. One hundred and fifty-seven people were lost in the accident, among them five Franciscan nuns. In "The Wreck of the Deutschland," which he dedicated to the memory of the nuns, Hopkins tries to reconcile God's majesty and the millennial question of why bad things happen to good people. In the first part of the poem Hopkins praises the divinity of Jesus Christ and then in the second part he takes up the drowning of the nuns whom he compares to the martyred and risen Christ. In his "spare, original, and strange" verse, Hopkins adopts what the sociologist Peter Berger describes as "religious masochism," embedded in the Job-like attitude of absolute surrender to a Commanding Deity whose ways are unknowable. "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him." God's glory and majesty, in other words, are inviolate. This is precisely the position Nissenson's work rejects.

Rubenstein, in contrast to the American Protestant theologians Thomas J.J. Altizer and William Hamilton, who, over forty years ago, celebrated the death of God as the freeing of humanity from the constraints of religion, mourns this death which for him is a fact of culture. The phrase serves as a code indicating the breakdown of all ethical, moral, and theological authority in the wake of the Shoah. The world, Rubenstein asserts, is "functionally godless." "No cold blooded contemporary David," he writes, "need worry about a modern Nathan the prophet proclaiming the ultimacy of God's law." Post-Holocaust humanity, writes Rubenstein, lives in a "cold, silent, unfeeling universe." Rubenstein claims that prophetic Judaism, with its avowals of hope and optimism has been superseded by the tradition's priestly dimension which emphasizes rituals, especially life-cycle events.

The Tree of Life

Without recourse to belief in a covenanting God, the protagonists of Nissenson's novels confront the ubiquitous power of evil. As the author once told an interviewer, "We made the covenant with ourselves. There is nothing but that." However, Nissenson's protagonists emerge as theologians in the sense that Rubenstein defines that vocation, as "dissonance reduction." They try to narrow the gap between divine promise of redemption and the sheer counter-evidence of historical events. When this gap can no longer be bridged, traditional notions of deity and faith come under radical assault. Moreover, Nissenson employs rites and symbols from archaic and non-western religious traditions to emphasize the universality of the aspirations and limitations of the human condition and its struggle against evil.

The Tree of Life, winner of the 1986 Ohioana Fiction Book Award for the best book about Ohio History, is written as a journal/ledger kept by Thomas Keene, who lives on the Ohio frontier in the early nineteenth century. He is a Harvard-trained Congregational minister who wrestles with the question of evil befalling good people. Keene, robbed of his faith by the death of his wife, renounces the resurrected Christ. The simmering tension between Native Americans and white settlers increasingly intrudes on Keene's lonely despair, and then erupts into murderous warfare.

To give the weight of reality to The Tree of Life, the novelist has created the art and poetry that Keene puts into his journal. These creations make the book feel like an historical artifact so immediate are Tom Keene's entries. Nissenson spent seven years writing The Tree of Life, and while you read it, you believe you have a historical document in hand. He researched every aspect of the physical world his protagonist would have known. He relates that he went to Ohio where he "learned to fire replicas of flintlock rifles, to throw a tomahawk," went on a hunt, "walked on snowshoes," and "dressed in buckskin."

The problematic nature of faith in the face of evil occupies a central role in the novel. Fanny, a young widow, initially spurns Keene's marriage proposal because he is an unbeliever. However, after she witnesses an Indian war party torture and murder her best friend, Fanny loses her own faith, too, and asks Tom to "help me live without Jesus." That both sides commit murderous acts has prompted the Italian critic Mario Materassi to note the "disturbing analogies between the experience of the American pioneers…and that of the Zionists on the Israeli kibbutz." He thematically links "Thomas Keene's West and the state of Israel," pointing to the "tormented relationships between populations boasting diverse and adversarial rights to the land…, the quest, not always fortuitous, for a system of coexistence that justifies the acts of both sides." Perhaps most revealing is his observation that Nissenson places "existential paradigms" crucial to contemporary Judaism into non-Jewish worlds. When Keene is asked to speak at a Methodist funeral, he prays in English and in Hebrew.

