Four Jews on Parnassus-a Conversation

Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Gershom Scholem, and Arnold Schönberg each struggled with the question of Jewish identity in the absence of a common religious label. Adorno was the prototypical German Jewish non-Jew, Benjamin vacillated between German Jew and Jewish German, Scholem was a committed Zionist, and Schönberg converted to Protestantism for professional reasons but later returned to Judaism. Carl Djerassi, himself a refugee from Hitler's Austria, dramatizes a dialogue between these four men in which they discuss fraternity, religious identity, and legacy, and reveal aspects of their lives-notably their relations with their wives-that many scholars have ignored, underemphasized, or misrepresented. The Greek mountain of Parnassus is the crowning symbol of canonization-the height of literary, musical, and intellectual achievement. The desire for canonization and the process by which it is obtained are the underlying themes of this dialogue, with emphasis on Paul Klee's Angelus Novus (1920), a canonized work that resonated deeply with Benjamin, Adorno, and Scholem (and for which Djerassi presents a totally revisionist and richly illustrated interpretation). Paul Klee was a Central European non-Jewish Jew, a category fashioned at the turn of the last century, and his drawing is said to represent the angel of history. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread, wrote Benjamin. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. Djerassi bases his dialogue on archival research and interviews with surviving witnesses. Most important, he returns the wives of these intellectuals to a place of personal and professional importance, humanizing the legend of Benjamin, Adorno, Scholem, and Schönberg and allowing readers to experience their theoretical insights in a fuller, more intimate way. He concludes with a daring speculation on the putative contents of Benjamin's famous briefcase, which disappeared upon his suicide.