In the history of religions, the "Tree of Life" is an archaic and enduring symbol. It appears in the tales from the Middle East, from India, and from regions throughout Central Asia. In Norse mythology, this tree is called Yggdrasill. The Hebrew Bible sets the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden. Later, Judaism compares the Torah itself to a Tree of Life (Etz Hayyim). These trees may be seen as an "image of the world," a pole supporting the sky, affording a means of communication between heaven and earth, and as an axis mundi, a point of contact between the two spheres.

In The Tree of Life, Nissenson adds to the richness of the symbol. Keene spies the nest of a great horned owl in a tree. The baby owls are nesting in the rotting corpse of a duck which their mother has brought them to eat. For the American Indians, the horned owl represented death itself. Nissenson's retelling of old myths startles us to a vivid awareness of the relationship between life and death. For him, "death and life, creation and destruction are part of the same process." In his journal, Keene draws the "Tree of life" growing out of the head of John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed), with whom Keene has several conversations, and who is a devotee of Emmanuel Swedenborg's visionary mysticism. For Keene (and Nissenson, too, one supposes), holiness comes from within and does not depend on a transcendent divine referent.

Nissenson's aesthetic vision

Materassi writes that Nissenson "is one of those few of today's writers, American or otherwise, whose work, beyond the semantic resonance of individual texts, gives the overall feeling that, even with all its pain, life is worth living." I hasten to add that this life differs in kind from that which preceded the Holocaust. It reflects a post-Holocaust sensibility suffused with the reality of violence, an intimate acquaintance with death, and recognition of the power of evil. Moreover, for the author's protagonists, God is not, in the Buberian sense, in eclipse. The deity has ceased to exist except as an ineluctable dimension of the Jewish and Christian mythic sensibility.

Earlier in these remarks I asked what is left in Nissenson's work after the renunciation of the religious vision of his protagonists: They no longer believe in messianic hope, or the risen Christ, or Gaianism (Earth worship). Artie Rubin of Days of Awe (the protagonist of Nissenson's most recent novel) does believe that he may have had a genuine religious experience. In a world suffused by violence, genocide, and terrorism, Nissenson's protagonists uncouple holiness from God; they derive solace from everyday life. Odin's poem, which concludes The Days of Awe, may express the author's view:

Rejoice in these things at nightfall:
Another Day lived,
Your beloved's love
A burning torch
Ice crossed
Dry boots,
Ale drunk.

Nissenson's innovation as a novelist and his use of language

Nissenson views himself as a modernist responding to the legacy of evil left in the wake of the Holocaust. He takes seriously Ezra Pound's admonition to "make it new." He is an innovator who does creative things with the form that he has inherited. Nissenson says his objective is to "push the form of the novel in ways that are new." He told an interviewer, "I wanted to make beautiful things,…beautiful artifacts, out of my words." He rightly contends that My Own Ground (his early novel) was his last conventional novel. Since then, the novels have conflated genres. Moreover, the lack of traditionally defined chapters, the switching of narrative voice (Nissenson refers to himself as a ventriloquist), the integration of e-mails, phone messages, digital art, and dialogue—all of which Cynthia Ozick observes is like "eavesdropping on life"—confirm that the work of this novelist is "spare, original, and strange."

Nissenson's place in Jewish and American literature

Hugh Nissenson occupies a distinctive place in Jewish and American literature. His novels dramatize various dimensions of the American experience whether they are viewed through a Jewish (My Own Ground, The Days of Awe), Protestant (The Tree of Life), or pagan (The Song of the Earth) lens. As he nears seventy-five, Hugh Nissenson is working on a new novel, which deals with the Puritan experience in America and the comprehensive, suffocating, and destructive role religion plays in the Puritan worldview. No matter the perspective, the author states that his "major infatuation…is the American language." He makes no distinction between his Jewish and American identities as a writer. Or better, he sees a confluence between these identities, "fascinated" that "America continues to be deeply influenced by the Jewish bible and its messianic message."

Nissenson's work is of great consequence. There is no way of telling for certain what his place will be in Jewish-American literature. Cynthia Ozick contends that he is like Melville who, at the end of his life, was reduced to writing without acclaim. However, she also believes that Nissenson's work is utterly original. While discomforting to some readers, for others, Nissenson's mythic perspective will open new vistas in the millennial quest to seek meaning in the face of unrelenting evil.

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A longer version of this essay originally appeared in the journal Studies in American Jewish Literature [SAJL] Vol.27, 2008.